Making Games

when i actually went back and read posts from Forge alumni, i started realizing that I had the wrong idea of what "narrativism" meant there. It's not actually about producing the dramatic arc of conventional fiction via play or using rules to enforce/produce genre conventions in general, it's about a specific kind of doing that.

Bankuei calls it "player characters freely make choices and actions based on human issues." Forge narrativism wants well-defined protagonists who can confront Big Questions and Important Themes, whether those Big Questions come from a systems' specific thematic anchors, or whether they emerge from characters' personal thematic anchors. This is strongly reminiscent of a specific genre, but it's the genre called literary fiction. Interest in the conventions of horror, fantasy, and other "genre fiction" was called simulationism, another term that often gets used in very different ways than the Forge's definition.

By drawing this kind of contrast between "narrativism" and "simulationism," GNS reiterated the classic divide between literary and genre fiction that's caused so much nerd resentment of "serious" literature and academic contempt for "popular" literature historically. This is helpful for understanding what was going on back there, but is nearly useless for understanding the ways the terms get used now.

For that we have to go even further back!

John H. Kim has some fascinating firsthand accounts of the RGFA usenet group, an early outpost for TTRPG theory and/or flame wars and the origin point for an earlier three-part theory of play. Not gamism, narrativism, simulationism, but gamism, dramatism, simulationism.

Mary Kuhner's description of the Threefold Model brings us much closer to the modern ttrpg discourse version of "simulationism," while "dramatism" seems to have survived under the new name "narrativism"... kind of. There's some odd assumptions about the GM's power to direct the story that don't seem to have survived transmission. If I had to speculate: vulgar narrativism combines the dramatist emphasis on Interesting Story more generally with the Forge narrativist emphasis on player-driven play. But in most cases, the boundaries between terms in common discourse seem much closer to Mary Kuhner's model than Ron Edwards'.

apparently RGFA developed this whole model to explain to a writer for Theatrix why Theatrix wasn't the game for them. Simulationism was first described by self-identified simulationists, rather than just being an appendage to the Forge narrativist theoretical project as some may assume based on other accounts.