Reply To: How do you feel about new game mechanics?

[McLaddie]

 

I have a complete blog of my design concepts and explanations.  But, even then, some people can completely misread the text, as you have done.  I have never claimed my designs are more narrative than others, but that some design approaches provide different means of supplying narratives , and provide better narratives for people that enjoy entertainment and variety more than rigid and highly determinative “simulations”.  This is an opinion, but one that informs what I like in designs, both mine and others.

Yes you have Bob and I read the one you referenced.  In it you do claim that your designs and others provide more narrative than ‘process oriented’ games. You even categorize your games as “narrative games” as opposed to ‘process’ games. So how is it that your narrative games don’t provide ‘more narrative”  but do provide ‘better narratives’?

In that article you state this division between narrative and non-narrative games–and gamers several times. As an example:

Process oriented gamers simply feel that they don’t have enough information, or control, in a narrative game.

So, again, what makes your or any game a ‘narrative game’ when all games provide narratives? Less player control may be a different narrative, but more or better to the degree that it is termed a ‘narrative game’?  And as a game is all about player control [their ability to make game decisions] it is more of where that control is provided rather than more or less, however that is quantified.

It is a simple, technical game design question:  How does a narrative game provide more or better narratives than non-narrative games?  What specific ingredients in a game design qualifies it as a narrative game while being absent from others?

I often feel, Bob, that you work very hard at not to ‘discern’  my design philosophy, skew the issues etc.   It’s not like I have kept my design philosophy a secret.   Your problem might stem from seeing only two kinds of wargame designs and two kinds of wargamers, process and narrative.  As my philosophy doesn’t fit either, you find it difficult to categorize me and my philosophy, though you do try very hard to cram it into the process ‘type’.  How about trying for one or two shades of gray between your two, or even better, other colors in your bifocal pantheon of game design philosophies.  If you can’t, then don’t worry, you’ll have a wargame design of mine to comprehend long before you are dead and buried.  Until then Bandit’s approach is similar to mine in a number of ways.

But to give one obvious component of my design philosophy: whatever a game does for the player, it is in the physical presentation and the actual game mechanics which are very, very concrete. You can create intriguing names for game types in any fashion you like, but in the end it all comes down to what is and isn’t in the very specific game system and rules and what that system can and can’t do for the players through it.