my GNS

Here's what I've taken from the many many many discussions of GNS theory, and how it applies to my gaming.

Gamism, to me, is the easiest one to nail down, though a lot of people seem to get it wrong. It's about the opportunity for you as a player to boast about how clever you were. Not how lucky you were. Rolling a natural 20 when you needed a natural 20 is not gamism. Using your 10-foot pole to craft a device that allows you to distract the ogre and get a +2 bonus to hit is gamism. Playing wargames is gamist play, but playing the card game War is not. It's about using your wits as a player in order to gain an advantage. The social esteem is your motivation for doing it, but really the in-game purpose is to gain a benefit that allows you to succeed or do better in play.

Any time anyone in your group ever said "dude, why would you play a bard? Bards suck," or "dude, don't use your fireball spell yet," or "hey, you were dumb enough to have your character do that, so don't complain that he's dead," that's gamism talking. I think that last bit is important, as in a lot of groups, negative feedback is more readily employed. Gamers as a subculture don't seem to be all about the 'you're really cool' praise, but that's just my experience with it. YMMV.

I suppose that puzzles constitute functional gamist play, but I personally find the 'one solution' encounters much less exciting than ones where I have many choices available. Puzzles have kind of a choke point regarding player input. It's either right or wrong, and there's no real thermometer of success other that how damn long it took to figure the thing out.

G play has to allow for the right kinds of player input. There has to be a number of choices you can make, so that they can be judged (by yourself or others) as good or bad. A lot of games labeled as 'rules light' are less satisfying for gamist play because they remove a fair amount of gamist input.

Narrativism is an altogether unsatisfying name, and honestly I'm not all that hip to 'Story Now' either. I'd probably go with something like 'human-driven play.' It's really misunderstood while also secretly being the preference of a lot of people who had no idea they preferred it.

All N play is about, really, is the human-centric conflicts that turn good movies into great movies if they're done right. Can I ever escape my past? Will I sacrifice my friends in order to get revenge? That sort of thing.

So there could easily be traps and puzzles and tactics and all that stuff, but it should exist to support the human stuff. Dude gets caught in a trap and the orcs are coming. Will you stay to protect him, even though it might hurt your chances of taking revenge against Count Suck?

If you're working really hard to avoid that kind of dilemma, chances are you really prefer gamist play, or your game/group/GM still kind of supports gamist play, and you can't quite shake the idea that you get a +1 bonus if you do this thing here.

Because so many games try to deliver the N experience on a G platform, a lot of gamers just don't get the point of N play. It looks just like what they've already been doing.

Now it's been said that N play has to allow for a certain amount of player input, but I think there's a bare minimum:

1. the conflict at hand has to matter to the player. If my guy is all about escaping his dark past, and you as GM set up conflicts about true love, we're missing each other.
2. in any situation where the choice comes up, the GM can't hold any authority over which choice is the better choice.

That second one is often the deal breaker. I think in most groups getting the meat of the conflicts is no problem, but GMs will sometimes abuse their typically godlike powers in setting up conflicts where the right choice is too obvious. Who can blame 'em? Grab a random RPG book off your shelf and flip to the part where the GM is supposed to plan out the story.

Simulationism is another crap name, and it also seems to end up being a dumping ground for anything that doesn't seem to fit in either N or G play. I think of it as N play where the human choices are generally assumed up front. That means that the human choices aren't the real driver for the game. I mean, they're cool, but you know when we're playing Star Quest that my guy never surrenders, because Star Quest officers never surrender.

The trouble with S and N is that there's kind of a gray area regarding how much of the character traits are assumed up front. You could play Buffy as S, basing the characters' decisions on everything we know about them, or you could play Buffy as N, with the belief that the characters are dynamic, and there may well be a time when Buffy would choose to kill a human being, for example, even though she never does otherwise (I think. If I'm wrong, replace this with a different example).

I like it that folks like John Kim and that Marco dude are picking and poking at it, questioning various boundaries (that gray area between N and S is worth a lot of poking), but if you're one of those boobs calling the whole thing crap, chances are you just fear what you don't understand, like being the only person in the room who can't see those magic eye pictures.