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It used to be part of my job (self-employed) to advocate for the Big Model’s terms. I never chased people around the internet and corrected their usage, an impossible task, but when people came to my spaces, I took pains to make sure we all used the terms correctly.

In my spaces now, I prefer not to use the terms, because I don’t want to sit here and correct people’s usage all the time. They still come up, though. If we want to talk about rpgs with any reference to their history — rpgs in general today, and especially my and our games in particular — there’s no way to do it without reference to GNS and the Big Model.

So here’s a quick retrospective. This is my take today, 15–20 years later, on these topics.

Previously: Revisiting Task & Conflict Resolution

Briefly, the Terms

“GNS” stands for “gamism,” “narrativism,” and “simulationism.”

We discussed them a lot at the Forge, which was a webforum for indie ttrpg creators back in like 2001–2012. They were the core of a larger body of ideas called the “Big Model.”

Ron Edwards coined the term “narrativism.”

“Gamism” and “simulationism” were terms borrowed (and yep, misapplied) from earlier discussions on rec.game.frp.advocacy, a usenet discussion group in the mid and late 90s. I don’t know exactly who coined them or whether they were in use before then. With “dramatism,” a term the Big Model didn’t use, they were the core of “the RGFA Threefold,” a body of ideas that the Big Model thought to build on and/or replace.

Narrativism

I think that the best way to understand narrativism is as a big, long-running game jam.

At the Forge, we thought that narrativism was its own kind of game, it’s own kind of gameplay, but I don’t think that’s true anymore. What’s true is that narrativism is a thing that games and gameplay can do.

For example, I really like games where you make a commitment on incomplete information, get the rest of the information you need, and try to make the best of it, or at least see now how your commitment plays out. Roborally does this, Diplomacy does it, my board game The Abductinators does it, Burning Wheel’s combat system does it. A million games do it. A million other games don’t.

We could give this thing a name for easy reference (“guess & script,” say), but it isn’t its own separate kind of game, it’s just a thing that you can do in a game. A dynamic that games can include.

Same thing with narrativism. Here’s the dynamic that narrativism refers to:

1. The PCs have vision, self-interests, best interests, passion, an ideological commitment: something they want and care about. Lajos Egri says “passionate.”

2. Their passions put them in conflict with others — other PCs or other NPCs, it doesn’t matter. Their passions oppose others’, threaten others’ interests, provoke others into passionate reaction.

3. Both the PCs and their counterparts are equipped to pursue their passions in conflict. Egri says “fit.” They’re physically equipped, emotionally equipped, morally equipped; they have skills, tools, initiative, stamina, followthrough, staying power.

4. Nobody pre-plans how it’s going to turn out. The characters are passionate, conflicted, and fit; now turn them lose. Play to let them pursue their passions. Play to find out how far they go, how they escalate, who comes out on top, who compromises, what they win, what it costs, what they prioritize, what they abandon. The only way to know how it plays out, is to play it out!

That’s narrativism, nothing else.

At the Forge, we’d all played narrativist before the term existed, just by arranging our games — often accidentally or unintentionally — to play that way. We’d enjoyed those games and we generally wanted more of them.

So the narrativist movement, the jam, was like: “here’s a cool, fun thing that games can do. Let’s make games that do it! Let’s play them and talk about them!” “Yes, let’s!” So we did.

A lot of the accidental details of the games we made came to be associated with narrativism, wrongly.

For instance, narrativism requires the GM not to plan out a storyline in advance, but people have come to associate it with various forms of player empowerment beyond that. Player narration, crossing John Harper’s line, “director stance” or “writer’s room” play, whatever. Some narrativist games use those techniques but narrativism itself doesn’t require them or refer to them.

Anyway now, in 2025, I don’t think that narrativism is a kind of game anymore. I think it’s a fun thing that a game can do. But: it’s real, it’s a dynamic that definitely exists in some games and definitely doesn’t exist in others. We can recognize it when we see it, seek it out, and do it when we want to.

It’s a dynamic that exists in all of my games from Dogs in the Vineyard (2004) to Apocalypse World (2010). This is because I made them for the jam!

I’m not really doing the jam anymore, but I still enjoy making and playing games that work that way sometimes. It’s a dynamic that still appears in some of my games, even while I’m happily exploring others.

Not Narrativism

To deal with the next couple of ideas, I think we need a working example of a game dynamic that isn’t narrativist. Let’s use the one in Murderous Ghosts:

• The character’s a cool and likeable stand-in for the players, not necessarily passionate and driven. Once the game’s underway, they have no vision or motivation but escape.

• The character’s not caught in a conflict of interests, exactly, or not necessarily. They’re in a dangerous situation that’s over their head, trying to survive.

• They’re not “fit.” If they escalate against the ghosts they’ll lose, we all know this. We aren’t playing to find out who they are, what they’ll sacrifice, where they draw the line, what it’ll cost them. We’re playing to find out only if they can get out of here alive.

If we entertain Egri’s theory of stories, playing Murderous Ghosts doesn’t give us one. And indeed, playing Murderous Ghosts is fun and exciting in its own right, but it’s not satisfying in the same way a compelling story game is. People who go into it expecting a literary or even a folk ghost story are often pretty disappointed by it. What you get instead is a quick, tense little nightmare of simple action, shallow or nonexistent character, unclear motivations, and unanswered mysteries, with (usually) an anticlimactic death cutting it abruptly off.

So: a good example of not a narrativist dynamic.

Murderous Ghosts threw off some of my narrativist colleagues pretty bad. It was my first non-narrativist game, arguably; certainly my first since 2001. It had some of the hallmarks of a narrativist game — an escalating situation, no pre-planning — and the genre trappings we narrativists had come to love. It even says PbtA on the back cover!

But they just couldn’t get it to play narrativist. They tried and tried.

They couldn’t figure out how I’d so badly bungled the design and how poorly I suddenly understood the brief!

I don’t have any grudge about this, I mention it just to reinforce: a good example of a non-narrativist dynamic.

Gamism & Simulationism

We thought that narrativism represented it’s own whole kind of rpg, which meant that there must be other kinds of rpgs too. Gamism & simulationism were our notions for what those other kinds of games must be.

Gamist rpgs would be games you play to win, achieve some kind of victory, or show your mettle as a player, like in normal games, I guess, like Twilight Imperium, Dodgeball, or Tetris. Simulationist rpgs would be games you play to examine your subject matter in depth, whether your subject matter is a fictional world, a fictional character, or the simulative model of your rules.

Something like that. Because gamism and simulationism never had their own long-running design & play jams like narrativism did, they were never anything but notional. Nobody ever laid down a good workable spec.

It’s tempting to look at Murderous Ghosts’ non-narrativist workings and say, “if it’s not narrativist, then aha, it must be gamist or simulationist. Which?”

But you and I could put our heads together and come up with interesting game dynamics all day long, limited only by our inventiveness as creators. Narrativism is exactly one of them. We’re supposed to divide the rest between gamism and simulationism? Why?

No, I don’t think that we should expect gamism and simulationism to mean anything at all, just because narrativism does.

That is — the gamism and simulationism of the Big Model. The terms gamism and simulationism were originally coined on rec.games.frp.advocacy back in the 90s, along with a term the Big Model didn’t adopt, dramatism. My vote would be to return them whole and outright. In the RGFA Threefold, they mean pretty much what you think they mean. We could forget that the Big Model ever seized on them:

Whenever you see the idea that gamism, simulationism, and “narrativism” (that is, dramatism) are spectrums, or that you might make a gamist decision in a sea of simulationist decisions, or that a game’s mechanics or subsystems can be broken down into their gamist, simulationist, or “narrativist” (dramatist) components, those ideas hearken back to the RGFA Threefold.

Incompatible Creative Agendas

The Big Model took the line that narrativism, gamism, and simulationism are mutually incompatible. When you play, you’re doing at most one of them, never two, never all three.

A lot of people had a lot of trouble with this. “Absurd!” they said. “I do two or all three of them all the time!”

Now anymore, I don’t think that gamism and simulationism mean anything, so saying that they’re mutually incompatible doesn’t mean anything either.

But look at the dynamic that narrativism represents. Compare it with the dynamic from Murderous Ghosts. For a single character, in a single situation, in a single game? They actually are mutually incompatible. Your character can’t really be passionate and not passionate, locked in conflict and not locked in conflict, fit and unfit at the same time. The GM can’t both pre-plan a storyline and not pre-plan one.

Say that you, the player, think that we’re playing narrativist, so you’ve got your passionate, fit character all ready to go, eager to escalate conflicts, draw lines, find out who you are, what you stand for, and how far you’ll go. But I, the GM, am going for a different dynamic in the game, so I’ve pre-planned a storyline with a big boss NPC you can’t defeat until the 3rd act. I think you can see where that’ll be frustrating for both of us.

So I can see where the Big Model was coming from.

The Big Model called it “creative agenda clash,” and said that it can ruin games. I think it’s just regular old creative differences — which can ruin games.

Thanks For Reading

As always, it’s my pleasure to answer questions. If you have any, please ask!

PS: Some Other Named Game Dynamics

Here’s my always-favorite, Sandra Snan’s Blorb Principles.

Here’s a manifesto by Sam Sorensen: New Simulationism. In it, he describes an interesting dynamic that rpgs can have.

Here’s a piece by Eero Tuovinen: Observations on GNS Simulationism. In it, he describes, not one, not two, but five interesting dynamics that rpgs can have. (In support of one of my points above, note that they aren’t compatible with each other, but GNS simulationism is nevertheless supposed to include them all.)

Any of these could, cultivated by motivated fans, form the basis of a long-running design- and/or play jam. Maybe some of them are already doing it. Maybe Blorb!