challenge, legible skill-testing, drama, narrative structure
So previously I've said that one nice thing about simulationist roleplay - more specifically, simulationist roleplay of someone who wants something that's hard for them to get - is that it naturally produces ludic and narrative pleasures, since both games and stories are fundamentally about agents attempting to get things.
Relatedly, Sam Sorenson - whose own theses on simulationism I endorse - expressed some thoughts on the 3d space into which he mentally categorizes games - problem-solving vs storytelling, authorial power, rules vs world. The following are some thoughts on that first axis.
what pretending to be someone who wants things gets you
Pretending to be someone who wants things, in a blorby pretended world with its own causal logic, organically produces challenge - scenarios where there's a wide spectrum of actions where creative, logical thinking can (maybe) get to those goals. The situation presents interesting puzzles that engage your capacities. (C Thi Nguyen calls the pleasure of having to use your full ability to do a thing "harmony of capacity.")
And pretending to be someone who wants things, in a cleeshy way, organically produces drama - the various pleasures we get from observing someone's emotions as they don't get what they want, or try to get what they want, or feel differently about what they wanted once they actually get it, and so on.
But you do not organically get two important things related to these that are typically pursued by traditional games, or by linear media, and these additional things really cannot be achieved without a significant cost to cleesh.
Most tradiitonal game design does not just seek to achieve challenge but legible skill-testing; the idea that you will have a fair chance to win and that this will be based on skillful play. Organically many situations will be cakewalks or functionally impossible, and you cannot to the same degree brag about the results, or get the kind of rapid, accurate feedback that produces both dopamine hits and meaningful skill growth. If someone is a top-ranked poker or chess or Battlepoint: Tactical Ops 2017 Madden Edition player, you can be sure they're pretty fucking good at it.
Likewise, most linear fiction tries to conform to narrative structure. This can be as depressingly strict as Save the Cat or just a general sense that major dramatic questions, happily or unhappily, be resolved in a satisfying way. Knowing how things turn out, you can do really fun things with it; almost every episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm has a punchline tying everything together in a bow (which would certainly not happen organically); in the most recent series of White Lotus (rot13) n zna frgf bhg gb xvyy gur zna jub xvyyrq uvf sngure; haorxabja gb uvz, uvf sngure vf nyvir (naq n cvrpr bs fuvg.) Uvf ybj-vag uvtu-jvf tveysevraq ortf uvz, ubarl, guvf dhrfg sbe iratnapr vf tbvat gb qrfgebl lbh, yrnea gb sbetvir, ohg ur ershfrf. Ur zvfgnxrayl pbzrf gb gur oryvrs gung gur nsberzragvbarq zna, uvf npghny sngure, vf uvf (vzntvarq vqrnyvmrq) sngure'f xvyyre, naq va gur ynfg rcvfbqr fubbgf uvz qrnq, pnhfvat uvf abj qrnq sngure'f obqlthneqf gb zbj uvz qbja va n fubjre bs ohyyrgf. Pbatenghyngvbaf qhqr! Lbh fhpprffshyyl npuvrirq gur qrngu bs gur zna jub xvyyrq lbhe sngure!
Legible skill-testing and plot structure are similar in that they are a situation where results can be traced back to choices. Fiction has been called "life with the boring bits left out," this can be true of a certain kind of fiction, but life minus the boring bits, while almost definitionally full of drama and challenge, is too full of messiness and caprice to reliably produce LST and plot structure. Those two things require sanding down the messiness until causality becomes much more directly observable. But such messiness and caprice (perhaps because of this) is precisely - at any rate precisely to me - what most makes the quality of real life different from the quality of most representational media. Hence how they tend to cleesh-clash.
So there are a number of ways you can some of cleesh, challenge, LST, drama, narrative structure.
As noted, you have most traditional games (prioritizing challenge and LST) and most linear narratives (prioritizing drama and ploticity). Notably I think each of these have "hollow" qlippothic forms - you can have a with LST but no challenge (flappy bird) and a formulaic Hollywood movie with plot structure but no drama.
You can have an organic simulation (high potential for cleesh, challenge, and drama; weak potential for LST or ploticity). This includes tabletop roleplay of the type I've been discussing here, but also some computer games, such as Paradox grand strategy or Dwarf Fortress. These are in many ways "life with the boring bits left out," although note that these frequently leave boring bits in, on bets that they might be interesting later.
And a lot of AAA videogames take a hybrid approach, with a linear story (or story with some feasible number of branches) and a challenging game alternating between each other. (Something that I think made Skyrim so enduringly popular is that, much like dnd or mtg, there are so many different ways to play it; there's a main linear narrative and a bunch of additional linear narratives and especially with modding you could really make it a big messy simulation.)
what is the Sorensonian problem-solving vs story-telling axis?
Sam notes as I have that "play oriented around problem-solving will eventually result in a story, just as any other sort of RPG play will; likewise, play oriented around storytelling will also very likely involve some degree of problems to be solved, because facing challenges is baked into nearly all forms of stories" but ultimately says:
But, at every single table I’ve ever run or played at, somebody eventually has to make the call to go one way or the other, towards drama or towards efficiency. The question is not about whether or not storytelling or problem-solving exist at all, since both exist at almost every table, but rather which takes priority.
This is in some sense weak beer; every potential good can hypothetically trade off against each other. Of course, this may be the tradeoff you find most salient! Is this a tradeoff that has a systematic nature to it, or is it just two goods that are in imperfect alignment?
Relatedly, having violently asserted my own ontology, is there benefit to forcing Sam's into it?
I think, really, that there are two systematic tradeoffs here. The first is between challenge and ploticity, and comes in at the level of player (including GM) approach in play. The second is between challenge and drama, and comes in at the level of the pretend person in their pretend situation.
challenge vs plot structure
There are a lot of ways for a GM to put her thumb on the wheel, especially if she hasn't meditated on the seventy-seven names of blorb. All the various railroading tricks, quantum ogres, and so on can be used to increase the narrative efficiency of the table - the proportion of time spent on what is dramatically interesting, and the proportion of dramatically interesting questions that are resolved in a satisfying way.
(The sin of illusionism comes from a kind of misplaced generosity of GMs. They want to gift the players "you are fighting an orc warband, which is dangerous and exciting" without running the risk of "you die from a random orc arrow before you resolve whether to betray your liege or not." But this is a real tradeoff!)
Likewise, a player might have a way to resolve the situation, but in a way that they worry is boring; they could dynamite the tower rather than breaking and entering, or whatever, and do the latter.
Now I, personally, actually find this dissatisfying even in linear narratives, in fact one of the main skills in composing a linear narrative is nicely teeing things up so that at any given point, characters are pursuing their goals as best they know how, if a character is going to pursue her goal inefficiently or incompetently, this is for cause of her temperament or flaws in reasoning that have been previously established.
challenge vs drama
I think this is basically about the degree to which people have complex goals, not whether they are really attempting to pursue them.
If characters have very simple goals, then the focus tends to be on questions of "how are they going to effectively achieve this clear goal?" Very simple goals also have the advantage, if this is an advantage (as it is for most tables most of the time!) of making it easy for the members of the "adventuring party" to have goals that are aligned with each other and reducing pvp elements.
When characters have more complex goals, the focus tends to be on questions of "which of my goals am I going to pursue?" This brings more attention to interiority, more possibility for pvp, and so on.
Personally I'm pretty happy with almost all parts of this spectrum, as long as there's at least a bit of complexity. :)