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A proposal
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?
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The things discussed above -- rules that make the gameworld follow a certain set of laws and techniques for inducing "IC trance" into players -- are techniques. Anything that we actually *do* during an RPG is a technique, from dice rolling to playing songs beforehand to having friends come and play an NPC for a session, and a lot of other things besides. A technique might also be called a "practice --" a thing you do when you game.
Simulationism, and its cousins Gamism and Narrativism, are creative agenda. A creative agendum is a goal -- what you want to get out of the game. You use techniques to try to get to your creative agenda.
Example: You want to build a chair. To do this, you might use wood, nails, instructions on chair building, the action of hammering, sand paper, the way of rubbing sand paper in a circle that makes things extra smooth, etc. In this analogy, the chair is your creative agenda -- all those other things are techniques.
A technique is a description of what you do. A creative agendum is why.
Does that make any sense?
yrs--
--Ben
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Matt
no subject
yrs--
--Ben