It seems fitting that after providing a summary of the worst gaming theory had to offer, I’d do the same for a few of the best. Or least those that weren’t a complete disaster.
Before the Internet would become the primary location for gaming discussion, there were print magazines. They even had more in them than ads, which I know is difficult to believe now days. In 1980 Different Worlds would publish what to my memory was the first ‘Theory’ article. Glenn Blacow’s Aspect of Adventure Gaming.
John Kim, while something of a failure as a gaming theorist and keeper of FAQs, maintains a wonderful archive of things rpg related, including the text of that original article here. I have a link on the right to Kim's entire website, well worth the trip if you avoid John’s own opinions.
Blacow would divide players of rpgs into four types: Power Gamer, Role-Player, Wargamer, and Story Teller. The meanings were for the most part quite intuitive to any player of the game.
Power Gamer: Interested in power by means of items or character abilities.
Role-Player: Interested in… surprise- role-playing a role and interacting with others doing the same.
Wargamer: Interested in tactical contests
Story Telling: Oh well, it couldn’t last. It doesn’t mean story telling. Rather it’s more related to a living world, i.e. a setting in motion that is independent of the players. Here the PCs are just people (and perhaps not so important ones at that) in that world. I imagine Blacow chose this label because from a player’s point of view, it was like being told a story. Later the Threefold and GNS would lump this under simulation.
So three out the four types were intuitive, not bad given that GNS failed at all three on that count and the Threefold only managed one.
Three things strikes me about this model.
First, is that it is in the end an appeal for people to understand that different players have different needs and goals in their gaming. That should be common sense, but common sense was and is never common. By this measure, the Threefold and GNS theories should never have been advanced- for on their best day, they barely do this well. The single positive outcome of their work had been done for them more than a decade before.
The second striking thing is how extreme his characterization is of the four types. But I think this was due more to his need to present what he saw as points of conflict in the hobby rather than a belief that all players were that extreme. If he done this online, I’m certain he would have started a flame war. Future theorists should be so lucky as to be limited to print. Print however was the model’s downfall. His name is never mentioned, and few credit him as an influence upon their own thought. So that blade certainly cut both ways.
Lastly, notice the absence of what today is considered ‘STORY’. This was before Whitewolf, and it just wasn’t a factor in the larger hobby yet. Rather it was a given, as he notes in the article: “any successful FRP game requires some story telling ability”. Ah such an age of innocence, would that we could return to it.
Later models would build upon this groundwork, and it would start a trend in RPG Theory seldom broken- everyone talks about player types. That begs the question, "must we keep reinventing the wheel?".
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
5 comments:
I think this is good--looking at positive theories. One of the things Ron also got right (although he's not the only one to say it) is that "story" means a lot of different things to different people (of course, having said this, he went on to co-opt story for "Story Now" rather than simply acknowledging that it was troublesome and choosing a different path of discussion).
I believe that the approach people take to gaming is at least as important as what they "want out of it." Mainly this is because I'm interested in a lot of things that I could get out of it based on what people do well (a GM who's great at tactical battles can "make me a wargamer."
However, the set-up to the game is something that I can quantify even without knowing various competencies. A 'sand-box' game (which a Story Telling person in the above taxonomy would probably like) tells me a lot. If the game is character-driven-story (meaning the GM sets up the situation based on the PCs s/he gets) that's different than if the GM sort of has a "story" (we'll assume 'situation' and not railroaded plot for purposes of discussion) and asks for the PCs to be made to kinda fit that.
There's more to the approach than just that--but I believe that there are ways of quantifying these things that are very informative to players.
I also think that these "techniques" (the GNS classification) are usually more important than the identified top-level goals associated with GNS buckets (i.e. I may shift between a preference of Sim and Nar in a GNS context so long as my top-level immersion need is met--something the Big Model has difficulty handling because it assumes that a GNS-mode is sort of a player's view of "what roleplaying is" to the understanding of many people).
-Marco
Good comments Marco, especially those about how the models relate to each other.
In general the models I'm covering in this second series are more useful because they speak better what actual players have in mind when they talk about various campaigns.
They also with rare exception use words in strange ways, and typically aren't out to declare a one-true way of gaming.
Sadly all this means they're also basically forgotten.
It does seem to be a nice and easy idea which is always good, but I question the importance of motive in regard to RPG theory. I think it's a bad idea to try to categorize RPGs by trying to judge what type of player experience the game is supposed to provide, especially when groups are more than happy to ignore those implied experiences to meet their own goals of play. It doesn't feel productive to me.
The goal of that model wasn't to categorize RPGs (notice how in his example, each group is playing the same system and adventure), but rather to categorize players of an rpg.
In fact, I don't think much Theory dealt with categorizing RPGs themselves until GNS, and that is likely why it's the worst of the bunch.
The value (beside saying "people play for different reasons") was after the fact sadly limited. If people had claim this viewpoint, it's likely a great deal of conflict and wasted energy could have been avoided. After all, two of the three corners of the Threefold are there- we could have passed right over that mess.
But it wasn't taken in by the hobby as a whole. So I present here as a piece of history.
Ah, you're right, sorry about that.
Categorizing players by motive is possible and could be useful. Which made me think of Allston's Players, another attempt to do just that which I noticed you posted this morning.
Post a Comment