Actually, while I hold PS:T in great esteem, I'd say it failed at being a *computer* RPG.
Pretty much all this game had to offer to a player could be just as easily conveyed by CYOA book, character sheet, some illustrations and an audio player.
All the remaining stuff boiled down to:
-annoying running around simulator.
-annoying and shitty IE combat.
-impressive, but primitive animations.
The last one was noninteractive and could be supplanted by adding a video player to our list of PS:T playing provisions. No computer necessary.
Well, if you think this is important, I do agree that there is little computational power needed to make te RPG elements of PS:T run. And I guess you could consider whether this is the case for different games and classify them according. But wherever they end up in the scale, all computer RPGs, Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and what not share the property they are games based on the principles of role playing games and that they are played alone. Of this set of games, PS:T comes closest to providing a narrativist experience, I think.
Indeed, but RL also doesn't understand a story, yet it doesn't prevent it from being the greatest source of them.
Our minds evolved to make sense of events in the context of our environments and other events. We naturally craft stories out of series of events bound by RL logic and even invented stories featuring completely fantastic settings tend to feature very similar kind of logic. If computer can to some extent run even a crude and coarse simulation of such logic, then it won't have to understand what makes a story - it will be the player, who will act, react, and make stories out of ensuing events.
That would certainly be nice, but this mode of game only works if your creative agenda is simulationistic. There was a lot of muddkling of the terms, but sim,nar and gamm are about what kind of narrative you want out of the game. I use the term narrative here for two reasons. First, a real story, the kind you will read in a fiction book, with a beginning, middle, and end, that goes somewhere, with a theme, a crescendo and a climax. All that stuff, not all RPGs want that kind of thing. Making this kind of story, together, between the players (the GM counts as a player here) is the objective of narrativists. But other kinds of game are about different types of narrative. A gamist narrative is instead about impacting each other. Making up the most scary monster you can think to the other player and let him interact with it, or coming up with the smartest plan you can think, etc.
This brings me to the second reason I use this word: narrative isn't at all about the static written story one could gleam from a gaming session. I played V:tM today this morning, and I suppose I could have transcribed all kinds of stuff that happened during the game. But that wouldn't be its narrative. The narrative is what is going on during the game. the back and forth between the players creating an imaginary world, with scenes, characters and what not. It is an intrinsically interactive thing, where everyone gets to contribute.
The reason I am stretching this point is because narrativist players wouldn't have much fun with a system that simulated life. Such a system would be extremely hard to manipulate into generating the kind of story you would want. Instead, a much more important aspect of what kind of stories it would create wold be the rules underneath its simulation. Maybe those rules are very inspired in such way that the resulting stories look like Mr. Tolkien's stories (say, like the Hobbit or the Adventures of Tom Bombadil). Maybe the rules would make stories much more like real life. But in the end, the player wouldn't have much control about how the story goes. Is his PC a protagonist? Is he a villain? Is his story arc about the strength of love against apathy? It could be... or it could be something completely different. Choosing this stuff and then telling story with your character, as story that is somehow understood and built upon by the other players, is the core of narrativism.
This is kind of a problem with computers and any other kind of static media. The game designer can only try to guess what kind of story one might want to tell with his character in the game, and of course, there are thousands of different stories that are left out. I say PS:T came closest to be a nar RPG not because it could be done like a visual novel (which I disagree, as doing so would take a lot of the control of TNO from the hands of the players) or because it had so much text, but because you got to choose, in a very small way, who TNO ws in the story. Was he a repenting villain? An asshole with a heart of gold? Did he care about Morte? Annah? They were small choices, but they worked and the game recognized them. By the way, I think AP tried to do something similar, but took away too much of the control the player has over his PC. The result there is, indeed, more similar to a visual novel, I think.
This said, I wonder what makes narrativist-gamists tick? I understand the point of gamism and simulationism. I think I know what narrativism is about too. I fully understand both the interests of gamist-simulationists and narrativist-simulationists, but what the fuck are narrativist-gamists interested in?
As represented in the diagram above, what do they want from their games?
Any NGs here who could clue me in?
I don't really know. What I know about forge GNS doesn't really have hybrids. You are either playing in one mode or in other, even if you use certain tools usually associated with the others to get to your creative agenda. According to traditional GNS (or how it appears in the big model, if you want to split hairs), both of what you call g-s and n-s are simply different simulationist goals.
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