The root-word of narrativist is narrative. Because of my training in narratology, I know that one meaning of narrative is that they follow one character. Stories contain one or more narratives. Thus a narrativist game deals with individual plots, rather than a story-based game which focuses upon one main plot. This also fits with the idea of players wanting more drama because conflicting goals creates just that. Or that's what I thought...

Edwards designed the narrativist genre to revolve around a premise. Later versions of narrativism would include thematic rules, morph the premise into an open-ended question, and recognize the beneficial effects of improvisation, but these were only small adjustments to a new way to play.

So, which one’s right? Both of them.

Everyone has their own definition of “narrativist.” Edwards, and a few others, tried to convince people of their own definition’s superiority. Their success helped turn an idea into a genre. I’m going to be studying that process, but that means recognizing other definitions as equally valid.

All of this is why I’m reading about Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics (academic-ese for interpreting language). It requires multiple readings of the threads to determine both the writer’s perspective and the different definitions of each word. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if Edwards and his friends took the same approach. I’ll just have to analyze the threads and see.

Hybrid genre games are difficult to create. In GNS and Other Matters of Roleplaying Theory Edwards proposes two possibilities:

(1) two modes are simultaneously satisfied in the same player at the same time
(2) two modes can exist side by side in the design, such that differently-oriented players may play together

Edwards admits to being skeptical of both, but one clue to that skepticism may be found in his preference for narrativist games. I explored this before and it makes heavy use of Edwards’ essay, System Does Matter", but I’m going to rehash the basic points here.

Narrativist games explore a topic and usually present an opinion on that topic through their rules. Any change to the rules results in a change to the opinion, or completely messes it up. To make matters worse, most narrativist games take a rules-light approach, meaning that changes would likely be far more drastic. This is not exchanging a +1 for a +2 in a task resolution system. Instead, narrativist games tend to be shaped by concepts like scenes and conflict resolution systems that ask “why,” instead of “how.” If you're changing anything, it has to be a big change. Furthermore, narrativist games' rules tend to produce meaning by their interactions.


I’m going to explore hybridity through Joshua A. Newman’s Shock: Social Science Fiction. Shock attempts to simulate the genre of social science fiction, but that genre always revolves around a premise. That premise qualifies it as an early narrativist game. I’ve written a lot about Shock before because I admire its originality in terms of its rules, and my hate for how it handles story.

Newman claims that it uses conflict resolution, but I would argue that it’s a hybrid form of task and conflict resolution. Conflict resolution normally has two forces going against one another, and so you always have a story to tell. Shock requires that each characters’ action have a different goal. It is possible for both actions to fail, leaving the storyteller without an obvious story to tell.

Nonetheless, every challenge is shaped by the issue made up at the start of the game, and the character’s approaches to that issue. If the rules are followed to the letter and in their implications, it definitely asks, “why.”

Despite being difficult to play and not having rules to resolve things at the story level, Shock was a big hit with The Forge crowd, including many non-designers. The game doesn’t have to be ideologically perfect in order to be fun. The rules don’t have to be perfect, either. It only matters that they’re good enough, and the players will fill in the rest.

This is where story games have an advantage over other types of games. Because there’s no way to create rules for everything that a player could imagine. Players accept a certain degree of hand-waviness because it's the story that they're interested in, not the rules.

I want to write about genres, but I've encountered a problem with writing about the genre of story games. This doesn't refer to story games which include all role-playing games and other games. I'm referring to a style of game that is usually talked about in threads like, "Story game-ifying (insert name of RPG here)."

This definitely points to the existence of a genre. The threads are based on how different The Forge's style of rules are from the traditional ways of building RPGs. What they fail to get is that the experience is different because the players and GM are treated differently. Yes, the rules matter, but it's not just the rules. It appears in the how-to-run and how-to-play advice that accompanies the rules. Sometimes there are rules governing the creation of the setting. Instead of leaving it up to a GM, story games give that power of creation to everyone.

What makes this so difficult to write about is that these threads usually don't mention games in them, only rules from games. Of course, if you're familiar with enough story games, you can probably guess which game they took inspiration from, but those are only guesses.

Of course, there are other threads which call for lists of games that possess a certain rule, such as lists of GM-less games, but counting games from those threads assumes that all story games are gm-less, which is far from true. As I mentioned in my previous post, that sort of turns the concept of genre on its head anyways.

I'll have to think about this to determine what, if any, method could be used to build my research sample.

The concept of genres has many definitions, but I prefer this one:

A genre is a repeatable but open pattern of communication which is shaped by a combination of expectations held by many people and which may be catered to by others. A communication may simultaneously conform to many genres or different types of genres, such as thematic or functional.

Unfortunately, I can come up with genres that threaten even that definition. The term board games, for instance, is spoken of as a genre, but there's a difference. Board games are dominated by one material characteristic, the board. That differentiates them from card games, war games, and even role-playing games.

Is there such a thing as a material genre, or is this just another example of a functional genre? I've always assumed that a functional genre referred to the rules, but if pictures are interpretable as rhetoric (I'm using the academic interpretation of that word, not the common understanding), then it reasons that a board would be even easier to interpret as such.

This post is just to keep you up to date on where I am on my various projects:

Storm of the Armadas: revising the game after my last playtest

RPG: I've decided to avoid the heroes saving the universe concept, but I'm still deciding which of my other games to edit

Dissertation: Exploring the changing definition of the narrativist genre

The online game design community I planned to study was originally based around The Forge. They established a series of role-playing game (RPG) subgenres, initially called: gamist, narrativist and simulationist (GNS). I developed a working definition of what a genre is, but I had no idea how to study genres. I've had to discover how to do that by reading the work of others.

Despite GNS being an important feature of my proposal, I actually failed to define how each subgenre differed from one another. For example, a narrativist RPG incorporates an open-ended question into both its play and its rules. Gamist RPGs were competitive, but they may or may not incorporate winners and losers. Simulationist RPGs were, well, they were complicated, so I'll leave that explanation for a future post.

Instead, I wanted to explore all the special types of rules which became commonplace within The Forge community and its diaspora, such as scenes or fruitful void. The exact definition of those terms varies a bit from designer to designer, giving me more topics for future posts.

Yes, I still plan to study these features, but I believe that the GNS subgenres caused certain rules to become more commonplace, while minimizing or eliminating other rules. Now that I'm no longer involved in the PhD program, I can also study the OSR genre, despite its origins being in another community.

More posts will follow as I figure out new things about this topic.