Yeah, now in fairness its also because i've seen the use of those categories and they very much seem to be mostly made to APPLY them to people to explain why they don't agree with someone or don't like a system rather than as a genuine want to categorize things.

Its the assumption that a game either focuses on the story, or on playing well, or on feeling "real" that gets me really, a lot of games do a lot of all of that, in different ways, I do also think its just focused on rulesets doing one thing at a time and not more and that's a limiting view of it

Like an example is Outgunned, which people online love to call a narrative game/narrativist, and while it focuses on narrative (and to be honest, most games do, they just do so through different means) the dice reroll mechanic makes you think in terms of odds of doing better, in a very gamey way

its multilayered but the bigger one is arguably that it creates barriers between all of those like a game has to be one or the others, often some details about games are just kinda erased for these clarifications to work, like how systems definitely bounce back and forth on the mindset you need

I shit you not I once saw a blogpost with like "the gameist player prefers hard rules over imagination" and "the narrativist player doesn't like reading the rulebook" and its like come on man.

"This game is simulationist because it includes rules for hunger" what are we doing here.

Listen I understand that for some people its easier to imagine the world in this nice little cozy place where you can sort through people in broad categories with simple labels; but like in practice that VERY often falls apart and quickly ends up not being accurate

All of these blogposts and thinkpieces trying to categorize players in these convenient groups always feel like they're trying to categorize above being accurate, beyond play patterns I think looking at systems someone enjoys and going "yeah you're a gameist" is just weird tbh

"I wonder what's going over on twitter"
How its going on twitter:

yoooooooo i'd love your perspective on it for sure!

Can you miss once?????

Good shit

if you're curious about my game, find out more about it here!
eldjester.itch.io/soar-shirtle...

This one is an npc, so the joke is on you, the GM gets to use aftershock