GNS my session
Ron and a Rifts player talk about the Big Model and GNS. I dunno if the end result will be fruitful, but this opening thing from Ron is good, if only for correcting a mistake *I* make in my understanding:
Imagine a little platform made of green-painted wood, standing a few inches high off the ground on its little legs. That’s Exploration, the necessary imaginative communication for role-playing to occur at all. Perhaps it’s a very pretty shade of green or particularly well-crafted in terms of pegs and glue. Doesn’t matter. It’s not the Creative Agenda.
Now imagine a secondary wooden structure built on top of it, reaching a whole foot off the ground at its tip. That’s your game in action. Whatever shared goal or priority puts it there, or (in the analogy) whatever shape or material it is, that’s your Creative Agenda. It’s what you and the group do with the platform.
A Simulationist CA happens to be made of wood and happens to be painted green. That’s why people are always mistaking Exploration for Simulationism, when it’s not. It’s still a secondary structure on top of the platform. It also so happens that Gamist and Narrativist CAs are always brutally, recognizably distinct from the platform that supports them – made of plastic or aluminum, and always painted a different color or not painted at all. That’s why people are always forgetting that no matter what, those agendas need the platform too.
Andreas, I’m going through this kindergarten imagery because, in your post, I see a lot of rhapsodizing about “wonder moments” and all that. I anticipate that you are going to claim that’s some kind of Simulationist presence in your group. Well, if you think that’s Simulationist, lose that mistaken idea right now. That’s foundational Exploration, the platform. Maybe your group’s CA on top of it is “the same stuff,” and hence Simulationist, and maybe it’s not. We have to look at it to see.