I've seen some rumblings around corners of tabletop RPG discussion areas of the Internet of some renewed discussion of Forge Theory, and even “Creative Agenda” or “GNS”. This was always the most controversial element of Forge Theory, and in my opinion has never been adequately defined in a usable way. However, I think this is potentially the most useful part of Forge Theory, because like a scientific theory it gets close to making a falsifiable prediction: games played with a coherent Creative Agenda are more fun than games played with an incoherent Creative Agenda.

Coherent theory?

The difficulty with Forge Theory has frequently been the toxicity of the conversation around it. The terms and concepts are not nailed down neatly anywhere, and the people who can state with authority what is or isn't said by the theory tend to avoid answering clarifying questions. As such it creates something of an impediment to conversation: Forge Theory casts a long shadow over present-day RPG Theory discussions, but most people can't quite make out what the thing casting the shadow actually is, and through negative reinforcement most people have learned that it's better to just stay away from RPG Theory talk altogether. This is frustrating for me, since I think there are some potentially good ideas in Forge Theory, mixed in with a lot of cruft, poorly chosen terminology, Internet arguments frozen in amber, and maybe some bad ideas as well.

Rather than play the perpetual guessing game of trying to figure out what old Forgies meant with their Creative Agenda ideas (or Gamism / Narrativism / Simulationism or the rebranded “Step on Up”, “Story Now”, and “Simulationism”), I'm going to present what I think would be a potentially useful concept that seems to be in the same ballpark as what they were talking about. First, it's important to not get hung up on any Forge Jargon terms – remember that any or all of them could have been very poorly chosen, so extrapolating from the plain-English meaning of these words is potentially a recipe for confusion.

Creative Agendas are families of System-in-action

What The Forge calls System most people in non-RPG fields would probably call “game”, but The Forge created the term System so that people wouldn't make the assumption that the only thing that matters to an operating RPG are the words printed in books. So a “System in action” is what most people would think of as “a game being played”, with the added understanding that there might be a lot of “unwritten rules”, “cultural practices”, etc., contributing to how that game actually works when played by a particular group in a particular session. Systems aren't just parts lists. In any area of life, the way the parts interact is often a fundamentally important part of understanding how the system works. If you were handed a set of parts you might be able to assemble them in a number of different ways to build different things that work very differently when used.

In the analogy in my illustration, I'm presenting a set of “parts” that can be arranged into three largely incompatible structures: a tampoline, a tent, and a hangglider. The way parts are used in some of those structures would actively interfere with some of the others – having a central support pole is often a good idea in a tent, it would be a disaster on a trampoline. This gets to the incompatibility or incoherence argument of Forge Theory, best illustrated by the “parable of the pigs” – if we're trying to cooperate with the same parts but you're trying to launch what you think is a hangglider while I'm trying to stake down what I think is a tent we're probably not going to be working well together.

Not a personality test

One of the problems of GNS theory is that it originally seemed to be a “personality typing” mechanism for figuring out what sort of thing you wanted out of a game. But the arrangement-of-parts understanding makes it clear that different arrangements can work for most people if you get on the same page. Even if my “natural instinct” is to see the parts as part of a tent I might be able to see how they can work as a hangglider if prompted to look at things a different way (although if I don't like heights I may not want to ride the hangglider even if I can see how it's supposed to work). CA isn't supposed to be a way to tell “hangglider people” apart from “tent people”, it's about telling hanggliders apart from tents (which is useful to be able to do if you love one and hate the other, or also useful if think they're both great just not two things you can use simultaneously).

Families

If you think of the universe of all possible arrangements of “RPG parts”, some of them would be similar enough to each other that understanding one would give you a lot of insight into the other, but some would be different enough that not a lot of insight transfers. By analogy, consider that a biologist's understanding of how one type of bird flies probably gives them a lot of insight into how other birds fly, but might not tell them too much about how insects fly. We can think of the things which are similar as working like “families”, they're kind of clustered together around some common principles. So in this way of thinking there would be something deeply similar about the way games in the same “Creative Agenda” family operate, probably down at the level that a video game theorist would call the “core loop”, because that's where the core of the fun of playing a game happens and CA's predictions are fun-related.

So are G, N, and S real?

So that was a lot of explanation about how I think it's a reasonable hypothesis that there might be “families” of RPGs-as-played (it's important to think of them in terms of how they're actually played, because of the possibility that some RPGs work like “kits” where you sort of apply some central organizing principles to the game that aren't explicitly spelled out within it, and someone else might be able to apply other organizing principles – the “same game” played differently is really a different game). Does that mean I believe they exist and that Gamism/StepOnUp, Narrativism/StoryNow, and Simulationism/RightToDream are them? I'm not sure. Sometimes the distinctions I think I see between these supposed categories seem pretty stark to me, other times they blur together. This gets to the “common language” problem of The Forge – there's a significant element of “you know it when you see it”-ism with respect to the CAs and no canonical examples, so maybe I haven't seen them and am misinformedly projecting my own experiences onto CAs that are truly alien to me, or maybe I've got as good a handle on things as any old Forgie ever did. Maybe the “clusters” that GNS claims to identify aren't different enough to be clusters, maybe the clusters exist but it's a historical accident and the spaces between them could be filled up just as functionally. Or maybe the Forge CAs were/are useful but the good ideas got buried under so many annoying internet arguments that it's not worth trying to dig them out due to all the toxic dust that gets kicked up.