About categorizing styles and about adjusting data, you are right, I agree completely.

About style X and the question, I have a further explanation.
With this purpose I divide things in RPG in two parts – the way we engage in play and things happening in play. About the way we play there are two distinct ‘modes’ – immersive and not immersive.
To describe things happening in play people use GNS, other theories and models, it doesn’t matter. What matters, in this context, is that these things can be boring, absent, bad or they can actually happen, be interesting and likeable.
So there are these two parts, each binary – yes or no, for the purpose of this ‘explanation’.

What does immersive style is ensuring that immersion happens. Good immersive game works in such way that players expirience immersion. Either immestion is there or its not a game and its so obvious that people just stop playing. What people actually call good game also includes something interesting happening, I don’t deny it of course.

What does style X is ensure that second part (things happening) are good. Good style X game either has good things happening or its not a game at all, it can’t be played anymore.

What I mean is that these two kinds of play are dealing the same way with these two aforementioned parts, one with first, another with second.
Immersion play [i]is[/i] immersion, so immersion is there for sure.
In the same way creative play is creation and so, creation is there for sure.

(glad it posted in the end)

You mentioned ‘creative’ play. I can simply assume, given the Forge reference, that the style of play that tends to be lauded over there as empowered, daring, and innovative is what you mean; but I thought I’d ask, in case the assumption is incorrect.

The answer to your previously asked question of whether there’s a fundamental difference between immersive play and style X is, I suppose, a given — yes, of course, or why are we calling them by different names? — but I cannot comment on what I think the difference is without knowing what style X is. Your choosing to call it ‘creative’ suggests that you’re not at the table mere to hang out, or to merely beat the challenge of a game-as-game; it suggests that the satisfaction you take in play is tilted toward the aesthetic. But I think there are at least three different styles that might be characterized as primarily aesthetic. So — creating what, why, how? seems to me to be a valid question to ask, at least if I’m to answer your fundamental difference question in a useful fashion. (Darn it, this isn’t as clear as I’d like.)u

As far as categorizing styles goes: I think we can categorize other people’s styles to a point, but only to a point: once we throw out an initial series of guesses about styles we don’t play in or don’t appreciate, we need to be willing to let the people who do play in and appreciate those styles say “Yes, you’re right about this, but you’re wrong about that; and this distinction here that you’re downplaying? It’s crucial. No, this other guy is not playing in the same style as I am, even if you don’t see the important difference between them. And I don’t agree with your idea that I can’t be doing Y if I’m doing X: in my experience they’re compatible.”

If we don’t do that, we’re adjusting the data to fit the theory, not the theory to fit the data. And of course the theory will seem to work, if we always adjust the data to fit it; but then we’ll be preventing ourselves from seeing any patterns that we aren’t already aware of — we’ll be preventing ourselves from learning anything new, and we may cause ourselves to see things that aren’t really there. So I think that categorization can be useful, but it needs more cautious use than it gets at times.

From where we started (I guess) my point was that much confusion with imersion play arises from wrong assumption about what it’s driven by – about part creative interest plays in such games.
What I really understood from your comments is that I shouldn’t use word ‘creative’ because it’s provocative. Then, I think, you are saying that you can’t divide or categorize styles of play, just describe your own.

In short, it would be nice if you would directly state your opinion on subject of this our little discussion, and then we would agree or disagree and then we could talk about our experience and use other arguments.
maybe we should do it elsewhere though :)

I’m still not clear on what it is you play for, though. What would make a game particularly good or particularly bad for you?

If you agree – if you play for those other things, you play one way, if you don’t agree, if immrsion is the one exclusive thing, then you play the other way.

immersion is the one thing I can get out roleplaying that I can’t get out of reading or writing
I can’t agree.
Can you accept this as that fundamental difference?

But under most circumstances I play for immersion and wouldn’t consider a session completely satisfying if I didn’t get it at all, because immersion is the one thing I can get out roleplaying that I can’t get out of reading or writing: it’s the particular thing that makes the effort of gaming worth it. I don’t expect to be immersed all the time, though, particularly when I’m GMing: I’m not always playing an immersible character. And non-immersive play isn’t necessarily uninteresting — it’s just that I can get much of what’s interesting about non-immersive play out of writing or reading. Without immersion the payoff for putting out the cooperative effort necessary to roleplay isn’t big enough for me.

Now, about the style of play you favor — I’m not sure what you’re getting at yet. How are you defining ‘something interesting happening’ — what kind of things are interesting? One of the characteristics of Forge games that doesn’t get any explicit formal attention in the definition of narrativism, although it shows up in the “Story Now!” essay and is implicit in many portraits of satisfactory narrativist games, is a particular approach to pacing: a desire to plunge from one conflict-intensive scene to another to another with very little break. Is that what you mean? If it is, I wouldn’t describe that as an interest in the-whole-of-story-as-such either: it’s a concentration and intensified focus on yet another aspect of story.

As far as I know in I-play you continue to play as far as you are ‘in’, as you are immersing. If nothing happens or ‘story’ is not satisfying, you can say it’s boring or whatever, but game is still considered to be going on, it is an rpg and it is being played. If a ‘story’ is happening, but players are not ‘in’, it can be fun, but it is not an rpg, it is not a game (from point of view of I-player). As far as I know and feel and understand from my own experience.

In C-play things are other way around – it is not a game when nothing interesting happens. It also may be considered bad or something if there is no immersion happening. In short.

I guess I’ve made another confusing question in previous comment :-/ I meant difference between one kind of play and another kind of play – the one for which we will not use ‘creative’ anymore and another – ‘immersive’ kind. Do you agree there is a fundamental difference between them?
From your words I estimate that you don’t agree. You say that this is just a style of play and difference lies in kind of ‘story enjoyment’ or something like this. Right?

Yes, there’s a difference between roleplaying and writing a book — I haven’t written an entire book yet, but I did sell a novelette (a long short story).

Yeah, ‘creativity’ is decidedly a non-neutral word. It wouldn’t be in a context that doesn’t demand any original thinking of any sort — nobody would bother to describe my washing the dishes as uncreative, but I wouldn’t care if they did — but I’ve never played in a game that didn’t demand any kind of original thinking.

I think (tell me if I’m wrong) that you mean that you enjoy the roleplaying as a story, and are (at least part of the time) consciously working to produce a story?

One of the complications with enjoying things as stories as that there’s more than one kind of story enjoyment. You could enjoy the atmosphere of the setting; the interaction between the characters; the author’s vivid descriptions; contemplation of a powerful theme; a suspenseful plot; the tone of the writing; or any of these in combination. (Or maybe something else I forgot.) Chances are, you like more than one of these. Chances are, some of them are more important to you than others. Chances are, in the books you like the very best, the particular kind of story-pleasures you value most are well-executed.

Now I happen to value very highly, as an important part of story-pleasure, the “you are there” sense, the compelling description, the character that intrigues me, or powerful wording. The books I like best do at least some of these well. Which doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate a dramatic plot. But the book often will affect me most strongly if it causes me to vividly imagine at least parts of the setting, and if it presents me with characters that capture my interest for who they are, rather than for anything in particular they might happen to be doing. And this is an important part of my experience of my very favorite written fiction.

I carry this taste over into roleplaying. In roleplaying I find that I can get an even more compelling sense of character and place than I can get either in writing or in reading. In writing, I end up paying to much attention to word choice and structure to think as the character thinks; when I’m reading, I’m not determining the character’s actions, and I don’t have nearly as strong a sense of who the character is. So my pleasure in immersive play is not contrary to the kind of pleasure I take in stories — it’s a tighter focus on the most important pleasure.

I frequently find that trying to make the character conform to an externally-imposed dramatic plot, or to various other considerations that don’t spring from the character’s own nature, lessens the believability of the character, and thus my engagement with them. Since I value engagement with the character more highly than I value having a plotline with a dramatic pattern of rising tension, I set aside having a dramatic plot in favor of character engagement.

There are other people who value the dramatic pattern of rising tension in a suspenseful plot most highly. Or people who value exploring a theme. Or — what is most important to you in play? That is probably what I’d call your favored style after. And I don’t think it matters whether or not it fits into somebody else’s theory or not — what seems to be more important is whether people can get a rough idea of what you mean by looking at what you called it.

(My preferred style needs a better name than it has, but I haven’t figured out anything clear that’s short. Although maybe ‘immersionist’ would be better than ‘simulationist’ (which is misleading) or ‘world-oriented’ (which is incomprehensible), after all. I don’t think, even with the multiple meanings of immersion, that it suggests anything that’s incorrect.)

I’m not answering most of your post – your explanations are convincive and as I’m not too far from immersive play myself, the meaning is quite familiar.

About use of language. I think I understand your point. The word ‘creativity’ itself is denying possibility of it’s neutral use?

English is not my native language and when I use a word which is translated as “creativity” with relation to rpgs, people around me (immersive) often apprehed it as negative. They react like “this is not like writing a book, it’s roleplayng” and such. I mean I agree to try to find another choice of words for this … difference.

Do you agree there is a difference?

In case anyone is unaware: saying “My style of play is creative, as opposed to this style over here, which isn’t” is not going to come out sounding complimentary or neutral to practitioners of style 2. There is no possible way to escape the “Your style is uncreative. Therefore my style is superior” implication. If you want results like Ron Edwards gets as a result of his dubious pronouncments, or results like we simulationists got in rgfa when we often spoke as if it were commonly accepted that a good story violates the integrity of the character and the setting (say what?), then continuing to divide creative play from immersive play is a good game plan. If you don’t want results like that, this use of language is not a good idea.

The second motive, which is the only one that indicates any point to continuing conversation, is very likely a mistake about the general nature and point of immersion. For the nonce, I am going to assume that this is what’s going on.

I believe I have already shown that it is not possible to play in deep IC in an RPG without engaging in at least some creation, even in the worst of railroaded games. The idea that this creation is not part of the point of immersion can come from only two places that I can see: one is an unusual metaphysical view, and the other is thinking that the process is more passive than it is in fact, owing to not having experienced the phenomena that the metaphorical descriptions refer to.

In the case of the unusual metaphysical view: I suppose that, if you believe that our channelling metaphor is no metaphor at all — that we actually are perceiving the thoughts and feelings of characters in some otherworld, or some pre-existing archetypes — then you can consistently say that, inasmuch as creation is not taking place during immersive play — inasmuch as we really are discovering, not creating — that creativity cannot be an essential part of the pleasure. If you say that, then we agree to disagree: I have no particular reason to believe that this is the case, and no desire to argue the metaphysics.

In the second case: the point of immersion is the experience, yes — and that experience is intrinsically creative. Since the process is subconscious, my language is to say that I channel — I discover — I perceive — I apprehend: I often speak as if the source of the experience is wholly outside myself, as if it is something I passively sense or passively encounter. But this is metaphor intended to convey a subjective sensation: it should not be mistaken for an assertion of literal truth. When I have the pleasure of “discovering” the answer to a longstanding mystery concerning why my lich-enchanter did not attempt to contact anyone he knew when he was alive after his reanimation, when this seemed out of character, I am in fact experiencing the pleasure of creating a beautiful interlock between previously created background and new background whose effect I did not consciously foresee. That this creative act takes its most satisfactory form when it is subconscious, when the results of creation and not the process are most prominent in the foreground of my attention, in no way diminishes the essential creative nature of the act.

Years of comparing notes with other immersive players have not left me with any reason to think that this understanding of immersion is not a valid general understanding. Different people best achieve immersion under different circumstances, but if I ever encounter anyone whose ‘immersion,’ by their own description, does not seem likely to be fundamentally creative, then I will perforce believe that they are using the same word for a different phenomenon.

What I do say (and, I guess, Thomas does too) is that this Creative Part is not really point of play for immersive players.
When people remember moments they liked in a game (whatever they verbalise it or not) they rarely talk about cool things someone did, they talk about ‘feeling’ of reality, about ‘being character’, they say ‘i did’ and such things – and thats what they like about playing, that is the thing they call RPG.
There happen games in which there were no ‘cool things done’ one can remember, but they were fun – immersion was there and it seemed to be enough to consider game fun. Again, no cool things to remember doesn’t mean there was no creative work done – GM’s work and all the stuff you mentioned is always there of course.

I haven’t had much use for the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast heretofore, but let me put it in those terms: how is it even possible for me to be controlling a main character in a work of fiction without exercising a creative influence on the work?

Does anyone do any creative work in any RPG? If they do, why should making up the setting and NPCs be called creative while making up and developing the main characters is not creative? Why is the NPCs’ contribution to the plot a creative work by the GM, but the PCs’ contribution is not a creative work by the players?

If no one does any creative work, at the end we have a fictional work that didn’t exist in the beginning, and we made it; isn’t that a strange use of ‘creative’?

Or is creative work only work that is done invita Minerva? Am I writing creatively when I’m slogging through my lines of blank pentameter, trying to write something halfway decent by conscious effort, but writing uncreatively when I seem to be inspired and when the lines flow smoothly, as if I were taking dictation rather than torturing them into shape? That would be a very strange notion of creativity in poetry, surely; and it strikes me as equally odd to apply it to character portrayal, character-development, and the making of plot.

Why does thinking and feeling as my character thinks and feels change actions that create parts of a fictional work from a creative to an uncreative act?

Claiming that, in playing for immersion, I am not thereby seeking to exercise creativity impresses me as being analogous to claiming that it is my goal to walk only by using my right leg, and that whether my left leg is involved is strictly incidental.

I don’t want to comment too deeply on Turku because I never played with those people, and therefore I don’t have sufficient context in which to understand some of their remarks. However, I will note that Turku’s a direct descendent of rgfa theory, not of the Forge, and if you bring to that manifesto the assumptions Forgites are likely to make about simulationism, I think there’s a good chance of seriously misconstruing some of the manifesto comments. There are many respects in which, from an rgfa simulationist’s viewpoint, the Forge take on simulationism is halfway inside-out, three-quarters backwards, and wholly muddle-headed; and, while there are deep IC players who favor other styles than Threefold simulationism, there seems to be a pretty marked clustering of simulationist and immersive preferences.

You have a strong point, and if I implied that immersion is not/can not be creative then I did not mean to. What I was saying (or trying to say) is that people who are primarily playing for immersion are not primarily playing for creativity.

That is, if you’re playing for immersion, you might be doing creative stuff too, and that’s cool. But if immersion is why you play, then if for some reason you aren’t being creative or whatever, it’s not a big problem: you’re still getting what you came for.

Now, it’s entirely possible that this is not, in fact, in line with your own play. It is entirely possible that creative stuff is your primary goal, and immersion just happens to be your most effective tool for accomplishing that goal.

Part of the problem is that most of my understanding of people seriously pursuing immersion comes from reading stuff like the Turku Manifesto, which is pretty extreme.

So, to restate my original thing: I’m not trying to say that immersion can’t be creative, but that it doesn’t have to be. Does that match up with your own experience? I ask in all seriousness because I simply don’t know how you play.

Thomas

First, it looks like you’ve just defined creativity in a sense that would exclude Steven King’s novel-writing process (as I heard it described in a quote a couple of days ago) from creative endeavor.

Also, a lot of people who immerse develop characters in play. There are people whose character development approach is what we used to call Design At Start (DAS) in rgfa (Sarah Kahn is one, IIRC), and they have most of the character worked out in advance; but there are also people whose approach is Develop In Play — they start with a rough idea of the character and it takes on definition and develops as play progresses. My approach is primarily DIP, not DAS; if I’m remembering correctly, Mary Kuhner’s was fairly DIP too. Immersion is the method by which we discover things about the character.

Aside from the character development question, as a GM I also do a lot of developing the world in play via channelling.

You can call discovering the further reactions of a character whose background and initial attitudes are largely known uncreative if you like, at the risk of removing much fiction-writing from the domain of the creative arts; and you can call my developing characters in play uncreative if you like; but after you’ve done this, we won’t be able to use the word ‘creative’ for anything between us, because the gulf will be unbridgeable. I can’t accept a usage of ‘creative’ that excludes the working development of fiction in any medium from creative endeavor.

Theory developed in rgfa, but it developed in an attempt to describe or name things that people had observed (their own play preferences) and things they were doing (like immersing). Rgfa was a haven for the the immersion-favoring Threefold simulationist crowd, and there are an awful lot of discussions in the archives between people who favored immersion and did it under varying conditions. One of the reasons we never had a Big Rgfa Model, but had a couple of smaller models and assorted other terminology, is that we found in the course of discussion that few of the generalizations and predictions that people want to make about the play experiences of people whose styles and methods differ pan out. For instance, while there’s a certain amount of correlation between a preference for Threefold simulation and a preference for immersion, Kevin Hardwick (I think) blew the generalization we were about to make out of the water by describing his achievement of strong immersion in a dramatist game, assisted by dramatist techniques.

http://www.google.com/advanced_group_search?hl=en group: rec.games.frp.advocacy
Some fruitful search terms: immersion, deep IC, DAS DIP, channeling, world-oriented delusion, Sarah Kahn, Mary Kuhner, cardboard character, narrative stances

The opening posts in my journal, http://keransrpjournal.blogspot.com/ are a summary of rgfa theory, which may assist anyone who wants to follow the discussions in the archives — although I should note that both the theory and the terminology developed over time, and also note that Threefold terms had a broader use in practice than they did in the “correct” statement of the theory. Forgites will notes the use of some familiar words with different definitions. Ron Edwards appropriated rgfa terminology and changed the definitions, thereby inaugurating lasting confusion; he also discounted the existence or validity of styles and techniques common in rgfa to the point where I would consider Forge theory strongly contraindicated as a path to understanding them.