Looking back - My MA

Well - what is the best way to surmise my MA games design project?

It didn't start out perfectly, it had a great middle and a less impressive end. 

Well, that might be a little too short and critical.

I started the degree while I was working at a computer games company (CCP Games) as a QA tester, which lead the focus of my project towards what the company was interested in. As such, my original plan for the degree was to research the concept of mid-core games as a market and tablet gaming. I should point out that I personally held no interest in these subjects, but I was swept up in my first job at a AAA games company. Once that contract ended and I came back home I started to realize that my own interests lay in a completely different direction - I also found out that mid-core was a bum-theory and I had little to no interest in the overly saturated tablet gaming market.

I started looking into tabletop role-playing games and storytelling systems as they are something I am absolutely interested in. I always found that when I played role-playing games with friends I always seemed to have different priorities and desires to the other players around the table; I later found that I was trying to reap a different emotional reward to the other players, which made me realize that there were many different emotional rewards that role-playing games can deliver to their players, and even different ones to aim for!

I settled on trying to solve a question the disparity between my interests and the interests of my friends raised - which boiled down to why they liked creating stories anywhere but the role-playing table. I found that It came down to a lack of creative boundaries and jumping off points which are integral to simplifying and streamlining the creative process into something entertaining. To prove my hypothesis I created Preposterous!

The Preposterous box

Preposterous was a rather successful game, it proved that given the right creative boundaries and jumping off points players enjoyed the process of telling stories. It was my favorite part of the project and I wish I had stuck to my guns and tried to make the tabletop role-playing game based around the same findings. However, I wanted to make a digital game and explore my theory on how random chance might be able to a more immersive role-playing experience in a choose-your-own adventure plot.

The final part of my project was a huge undertaking - perhaps far too much for the time slot and a little too ambitions for myself. Trying to learn Actionscript 3.0 enough to make a game that didn't lend itself well to tutorials was the first hurdle that tripped me up, the 80K+ writing was a rather tall order also. If it weren't for my contracted artist (Rebecca MIchalak) I wouldn't have even been able to finish the analogue version of Wasteland (working title).

If I had the time to do this all again I would cut the desire to work in a digital format and the part where I stopped looking into what I wasn't interested in - that being said, I am not sure that things would've been any different any other way. Overall I am impressed with what I was able to achieve, it might not be perfect but I don't think anything ever hits the deadline completely finished.

Wasteland - the Analogue version

Cover of Wasteland

The finished Wasteland product - well, almost. Due to timing constraints I had to send the book off to print before I could finish the proof read! Luckily, I will be able to proof read the document before the hand-in. It is too bad that the actual book is nothing more than a layout and display piece, however I couldn't chance the book not arriving before the hand-in.

I am pleased with how the project has gone - the analogue version is an almost-perfect representation of the games system; a few of the more dynamic parts of the game have been removed but overall the system has benefited from the analogue system. I wasn't expecting the book itself to be as long as it turned out, but I was trying to create something that diverted from the usual methods creators of such games use to shorten their pieces. What else could I expect?

If there is anything I learnt from this project it is this: I really ramble when I type.

It's something that has become more and more apparent to me through this blog and writing that book; a lot of the writing I did could do with iteration and re-writing. But that's something I will have to work on in the future, it is unfortunately not possible before the end of this project.

Well, I am glad to see the project come to a conclusion with a physical representation of my product. It is a choose-your-own adventure game that takes an alternate approach to the illusion of choice in games: instead of there being a right and wrong choice for the protagonist there is a series of jumping off points to lead the player in their choices, two or three options and multiple outcomes for each.

A change of plan

After a few months of trying to learn Actionscript 3.0 and implement my game I have been forced to scrap the digital part of my project, while this is disheartening I believe that due to the time constraints it would be impossible to get the Flash game to a finished state in time. I believe that I failed to account for the amount of bugs that I ran into also failed to account to exactly how much text would be involved in this text-based adventure. If I would have had it all to do again I would have started this process much sooner, but that's neither here nor there!

It seems a shame to throw all of this code away... It was by no means early figuring out how to half-get this game working. I did learn a lot about AS3 during this process, overall I learnt that there will always be bugs and things will always take longer than you think.

I plan to continue the same project, instead producing it as a choose your own ending book with a twist! I will have to include a random chance system to maintain the same system however I believe it is more manageable than trying to maintain the digital interface.

Current story structure - expanded

Flash Game Story Structure

Gate One

The story begins with the character walking alone on the lonesome highway 89. Land stretching into the distance rolling over dirt hills, the sky an ever changing landscape of unnatural shades of gray cloud dancing like a choppy ocean. It was sickness that drove you from home, people were getting the shakes so bad they couldn't even feed themselves; you knew there was no cure for them and so did they. You were always warned about travelling towards the city but you had no other choice, it was a desert in all other directions and you did not like your chances in the big empty.

Events

Begger - An opportunity for the player to show charity, for better or for worse.
Motel Six - Gives player opportunity to interact with other survivors.
Ambush - Life or death situation, does the player take any chance he can get?
Stand-off - A conflict rages on! Does the player intervene or simply stand by?
Lucky Break - See how much the player believes in luck.
Desolation - Player arrives on a gristly scene, does he respect the dead or be objective?
Flood - Another risk-reward situation for the player to undertake or ignore.
Illness - Player gets the shakes! Does he risk stopping to heal or ignore it?
Emptiness - Chance to see what the player does when (s)he thinks nobody is watching.
Friends - Jealousy measure event, what will player do out of spite to nice people.

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Gate Two

Camping one night you hear voices coming from the road, to your suprise a group of 6 individuals come towards you. Although they are armed they ask to share your fire and appear very friendly, over the evening you get to know them and they seem to have similar goals and outlooks to your own. They offer to bring you along as a member of their group, they even offer you a gun. They do warn you that you are unlikely to survive the journey any further on your own. What choice do you have?

Events

Disagreement - Group disagreement turns hostile, chance for player to pick sides!
Food Crisis - Not enough food for group, do you risk starvation or turn cannibal?
Slavery - Slavery company block path and demand a group member, do you fight or give up?
Ill Weather - The beginnings of a romance for the player, allows them to show if they like x.
No Man's Land - Group find a minefield, does the player test his luck or risk somebody else?
Warzone - Caught between a gang and slavers, do you intervene or hide from injustice.
Desolation - Gives the player the option to attempt to dick over the group he is with.
Slavery Sale - Gives player an opportunity to either set aside morals or stand up for them.
Mutant Dogs - Does the player truly believe that Nobody gets left behind?
Missing - Member of group goes missing, group panics! What will player do?

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Gate Three

After a long and very tense journey the group hit the city limits, you camp out at the edge of the city and they tell you that this is where you and they part ways. They allow you to keep the gun and slip away one morning before you awaken, you are sad to see them go but you are finally at the city. Now you have to try and find the society your parents grew up in.

Events

Cruelty - You witness an act of injustice, another chance to be a bystander or to intervene.
Hold-up - Help up at knifepoint, since you have a gun do you threaten him or kill him
Storehouse - You find somebody's store of food, do you take what you can or leave it?
Romance - You meet a mysterious stranger who seeks affection from you, do you believe in love?
Help - A man pulls a gun on you and then almost falls to his death! Do you help him or not?
City-state - You find an insular society hidden away, they invite you in, do you steal or not?
Sewers - You are forced into the sewers by raiding parties, Do you explore or exit again?
Ruin Diving - A flooded stairwell underground, you find hidden water still, steal it or leave it?
The Collapse - Climbing an overturned building, it begins to shake! Do you hold on or run?
The Smog - A billowing smog begins to choke you, do you seek higher ground or lower ground?

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Gate Four

You hear a scream coming from another building over, you recognize a voice, it is the members of your previous group! You make your way over and see that she is caught in a blunted bear trap that was hidden in a small pass, you turn just in time to see the eyes of a wild, dangerous looking woman who hits you square between the eyes. You flutter back into consciousness in a makeshift jain cell with others who seem to have been caught the same way.

Events

Feeding time! - You are starved, the guard gives you a fresh human arm to eat! Do you do it?
Stockholm - Attractive guard befriends you, eventually the relation deepens, sleep with or not?
Gang Politics - Guards argue with one another, do you turn them against each other or not?
The Hunger - the gang contemplate eating somebody and make you vote! Who do you vote for?
Escape Attempt - Two prisoners hatch escape attempt, do you go with them or stay in safety?
Sickness - One person in prison shows signs of zombification! Guards ignore, wait for it or kill?
Blood Sport - You and another are thrown into a ring to fight, finish him off or refuse to kill?
Pack Mentality - Big guy starts to bully prisoners, do you beat him into submission or submit?
Dog Eat Dog - As a joke the guards throw a rabid dog into the cell for 'lunch', how do you deal with it?
The attack - Another gang attacks your captors, use the chance to escape? Do you trust them?

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Gate Five

The guard that favours you helps you to escape, however while you run into the dark subway system you hear the gang yelling after you - it is blood sport. You are the prey and they are the predators, you struggle to navigate your way around in the dark, doing your best to stay one step ahead of the hunters as they scream profanities and scrape the walls in their hunting frenzy.

Events

Close Call - a torch bearing group runs deathly close to you, run or stay perfectly still?
Survivor - You run across another victim, they know a lot about it... trust or kill?
Exit - You find a ray of sunlight, an exit perhaps? It is out in the open, go or not?
Flooded - chased towards a flooded tunnel, swim into the depths or find another route?
Power - You find a circuit breaker, you could light subway system! Use lights or not?
One on One - You run into the cell guard you liked, do you kill him or love him?
Scouts - You meet another group in the sewers, do you warn them about the hunters?
Music - You hear beautiful singing, smell food, see a beautiful woman, is it a trap?
Argument - Three hunters argue over some cans, evade them or steal the food?
Collapse - You are caught dead to rights, a cave in starts! Take cover or run for it!

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Gate Six

The ending of the story is different depending on the choices and stats of the characters. The ten different endings are listed below:

violence - You find a automatic rifle and ammo, payback time! You hunt & kill them all!
Mutual - They chase you into a strange room, you open a door and zombies kill you all!
Stockholm - They corner you and you kill one of them, this was an interview, you passed!
Bleak - You escape this situation, see the world and realise that you've escaped nothing.
Meaningless - You find your way out of the city and live a long and normal life after all.
Cannibal - You find a body in the subway and realise you thirst for human flesh!
Lucky - You make a ridiculously lucky escape from it all and feel lucky.
Hopeful - Cornered, trapped, Your original group comes and saves you at the last moment!
Humanitarian - You escape to find a society trying to rebuild humanity, at last you are home.
Romance - You are saved by your romantic interest, you realise love conquers all things!

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Expansion on Look and feel

The basic layout for the game will be an appropriate piece of artwork to help the player visualize the current event, then text shall animate into the image slowly, to simulate the speed at which the events occur and add an element of dynamism. As a constant background there will be an off-black backdrop with animated smoke rising from it, along with some bloodstains and other decals. The image to the left is one of the three current proposed layouts, in this layout the artwork covers most of the screen and the text is carefully overlapped over the image to ensure no direct separation. This runs the risk of obscuring the text from the player.

The second proposed layout has a similar layout, with the artwork covering most of the background. However, small cut-always will hold parts of the text (aka. the Choices) to separate them from the events and push attention onto them. The benefit of this is that it clearly separates the choices of the game from the artwork and serves to allow the player to clearly see the artwork.

The final idea for the layout has the artwork as just snippets or 'windows' filling in dynamic shapes over the background, with the text filling all the other space. This has the advantage of making it easier for the player to identify and read the text while allowing the artwork to be less monochrome so as not to interfere with the text. The downside is that the artwork occupies a smaller section of the screen, however I am not sure which of the layouts I prefer at present. The artwork used was taken from the internet and does not exist in the final piece, however the fonts used will probably be used, the title is a working title and will not be in the final project.

Look and feel of proposed flash game

One of the many short stories found throughout Lost Odyssey, this would be the sort of direction I would want to take - with ambiant music, SFX and text animation at this level. I think perhaps a different painted image background for all 50 of the events, the gates and the endings. I would do a similar fade in-out and the buttons would be text that highlighted when selected, I would say that this would be the correct level of visual representation the game would need.

Implementation
At first I was concerned by the amount of content, however, if I used flash to create this game I would not have to code a great deal - most of the code would be the same page copied for different events. animation and music/graphical implementation would also be hassle-free. I might need an artist to create 70 decent images, but I am sure I can find that. SFX are easily found on the internet in large open source areas. Finally If I couldn't find a musician then I myself could create the music using Adobe auditorium. The first act would be to create the story content itself, something I would have to think about a lot (it would be the main content). At the same time I would need to prototype the game, getting a single, linear version of it running so that adding to it would be easy. I feel confidant I could finish this by the end of the degree, since I have over half a year to do it!

What would be the purpose?
Apart from creating a fun, interactive game with good replay value? I have already proven that people find it fun to tell stories, however the method by which I proved this was to randomly give players items and ask them to extrapolate a story. By the same token, I should be able to do the same thing digitally and fire the imagination of the player of my game by introducing random chance and thereby adding value to their choices.

Proposed Flash game - A probability effected choose your own adventure game

Event layout of my proposed CYOA Flash game

So here is my suggestion for a digital storytelling game. This game would be a mixture of constant events and variable events (much like the parallel story structure), however probability will affect every part of the game, meaning that every time the player starts the game up they will have a different story told to them. 

When the game begins the player will choose the character's name and gender, after that they will be presented with a brief back-story, which will comprise of 4 different elements (positive, negative, family and job). This initial event allows for a separation between the player and their character, it allows them to perceive the protagonist as an individual in their own right, since the player did not have the option to choose this back-story. They will then encounter Gate 1, the initial starting event for the story; after that they will encounter a series of 1-5 events, randomly selected from a series of 10 possible events before coming to gate 2. This repeats at all 5 gates. During each event, players are faced with a choice, they may choose either of the two options, the outcome of either could be they were successful at that action or they failed that action. There will also be a possibility for death in some of the events, irregardless of the choices they made. Finally, depending on the pre-generated back story elements to the character, they may gain access to a third option, this option always succeeds. Depending on the choices the player makes at the Final gate they will progress into one of 10 possible endings, the ending they get will be based upon the adventure they have undertaken and how it had effected them.

The intention is to make a text based adventure game that embraces random chance to derive more meaning and emotion from the player; it is harder to care about something when 'death' means you can restart and pick the same options again to receive the same outcome.

non-linear storytelling, analogue vs digital

The reason that I prefer analogue forms of role-playing / interactive storytelling games to their digital counterparts is the possibility of choice. To explain:

Linear story

 The above image depicts a simple, linear story. Most forms of storytelling are linear; examples include books, films and games. These stories depict a series of events that follow one of many karmic formula. No matter what the reader, watcher of player does, the events of the story are set to occur in the same order with the same outcomes every time the player plays the game/ reads the book / watches the film. The alternate to this is a branching story path, the idea being that at certain points in the story the player may progress in multiple ways - each of which opens up to a new path. This looks very different when compared to the linear story-line:

Branching story layout

This interactive story allowed the player to make meaningful decisions that will influence the story one way or another. effectively giving the player the freedom of choice that the protagonist would have. The branching story path has been around in analogue and digital forms for more than 20 years, however the digital and analogue forms of this are very different. Mostly because there is an obvious problem with this type of story:

The problem with a branching story

What you effectively do every time you branch a path is you double the effort the game requires. For example, if you wanted a player to make 10 choices in the entire game, but each choice would only present two outcomes you would end up with a game with exactly 1024 separate endings! This is far beyond the capabilities of any analogue or digital format, more importantly it defies purpose - nobody would ever play a game or read a book over 1000 times just to see each ending and you should not expect them to!

Obviously choice (or the illusion of choice) is still a very emotionally valuable asset for a story or a game, so what is the most common fix for a digital system?

Parallel story structure

A story parallel! One that allows multiple choice to a certain extent but then falls back into a linear story structure. This is a common and rather popular system used in the games industry, because it allows all the illusion of choice that a player would desire without the astronomical amount of extra effort and waste of assets that would inevitably destroy the games company that attempted it. As you can clearly see there are 'Gate' events, no matter what the player has chosen the center event is inevitable and universal to each game.
So, if that is the solution devised in digital formats, what is the analogue equivalent?

An examination of the CYOA book Journey under the sea

Well, the first noteworthy medium is the Choose your own adventure story! The real difference between the novel and tabletop game medium when compared to the digital game is the ease of content creation. A computer game must limit the optional story outcomes because the process of creating the event or area in the game is very taxing and expensive. With a novel or tabletop game the content requirement is very minimal; In a CYOA book a player must choose a page to read, that page had to be written before he made the choice. For a detailed examination of the choose your own adventure story book, please see:

http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/

In a tabletop role-playing game the player must sit down, make a choice, express the choice to another individual (a DM) who must simple reply to him - informing him of the outcomes of his choice. Unfortunately that is where we loose the ability to gain more choices by lowering the required output; that individual will still need a story that he expects the players to follow, he will - if he is worth his salt - modify the story according to every session and choice the player makes. However, the intended story is still fixed.

What separates the tabletop game from the choose your own adventure book? Mostly it is the inclusion of probability in the form of dice rolls to determine the success of the choices a player takes.

So, what if we included probability into a CYOA style of game? The plot would still be a parallel story but the outcomes of it would be much more varied! Probability is handled batter by computers than by dice, maybe some form of more interactive CYOA could be achieved.

(source of images: http://mycours.es/gamedesign2012/48-2/branching-narrative-from-borges-to-the-hypertext/)

Game Ideas 21.02.2014

Audatory (Mobile / tablet game?)
Puzzle game based around musical sounds, octaves and instruments, players must try to communicate with characters which speak in musical sounds. The player must bring them to a certain type of thought before the timer runs out by communicating with them using instruments and octaves. Each creature you talk to communicates differently using different instruments but with the same basic logic to it all, so it is a decipherable puzzle. Difficulty progresses as levels continue.

Coffin Nail Gin (PC based story game)
Story based and management based game, players take on the role of father Clements - an alcoholic new Orleans preacher who runs a gin distillery out of his parish's mausoleum. During the game players make a choice of how dangerous to make the alcohol, who to sell it to and who to hire to work with him, not to mention you decide how to deal with the police, what risks to take and how much you want to meddle in the affairs of your team. As you progress you see the consequences of your decisions and make the choice between the good father's alcoholism or his incarceration.

Notorious / city of thieves (Console based)
Player is a fledgling member of a thieves guild in an ever changing city of greed. As the ownership of buildings change and the wealth of the inhabitants fluctuates the player must choose a mark, then carefully plan out and execute a heist without getting caught! The more wealth he amasses, the more notorious he becomes! As the thief steals from the homes of the town the wealth of the inhabitants fluctuates, as a result if the local town hall was robbed the town guard may move to protect it in favor of the local noble houses. Or if the owner of the largest shipping operation is robbed his boats may pull out of the docks, opening up secret entrances into the sewer. Players can also steal from one another, they must set up their own safeguard systems to ensure that other players do not steal from their home, in this way the homes within the game can be truly randomized as different players control different homes in other people's games.

Tribal stories (indie PC game)
Game based around a fantasy city-building game, however the focus is on the townsfolk instead of the management of city expansion. Townsfolk become characters in their own stories, making choices based upon their moods and dispositions and effecting their own inter-relationships. The player may choose to interact with these villager's choices, changing them to suit what they think the characters should do. Townsfolk gain a reputation based on the conclusions and effects of their stories, other villagers may fall in love with a particularly noble act of a townsfolk, or even grow to dispise a townsfolk and plot for their downfall!

Alibi (possibly a source game?)
Game set in a mansion after a great party, one of the people at the party is dead! One of the players is the killer and he knows it, the players must quickly deduce who the killer is and expose him/her before the detective arrives. Clues left around the mansion will point towards the suspect and players shall have to trust one another to share the information they are given at the start of the game. The Killer must provide disinformation and attempt to cause the other character sot have 'accidents' which they cannot be implemented in, if they are the only person left alive they fail the game, but if they think somebody is too close or they want to destroy evidence another person has found they can secretly eliminate them, possibly framing another guest in the process.

...Aaand I'm out of steam.

Well, it had to happen eventually I guess. In the last few weeks - perhaps the entire month - I have found myself unable to make any meaningful steps forward. Perhaps it has been the path I have chosen to pursue, a personal dip or block, or maybe I have just 'run out of steam' and need some new input before I can create more output. Either way I am sick to death of it and want to make a physical acknowledgement of it on this blog.

Obviously I have no idea how to get myself out of this rutt or I would not be spending my time talking about it; my next plan is to try a variety of new things, hopefully the act of finding new direction in the process. I do not particularly want to go too far off topic with this attempt to re-invigorate myself. So, to start off I am going to try and come up with a variety of game ideas, these ideas will have no parameters and will all be created today. If none of those interest me I will spend the next week working on equal parts 'child Preposterous' and music, the logic being that working on artwork and music will help to expand my creative outputs to different mediums (hopefully getting me out of the rutt in the process). I will also attempt to write a short story. Although I agree that this seems like a lot of work to attempt to complete in a single week I would argue that I am not trying to complete all of these things, I am simply trying to re-spark my creativity. To ensure that this I intake as much new information as possible I will also ensure that I do not listen to any music I have already heard, watch any television shows / entertainment formats that I have already seen and even move my location of work.

I suppose what I am saying is whatever I am doing is not working so my plan is to do everything I have not been doing.
I will update the blog every day on my progress, hopefully by next Friday I will be in a very different place...
If not I have no idea what to do with myself!

A New Project

While Preposterous is not 100% finished I have decided to start work on the next game, since Preposterous' purpose was to prove my proposed hypothesis that:

given the right situation players would enjoy the process of telling stories to one another.

So far however, my next incarnation of that concept is proving difficult to formulate. I have started my further exploration into this different type of gameplay by attempting to create a game based around the murder mystery genre.

Alibi - A game of accusation!

In this game the players first all take it turns to pick characters from a pre-generated roster, they then are informed that as a group, these players had been to a wonderful party, passed out drunk and awoken in the house just to realise they cannot remember what happened the night before and a crime has been committed! The players all write down a possible crime & hand them in to one player, who reads them all out, players then vote for the most entertaining sounding crime as a group and all collectively write it down in their notes; the player who came up with the crime then goes first. The players take it in turns to roll dice and explore the mansion, each time they enter a room they draw a card and spin the clock spinner. They then make a note of the card they drew, the room it was found in & the time the spinner says, the idea being that by racking their brain, the character has remembered seeing something suspicious the night before. The player now has a clue & must continue searching the house for more clues, once the player has at least one card for each of the four classifications (means,motive,opportunity and clue) that player can return to the foyer to call the players to finish their stories, that player then rolls a single d6 and all remaining players only have that many turns to finish their stories. At the end of the game players explain how the clues they found lead them to believe the crime occurred in this manner, the most believable/best version of events. Once the vote is cast, the player with the best version of events wins. In the case of a tie, the player who used the most cards wins. Players can have up to 3 clue cards, one means, motive and opportunity card at a time; when the player draws another of any of these cards they may select the one they want to use.

So far the game is in need of some serious changes. Firstly the existence of the board is possibly unnecessary, secondly the cards having their own segregations seems to slow the game down a little. Perhaps it would be better if the game was based around a single possible version of events that the manipulate one player at a time, this system would have a time line and a lot of note taking. However internal consistency would be met. Also the initial aim of this was it would be interesting to have a game where character work backwards to discover and establish the character instead of retro-actively. I will continue to explore this game concept while at the sime time looking into other game concepts.

The Big Model, by Ron Edwards

The Big model

'A group of friends gets together (Social Contract) and decides to play a roleplaying game about superheroes in love (Exploration). They use a set of tools (Techniques) to do things in the game (Ephemera). The decisions that they make in terms of what things to explore and how to explore them compose their Creative Agenda.'

This is a more all-encompassing model of how a role-playing game works, the original GNS theory has been condensed into the Creative agenda, while all the elements used to achieve the creative agenda have been shown as well as how they inter-relate.

• Social contract is the context in which all roleplaying occurs.
• Exploration is the definition or role-playing. The players explore the world, theme, situation and characters. The elements that players will explore can further be broken down into 5:
• Characters - The fictional beings which the players focus on. Divided by control.
• Setting - The imaginary place and time which the role-play is set.
• Colour - comprises all the details which give the game a certain flavor but do not affect the development of a situation.
• Situation - The players motivation to act, without a driving force or juxtaposition the players will have no need to act and therefor will not.
• System - is the procedures by which those elements change and develop. Usually worked out by a 'Dungeon Master' beforehand, akin to the written story plan.
• Technique - The system with which the players decide what happens within the game, this can range from dice rolls to card drawing.
• Ephemera includes what the players say, what dice they roll, what the dice results are, how they react to each other's contributions, and much, much more. Ephemera is the "meat" of play, the medium by which the rest of the game operates.
• Creative agenda can be found at the heart of all, and can be defined as the 'reason to play'. This is the objective of the player or what they want to achieve; there are many different objectives for players even when playing the same game. This was originally definied as GNS theory, and as such it breaks down into the same three basic concepts:
• Simulation (the right to dream) This creative agenda emphasizes appreciation for nuanced development of character, setting, and color to no other end than creating a holistically consistent experience.
• Gamism (step on up) is based upon the imaginary world being an arena to proove the abilities of the player, emphesising mastery of the systems and clever use of the character as the values to determine a good player
• Narritivism (story now) attempts to use the elements of exploration to create an engaging story that addresses a "premise" to produce a theme. Premise in this context is a defining question or theory (e.g.You must protect the ones you love). The primary focus is exploration of this theme.

Of course this system is not without criticism. The model is predated by some of the biggest and most successful games (D&D, world of darkness), therefor it's usefulness is questionable. The theory is also Totalist, as it seeks to encompass all definitions of role-playing, meaning that anything that it cannot explain seems dismissed. Another critique of the big model is it is disconnected to the study of the arts in a broader sense, and finally it seems to have no definition for 'immertionist' gameplay.

I will keep these critisisms in mind, however I do not believe it is fair to critisise a game for the successes of the games that predate it. I also believe that while it can be considered totalist it can also be recognized as a broad definition instead of a rigid set of rules. As for the disconnection to the broader study of the arts that is something I will have to keep in mind; it is noteworthy that the theory does not relate to other studies of drama or storytelling. Finally I will study immertionist play as a possible exception to this theory.

Immersion 

(copied from the RPG talk wiki)

Immersion can be described as the sense of a virtual reality experienced in a role-playing game. It includes such experiences as empathizing with a character, responding to narrative elements, and making decisions in-game rather than using meta-game thinking. For the player, immersion generally means geetting into their character and imagining something of their experience. For the gamemaster, immersion can be trickier to describe, but might involve imagining the world, reacting to the PCs as characters, and treating NPCs as entities with their own motivations and rationales for existence.
Immersion is roughly the antonym of Meta-Gaming. For this reason, immersion often represents an opposed viewpoint to theories based on goal achievement, such as GNS Theory. While someone engaged in immersion might experience a sense of the dramatic or a thrill at overcoming a challenge, the experience is immediate. Hence, an immersionist could share the same goal as a Power Gamer but have a markedly different play experience. While The Big Model partly came about to describe this type of involvement, ultimately this model breaks down because of the problem with simulation when applied to an immersive experience and the lack of description for what it means for someone to feel immersed. You can believe in a simulation and agree with its accuracy without being engaged.

GNS theory

Visual representation of GNS theory

A theory developed by Ron Edwards, GNS theory relates to role-playing games of all types; the basic concept is that in any role-playing game the gameplay can be steered towards one of three different styles of gameplay. These game styles are classified as Gamism, Narritivism and Simulationism, and while no game is purely one of these three points you can only truly achieve a successful amount of one by neglecting the other two. Basically put, a game can be classified by how it facilitates each of these types of gameplay.

The three categories can be defined as this:

Gamism (prove thyself gameplay)

'Decisions based on satisfying clear predefined goal conditions in the face of adversity: in other words, on the desire to win.' (Ron Edwards, GNS theory)

Gameplay of this type is by far the most popular, pitting the players against tougher and tougher challenges without spending much time on the set up, explanation and narrative value. The emphasis is on character effectiveness and ability to succeed, also known as power gaming in some circles. In a broader sense, the game is about winning, being the best, and proving it by overcoming obstacles. Arguably most of current games have this focus, indeed it is hard to think of a role-playing game with a focus outside of power fantasy and 'winning'.

Narrativism

Narrativism relies heavily on outlining or developing motives for the characters, putting them into situations where those motives come into mutual conflict, and making their decisions in the face of such stress the main driving force behind events. (Ron Edwards, GNS theory)

The purpose of narrativist games is to draw the player into the emotional situation of conflict of their character, then, much like gamism they follow a pattern of escalation until the character either fails to uphold their morals & subsequently changes them or their 'story' ends; in this context, a story reflects the amount of remaining conflicts that exist for the player.

Simulationism

'Simulationism refers to a style of play where the main agenda is the recreation of, or inspiration by, the observed characteristics of a particular genre or set of source material.'(Ron Edwards, GNS theory)

The true focus of a simulationist style role-playing game is the analysis and following of cause and effect. The players begin with a base world, perhaps even physical reality or superhero anthology & they then create fitting individuals for such a world. The internal consistency is the primary focus. The decisions of the character are based upon what that individual would want rather than the player, in this sense the character is treated as a completely separate entity rather than an extension of the player.

The creator of this model of role-playing specification has discarded it in favour of something called the Big model, I will look into the big model, however I believe there is a lot to be derived from this analysis of why people play role-playing games.