Hey, Brantai -- Sorry for the wait. I've been starting a new job, finding a new apartment, all the bullshit of moving to a new city.
Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulationism are three types of Creative Agenda, in Big Model terms.
Basically, they are three totally different activities that someone might mean when they talk about playing a role-playing game. These are totally different and seperate activities. This isn't a difference in "play style" nor is it a matter of the imagined content of the game. We're talking about the real people sitting around the table, and what sort of activity they're engaged in.
For specifics, I'm going to quote from an essay I wrote, if you don't mind.
Basically, GNS seperates out into three different broad categories the things that players mean by "play a role-playing game." This is emphatically not about the fictional level of play at all rather (”I like combat” is not a GNS-level preference), it is about the interactions between the players, the actual activities of the human beings playing the game. What GNS says is that, when people talk about playing role-playing games, they are actually talking about a wide variety of activities at this human level. So, without further ado, let’s give a brief introduction to each of these three activities. (The links are links to Ron’s long essays about each activity.)
Gamism is an activity where the participants show off their guts, tactical thinking, drive and luck, and gain social esteem for doing these things well. It is comparable to activities such as card games, board games, sports, or car racing.
Narrativism is an activity where the participants make a story which is personally affecting, and gain social esteem for contributing to the story in impressive and thematic manners. It is comparable to activities such as theatre, poetry slams, freestyle (multi-participant) rap, shared stories, and writer’s workshops which aren’t publication focused.
Simulationism is an activity where the participants revel in another place, another time, or another world, and gain social esteem from contributing to the sense of place, whether from reiteration of canonical details or from whole-cloth creation being a matter of local taste. It is comparable to activities such as historical re-enactment, model rail-roading, or many fandoms, especially science fiction fandoms such as Star Wars and Star Trek.
It’s pretty clear that these are dramatically different and generally incompatible activities. If I show up and try to strategize a writer’s workshop, or to get a coherent and dramatic story out of a bridge game, or play insist on playing Risk with historical Napeleonic empires, I am clearly just being clueless at best and willfully disruptive at worst.
And, I know the question that comes next, so I'll just prepare an answer to it right away.
yrs--
--Ben