A proposal

[benlehman]

There seems to be great confusion about the use of the term Simulationism. To paraphrase Vincent, a lot of people want the word to mean something that is cooler than it is. Further, most of these people seem to talk about it in terms of a set of techniques for enhancing the "reality" of the experience.

I'd like to propose that there exists a set set of techniques, compatible with any creative agenda which encompasses what these people are talking about when they say "simulationism."

I'd like to propose calling these techniques "plausibility techniques" as a whole, with the subsets of "fidelity techniques" and "immersion techniques." The essential idea is that the goal is to render a plausible gameworld, and that this is achieved via two means: One is rules which make the game adhere to certain requirements, the other is an immersion which brings players into a trance-state where they will accept the strangeness of the world as reasonable and true.

Those two subsets are not the entireity of plausibility techniques -- there are other types, I'm sure.

How does that sound to other people?

Comments

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

I agree completely. This is why I'm trying to establish a technique set, orthogonal to creative agenda, so we can say "Oh, you mean 'plausibility techniques,' not Simulationism" when people start to go off.

yrs--
--Ben

[yeloson.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think Ron may have been better off seperating stuff like the Stances, Techniques, Explorative Elements, etc into their own mini-articles instead of lumping them with GNS. People get totally seperate issues confused all the time with it.

"...so you're saying the car is red, right? So it has to be a sports car!"
"No! That one car happened to be red & a sports car, but it's red-ness has nothing to do with it being sports car! It could have been yellow!"
"So now you're saying sports cars are yellow!?! You're contradicting yourself! This is all bunk!"

Etc.

Sigh :(