I don’t want either to bend before the next.

And yes, I usually feel story priority first is closer to what I’m looking for than competitive priority first. Perhaps it’s a remanant of the culture I come from.

It depends on which has priority - which comes first, and which is just an additive. Because the additives always bend or disappear entirely based on the priorities needs.

I’d say alot of gamist design has revolved around taking an imaginative base and trying to add board game elements. Which is destined to fail, because the priority is on imagination - whenever competition would endanger imagination, competition is eliminated.

Usually when I see gamist design, there is a ton of effort to add gamist elements - tons and tons and tons. But never, ever any move to switch the priority around. And you can’t blot out the result by adding a ton of board game like rules - when imagination comes first, it comes first. The board game stuff will eventually be left by the roadside, because eventually it’ll threaten imagination.

In terms of gamist design I think the hard question is priorities.

That is one of the things I’m saying. One form of Story is it being constructed after-the fact.

I am unsure if it were useful to me, and if so, how. It resonated with many things within me, and sometimes, that’s enough.
I am not sure how I’ll use (or if I can) your post consciously.

Hm. If you feel your post is substantive enough, feel free to write it as a complete post, email it to me, and I’ll post it as its own post, here, on the blog, if you want. Or you can feel free to post it here (as a comment for this post).
If you fear drifting, and do not wish your post here on this blog, you can always post it elsewhere and link to it here, so the discussion could move elsewhere.

I leave that choice to you.

Was it useful at all in terms of …
“Sure, right now it’s better for you to play card/board/video games, but this is what I’m trying to change (or at least, make it more viable here).”

Basically the honour I refer to is something I had to reinvent over time. Before that I was basically an apologist designer, always looking for whether my gamist designs done gone and hurt someones feelings. Alot of apologist habits still hold me back, I think. Though Xenopulse (Cristian) found some use in some of my forge posts, as it was part of the inspiration in writing Beast Hunters.

Anyway, I have some thoughts on how it’s currently better (on average) to play video card/board/video games and whether attempting to merge in an imaginative element will be worth the gamble of R&D. Should I post here or would it be drifting the thread too much?

* I mean exactly that. I do not mean this in the dismissive way, which also reads into the above statement “And wrong”.

I think the direction of my post may not apply to you and I was shooting in the wrong direction for this thread, but it was still a close thing.

“My conclusion was fitting: choose a game where you do not find the need to add handicaps.”
No, this isn’t quite right - and being slightly off will be bad form in the long term, I would say.

Basically in terms of competition, someone challenges you to a game of X.

When someone challenges you to X, you don’t go ‘Oh, I don’t find it fun, lets play Y’. That’s really, really bad form. They challenged you - you either accept the challenge, or admit the challenge is too much for you. The most important ‘fun’ bit of play isn’t in any game, it’s maintaining the honour of the challenge to begin with. If the game itself is also fun, that’s nice, but isn’t needed at all. I know that sounds crazy, ‘Games should be fun!’. But remember, you can always admit the game is too difficult for you and not play. That’s why a grueling marathon makes sense - such a marathon make fatigue rack your body and pain shoot through it!! How can that be fun? How can pain be fun?? What’s fun is the honour of taking the challenge and beating it, OR EVEN the fun of honourably admitting defeat and ceasing to participate (yes, this is fun, for anyone who’s reading this aghast).

That’s my honour construct. I’ve probably just instinctively reinvented something much the same as has been used for milenia. I’m pretty sure the it’s largely instinctual, in the same way you can see puppies or lion cubs challenge and wrestle each other.

This ties in to your comments on how handicaps peeve certain people off, because no one admits they can’t take the challenge of the player, yet that player is socially pressured to take a handicap. It’s bad form on the other players part, and the gamist player is being punished for being good.

The gamist is also socially vunerable to having a handicap pressured on him, because he sees it as some sort of challenge being given to him. But at the same time he can usually sense that the other person doesn’t give a crap about challenge, they just want to ‘explore’ or ‘have fun’. Thus he’s left in some twilight zone where he thinks others have given him a challenge, but no one else quite responds in the way you’d expect if they had.

Handicaps can be applied without changrin, if the other person admits your too damn good to play against otherwise. That, in itself, is a win! Then when they suggest a handicap, it’s a whole new challenge that they are now giving to YOU where you play with handicap X. Do you accept the challenge? As usual, you can take it, or decline it, openly admitting it’s too tough. This is a basic, but very functional social contract.

As noted, this goes to hell when the other person doesn’t give a crap about challenge and just wants to ‘explore’, ‘experience the game’ or as Ron once put it ‘Piddle about and just ‘be”. These days with GNS knowledge, it’s usually more clear that they prefer some other creative agenda.

However, even if they are just interested in another agenda, it’s still a lack of honour (how I’ve defined honour, anyway). The fact that, if simulationist, they wouldn’t like their immersion/creative denial blown away, or if narrativist, they wouldn’t like to be deprotagonised, still doesn’t seem to make them sympathetic to supporting a gamists honour. Guess what, your game world has glaring flaw X! And no, your character wouldn’t choose that in a million years - I know better than you!

The fact that they do the same to gamists ‘Oh, that’s not fun for me, and it’s all about fun, so take a handicap or your bad/I’ll change the game (without admitting its too tough)’, seems to come very, very readily to their lips. It’s quite frustrating.

Yes, this is what this post is about, fuck, this is what this blog is here for:
For people who are trying to get this sort of fun, from “RPGs”. This whole blog is about competitive story games, after all.

Sure, right now it’s better for you to play card/board/video games, but this is what I’m trying to change (or at least, make it more viable here).

The problem with the post isn’t that it’s wrong, it’s just that is keeps sounding like it’s trying to apply to things it doesn’t. Which is totally weird, because there are little disclaimers and statements all over it.

You’re talking about a very, very specific type of fun - and it’s one where mutable rules are a pure aggravation. And it’s a kind of fun that can be gotten from RPGs, though it more often gets sought out in board games and strategy games.

Which is interesting; I don’t think people looking for that kind of fun get as much coverage as they should; it’s good to see you poking at it.

My whole point is that handicaps, to some players, are vastly different from other forms of house-ruling.

(There are social issues like it being polite to inform of any such changes well before play, but those can and should be dealt in social ways.)

My stance: Use handicaps. Share them. They are new ways of using an existing game. Some computer games are very hard to modify, but handicaps can still be easily used. This is less of a problem with roleplaying games and their ilk.

This is also exactly what Callan is saying: Games produce certain kind of play (and by implication certain kind of fun). Changing them changes the kind of play (and fun) they create.

I am not sure I agree fully with the argument you’re making Callan. A game may enable a certain sort of fun, but in the end, I think the fun comes from the player as well.
There is a synthesis between what the player is seeking and what the game gives. The game can give X while the player is looking for Y, and the end result would be Z, which may still be fun.
Furthermore, the game may not be designed to create X, and while the player is looking for X, he will gain X.
And yes, I think that’s what people often do when they play, the “drifting”, and the “house-ruling”, are there indeed to take a game and change it to be fun for you.

Hm. Now that I read what I wrote, and what you wrote, I am not sure whether you’re disagreeing with me or not. Handicaps indeed take a game that is not optimal for you and attempt to shoehorn it into being optimal for you. My conclusion was fitting: choose a game where you do not find the need to add handicaps.

There is my other point, which I think still holds: players can enjoy more than one thing: Give a competitive player game X, and handicap it into being game Y. Give a competitive player game Y, without handicaps. While those games are not optimal fun for the competitive player, he’ll still enjoy game Y more than game X handicapped into game Y.
The act of handicapping harms his fun, because he knows there’s a limitation put on him, and that is something that detracts from the fun he derives from going “all out”.

And so, while for most people handicaps serve to force the game into being the fun type you want it to be (I disagree “originally thought it were”, people often make sub-optimal choices conciously), for some people, the mere act of handicapping is antithetical to fun.

No, we do not play for fun.

Shocked pause from the audience, no doubt. Everybody plays for fun! It’s obvious!

It’s also equally obvious there isn’t one, singular ‘fun’, isn’t it? There are millions of different types of fun to be had. We do not play for fun, we play for a specific type of fun.

Even more specifically, when we don’t know the type of fun a game gives, we play it (for the first time) to try and discover the type of fun it holds. That isn’t playing for fun at all (unless the act of discovering the fun type is also classed as a type of fun).

Okay, here’s the important bit - it’s possible to think a game is about fun type X, when really it’s about fun type Y. The above examples of Tekken or magic are this - having your ass kicked in the first round isn’t the game being unfun, it’s that you missidentified the games fun type. When you sit down to fun type X and it delivers fun type Y, the game isn’t failing. It’s a result of you having previously failed to identify it’s fun type. It’s rough, but it’s you who failed.

The whole handicaps issue is a red herring, based on that initial failure to identify fun type, and trying to pad it out with ‘handicaps’. If your not willing to accept being wrong in identifying the fun type, you’ll never be happy with handicaps until they force the game to actually be the fun type you originally thought it was.

Now pretend Ron Edwards wrote this, in the way he delivers jarring information in a much more sublime way. Cause I’m not good at that at all.

An additional point: There needs to be a spectrum of games, so when only highly competitive players play, they could play those ‘extreme’ games, which would not sit well with mixed groups.

A discussion between myself and a friend (who wishes to remain anonymous):

Guy: Heh, it comes at the end:
Some people like competition without handicaps, some people like competition, handicaps or not, some people do not like competition so much, and need handicaps to enjoy the game. The major point is, the group needs to find a game where they’ll all have fun without handicaps, because once you’ve added the handicaps, you’ve castrated the game to the highly competitive people, which goes against the whole point of designing competitive games. You don’t design a game intending for it to be castrated. But since different people have different likes, and scales, you need a variety of games, where some can be played without handicaps, and some should be reserved for only the people who detest handicaps, and do not seek any.
Guy: But in a mixed group, a handicapped game? That’s… well, even worse than sub-optimal. You’re better with a game the less competitive people, or less skilled, don’t need any handicaps added to. The competitive people will also feel better about it.
Friend: It’s a blanket, general statement applied to the world at large. I can’t say that I agree, since the interests and needs of an individual group tend to be fairly specific. ‘Handicapping’, as you call it, works just fine for some groups*.
Guy: Handicapping works for the group, but if the group has a person that detests handicapping? Many things which work for the group as a whole, are not 100% for anyone, it’s compromises all around. My post was a way to reduce those compromises, because I can tell you, from personal experience, that what I wrote about less than perfect is true. I’d rather play a less than perfect non-competitive than less than perfect competitive. If I play a less competitive game with no handicaps, I’m having more fun than a more competitive game with handicaps, even if the resulting game is nearly identical, in my mind, there is a difference. I know that we handicapped this horse.

* Additional point, post discussion: You can say this is a problem with theory. In the end, each group does what is best suited for it. I am generalizing, that’s true, but it’s not my goal to address the needs of each and every group in the world. I am saying what I think will work for most groups in general.

I mean, it is always good to define the basics clearly, and this does so, but I’m looking at this and thinking: “Ok, I buy that. Now what?”

It’s better if we’ll all err on inclusivity’s end than on the exclusionary end, and we’ll be bold both ways.

Another odd thing is that I note you’re not on my links to the right, which I’m sure I put you on, quite odd.

Also, thanks for reminding me. One of the oldest games is the storytelling competition, in which you compete by telling stories.
Or the alternative of the wizards’ duel, as presented in “Equal Rites” and Sandman 1. You shapeshift forms in order to best the other, which for us is a verbal/written duel of the imagination, using story as a tool to power competition (or perhaps the other way around?)

And of course there are other type of stories, thus “Training Wheels”, though I of course, also believe in advanced competitive story-telling.

Blogspot’s new version is much better.

Yehuda

I’m also amazed you’re still sticking with Blogspot.

Yehuda

We take different masks in different social context.

Game is a social activity. The fictional events are a product of this activity, but are not a social activity itself.

So, during a game one puts on his gamer mask. This is the set of behaviours used while manipulating the character, but most of all while interacting with other gaming persons.

The character is a different thing, as it can be put in different fictional social context, and the player can make it assume a different mask in each one. Still, its a fictional construct, and its masks as well. The character’s masks have nothig to do with the mask of the player, as the player influences them in the same way he influences his or her character.

For example, personally I’m not a charismatic type in general. At a gaming table, though, I often asume a leadership role, with some organisers behaviour (even if I’m not the one running the game, and it’s often the same with LARPs). At the same time, I can run a character that isn’t like this at all.

Also, I find most LARPs I participated in extremely competitive - and the competition is mostly on the player-player, not player-character or character-character level. This may be due to the specifics of Polish convention LARPs, that is one-shots with clearly stated character goals.

Only one LARP in which my character actually changed comes to my mind now, although there could have been others. Back then, it was due to mine, as a player, decision, and I’ve been carefuly framing the whole situation for the first part of the game. The change occured in the moment I’ve chosen, the way I’ve chosen.

As I see it, in the context of gaming, the character is not really a mask. The mask taken in this context is not the character itself, I think. I’d say it’s rather the mask of a player.

(as a side note, I wonder how many people get turned off by such postmodernist talk ;) )

I think it’s more interesting when the masks we created for our games evolve and become something different than they were meant to be originally.

In gaming, the point of the activity includes consciously creating masks, so we actually think about it. In most of life, your masks move quickly and adapt to changing circumstances, often unconsciously.

Gaming is where we get to test out our masks.

(And my point about LARP, in a nutshell, is that the nature of the activity makes it much more difficult to portray multiple characters because of physical and mental human reactions, which is a really interesting thing. Thats all.)

One thing I’d really like to study more is the impact of knowing the other players has on larp play, including situations where characters change during the game. Juhana Pettersson wrote about this in “The Art of Experience” (In: Role, Play, Art, 2006). While my experience of this subject differs strongly from his, comparison are always interesting.

If you re-write the advice to match the mechanics, when these do not support your goals, you are also changing the goals of the game, basically creating a new game.

It is sometimes necessary, but as always, you should know this is what you’re doing.

Option one is to re-write the mechanics so they do align with your design intentions.

Option two is to re-write the advice to match your mechanics.

I consider any option to write advice IN SPITE of the mechanics foolish and poor design.

It’s happened many, many times in the RPG hobby. In the long term, I think it has actually been harmful to the hobby in a variety of ways. For example, it sets up many false presumptions about “what role-playing is,” and also likely contributes to social confusion and mismatched expectations among groups of people playing games together.

Advice is, to be frank, anything not supported by mechanics.
You tell me the themes of the game, I will create a story that follows these themes, even if it does not arise naturally from gameplay.
You tell me what kind of turns and twists the story should contain, I’ll include these in the story, even if they’re not a natural evolution of what happens at the table (and this also deals with the question of Story as method or result).
You tell me what form of gameplay should be like, competitive or otherwise, and I’ll play accordingly, no matter what the design actually suggests.

Now, obviously, for a full game we need advice, it cuts down on the time it takes people to figure out for their own what kind of gameplay is actually supported by the mechanics, and creates tighter experience - especially in tight enviroments such as one-shots.

Thus, this is stated as a way to test your mechanics and game-text. See what kind of gameplay the mechanics give rise to, make sure that they only give rise to what you want, and give rise to all that you want, and then write the advice that goes with it.

I agree that it could be a good test of a game’s mechanics to see that they produce the kind of gameplay behavior you desire in an “advice-less” format. Theoretically, a neat idea.

That said, I don’t think I’m drawing the same conclusions you are from that approach about System Does Matter.

Specifically, you indicate that when a designer has mechanics that do NOT produce the desired actual-play behaviors, there are two choices. One can either add mechanics (which I presume to also mean remove and/or revise mechanics), or one can provide advice.

I do not agree that the second option is workable. If mechanics do not do what one intends, no amount of advice will produce the desired actual-play behavior. People may follow the advice, but they aren’t REWARDED for doing so. That’s what system (not mechanics) should do: Reward (and, possibly, punish) behaviors in actual play.

So, my question is what do you mean by advice? Because I know, having chatted with you previously about this, I don’t have a full grasp on what YOU mean by that. We already talked about how difficult it is to separate out mechanics from advice in a text. Even with “just mechanics” there must be some modest level of instruction to explain how to use them. So, is that advice?

I think little kids know enough about cliques to not require games about them. And such a social life game is inherently competitive. I can only attempt to simulate it.

Also, what do you think of this entry, seeing as you arrived here from a search for “Clique Games”, or you just posted your reply?

Filip, once more, what does it prove in Illumination, that’s the question of this post. Is competition for its own sake enough, or you need to prove some skill by winning in order for it to be meaningful?

As mentioned, it broke the game. I felt my story wasn’t as good as some of the others because I pushed the limits in order to win, when the game was set up to handle competition in narration. Narration is only supposed to provide colorful situational conflicts, not complete blocks, with a graceful acceptance of circumstance when necessary.

I play video games all the time. Many times, I play video games to watch the story unfold, and I’ll cheat my way past obstacles if I can in order to get the story.

Other times, I will sit and bash away at buttons and keys for hours on end, trying to get through one specific area or past one specific part of the game, because I’m trying to beat the obstacles and prove myself (even just to myself). Heck, I usually play on the most difficult setting available simply to challenge myself!

What this boils down to is that competition is about who is better at overcoming the obstacles: who gets further, who gets more points, who does it faster, etc.

I also play card games like Magic:tG and Vampire:tES. Same thing there: who can beat who, and how many, whose deck-building skills are best, who has the best poker face, who has the best strategies, etc.

So, is competition based around resources? That is, gathering or manipulating resources (whether your own or that of others)? That seems likely. But at the same time, competition can happen without a well-defined resource.

When I played “Death’s Door” at Forge Midwest this past year, I ended up slipping into competition mode during the back-and-forth narration. Now, this broke the game a bit, or did for me at least, but the game isn’t about getting your way or achieving your specific desired outcome. But competition was present without an overt resource.

What was going on? The competition was about being clever enough, about putting that narration die back across the table (and the story be damned).

Regarding the reason people keep playing games despite losing…a bit of psychology provides the answer: intermittent rewards are a strong influence on behavior, moreso than constant rewards. The reward-without-guarantee-of-reward is just addictive.

Now, let us get specific. Of course only I can “Decide”, but everyone can read and get their own understanding. Read one or more of the games on the list of CSI Games and try to tell me what you prove by winning them.

Not just Filip, everyone.