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I agree completely with your comment about Gamism not being the same as an Achievement orientation, although I think Dan F.’s description of Gamists wanting victory to be difficult but achievable is spot on. To some extent, achievement orientation may be separate from any of the three styles/agendas of play: clearly, some players do want to win and do enjoy the power fantasies, even if it’s not fair to tar all Gamists with that brush. (I should say that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting achievement from your games–people face lots of setbacks in real life, if they want to win and be awesome in games, I’m not going to say there’s anything wrong with that.) In fact, the desire of some players to “win” can conflict with the desire of other players for challenge in winning–the more you ensure that Joe Achiever will get his desire, the harder it becomes to adequately challenge Jane Gamist.

Thanks again for the thoughtful comment.

Sorry, this might get a bit wall o’ text…

If you present players with a set of four options, one of which is clearly mechanically the best, one of which is clearly the most interesting narrative option, one of which clearly makes the most sense “in character” and one of which clearly has the most potential to have unforseen consequences, you actually violate rule three *simultaneously* for every player, because for every player the option that fits their playstyle is “obviouly” the “best”.

I also think you very much miscategorise the three player types here – particularly the poor, much maligned Gamist. “Gamists” absolutely do *not* want “power fantasies”. Gamists play *to* win, but they play *for* the challenge. Yes, a strongly Gamist player will feel cheated by tragic ending that they couldn’t avoid, but they will feel *equally* cheated by a happy ending they felt came too easily.

The three creative agendas (as the Forge calls them) aren’t about how you *play* the game, they’re about how you *approach* the game in the first place. They’re not about what choices you make, they’re about what *sorts* of choices you think are significant. This adds a nasty complication to Rule One, because what a player thinks count as “real consequences” will be vastly different depending on who they are. Choice of gender is a good example, to a strongly Gamist player the choice is meaningless, because it doesn’t carry game mechanical consequences, to a strongly Narrativist player it might be equally meaningless (particularly if they’re a Forge-definition Narrativist and beleive that anything that isn’t a real, gut-wrenching moral crisis is a waste of time), but to a Simulationist – somebody whose primary concern is interacting with a fictional reality – it’s highly significant, because your character’s gender is an important part of *who* you are playing.

It’s not necessarily impossible to satisfy all three “types” of player at once, but I think it’s more difficult than you make it out to be, because the agendas do often conflict. Ironically it’s even more of a problem because in reality most people’s playstyle falls between the different types. You can just about design a choice which functions both as a (Narrativist) moral decision and as a (Gamist) tactical decision, but if a player has both Narrativist *and* Gamist impulses (which many people do) they might feel cheated, because the moral choice is undermined by the tactical choice. Of course in that situation a strongly Simulationist player would be perfectly happy, because the mix of moral and pragmatic issues makes the whole thing seem more “real.”

So umm … yeah. Players are complicated.

I think what you guys did in Choice of Broadsides with the dream sequence- giving those kinds of choices- REALLY worked. I actually experienced a brief moment of panic because I honestly couldn’t figure out what choice to pick, and the final question, when all the choices were the same, was eerie yet fitting. Looking at the types, I’m probably more of a ‘Simulationist’ player, and I have to say it really worked for me.

We shall, therefore, remain here for the time being. I believe it was Amelia Burr who wrote: “Because I have loved life, I shall not sorrow to GTFO when the time comes.”

As a minor point, explorationism can exist within table-top RPGs. One of the obvious examples is the classic “exploring a wild section of the world,” but “hey, I found this wacky magic item, let’s see if I can figure out how it works” is also explorationism and not unique to computer gaming. A less common form of explorationism involves figuring out how, e.g., magic works in a world. I’ve heard of games where players might spend an entire session performing in-game experiments, because gathering information about how the world works is both interesting and useful. But that’s rare, in part because it’s difficult to do in a game based on published resources where both the GM and the players have access to the resources–figuring out how magic works won’t be very fun or interesting if the Book of Magicky Stuff tells you the answers.

On a more significant note, I think it’s useful to distinguish between “emulationism” and the rest of dramatism/narrativism. To me, emulationism is about creating a work that mimics genre norms. When someone sets out to make a game that feels like a noir thriller, or a Star Wars movie, or a Hornblower novel, they’re not trying to simulate a fantasy world exactly–instead, they’re trying to match the patterns, conventions, and (especially) the feel of the source material. (My understanding is that Ron Edwards and the Forge community use “simulationism” to refer to what I call emulationism; I find that usage problematic, because simulationism already had a well-defined and (IME) useful meaning in the Threefold Theory. Also, I view emulationism as fundamentally a subset of dramatism/narravatism, and thus view GNS definitions of simulationism as embodying the classic failure of (A) positing that other people’s stated position is nonexistent/nonsensical/impossible and (B) redefining their playstyle as referring to a subset of your own playstyle, because you find it more comprehensible.)

My intuition is that many players of choice-based games try to be emulationist, at least at times–”I’m going to pick option (C), because that’s what James T. Kirk would do, and this is a space opera game about exploring new worlds!” That’s related to making choices because they will make the best story, but sometimes people will say, “it might make a better story overall if I do A, but I’m going to do B instead because that’s what the genre conventions demand.”

When writing a ChoiceScript game in a well-defined genre, I think almost every choice should have (at least) one option that is emulationist–the sort of choice a character would make in the source material for the genre–and taking those choices should generally lead to a genre-consistent result. It’s good for some choices to also have options that get their kick precisely because they are contrary to genre assumptions–those make for good grist for explorationist and simulationist players who want to push against, subvert, or question genre conventions. But there should generally be the option to go with the classic emulationist approach.

In our games, some of the “kidnap a princess” sort of stuff in Choice of the Dragon is intended, at least in part, as emulationist. Likewise, much of the design approach to Choice of Broadsides is emulationist.