The Flaws With the Big Model

The Big Model attempts to contextualize the many different aspects of the role-playing game hobby in a set of meaningful, hierarchical relationships by organising these phenomena into four nested 'boxes'. The contents of each inner box are considered to be within the aegis of the outer box. A "skewer" that thrusts through the set of boxes identifies creative agenda.

The smallest box contains Ephemera, the actual events and statements made at the table; these are instances of Techniques, which are governing practices of behavior. Techniques are how players perform Exploration, the basic act of roleplaying, and Exploration is itself an expression of the Social Contract. The Creative Agenda is a pervasive concept that pierces through all four boxes, 'fixing' the mode of play in place.

Or to put it in simpler terms, a group of friends gets together (Social Contract) and decides to play a roleplaying game about a subject they find interesting (Exploration). They use a set of rules (Techniques) to do things in the game (Ephemera). The decisions that they make in terms of what things to explore and how to explore them compose their Creative Agenda.

Now that you have a bare-bones basic understanding of what we're talking about, let's talk criticism.

Agenda is Personality Profiling.

The big model absorbed previous RPG philosophies, and is descended from the Threefold model and GNS theory, which describes the primary objectives of players as being easily identified into 3 categories. Although threefold and its descendents always try to make a point that this isn't about typing players...

...it's completely and totally about typing players.

The giveaway is mutual exclusivity. In threefold and its descendants, there is a persisting axiom, which declares that the different player agendas, (the player types) are mutually exclusive, and that conflicts at the table are ultimately due to incompatibilities between the player agendas at the table. In effect, they are saying gamists do not get along with narrativists, and neither of them get along with simulationists, and vice-versa.

At least Ron Edwards gives the opinion that a person's agenda is at least flexible and can change over time, even within a single game session. In this regard, he is more open-minded than those who preceded him.

The problem is that the player agendas are NOT mutually exclusive. 

Contemporary practices of game-mastering have revealed that almost all problems that manifest at the table are due to immaturity, irresponsibility, poor social skills, and inappropriate behavior. Agenda has nothing to do with it! Furthermore, most people who read the agendas immediately react with the attitude that they value all three agendas, and some can't even prioritize any one as being more important than any other.

In essence, this is yet more of the same type of thinking as the Bartle player typology, or the Myers Briggs test. It's personality profiling. It has no place in modern philosophy.

The biggest downfall here, however, is the elitism that is inherent in the definitions of the agendas. The original threefold model idealized simulationism as being the purpose of roleplaying games, and characterized the other two types as people who are looking for something unrelated to the roleplay experience. Meanwhile, the big model redefines the agendas slightly to emphasize narrativism as the purpose of roleplay, redefining simulationism as a form of irresponsible escapism, and gamism as the activity of aggressive, selfish jerks. The fact that the definitions of the agenda ascribe personality traits in addition to their gameplay implications reveals their true nature:

Player agendas are gamer snobbery; a form of bullying.

To really drive that point home, in 2000 WOTC put together a market research survey. They reverse-engineered the results of that survey to identify actual groupings of people based on their interests, statistically speaking. Their results do not match the three-fold model.

Here is the results of their research, and here is some commentary on it.

Now, even that form of profiling is prone to problems. (Mistaking a pattern for having a meaning, and also categorizes one group as "thinking" which implies that the rest do not think.) ...but at least it's based on something more tangible than some dude's opinions.

Disconnected from Game Design Theory

My personal primary complaint against the big model, however, its that it is isolated and inbred. It is the back-waters hillbilly of game design theory. See, The Big Model was built almost entirely by Ron Edwards, based on him bouncing ideas off of a forum of people he manipulated into social captivity for several years in the early 2000s. Once he was done designing his opus magnum, he shut down the forum.

Ron Edwards is not a game designer. Aside from his work on the big model, he has no experience in the game design industry. As such, he has an audience's perspective, which has lead to the big model lacking something important: practicality.

Compare this to the work of actual game designers who engage in game design theory, such as the folks at Extra Credits, who make genuine contributions to philosophical examination of game design as a whole. They have built formulae that can be used to calculate the consequences of randomness on player engagement. They discuss how design philosophies in engineering and the arts may apply to game design. They say things that can be used.

The big model is devoid of any of this. It has no engagement with the larger field of game design theory, and evolved largely in isolation of it. What the big model DOES provide us with is a large lexicon of specific terminology that can enable us to discuss the subject of formal RPG design in technical terms. I believe game design theory as a whole could benefit greatly by incorporating this terminology and examining the RPG sphere with the same scrutiny that they treat the other game media.

Loaded Technical Jargon

While I praise the big model for expanding our game design lexicon, there is one problem...

The terminology is often inappropriate.

In order to insult design elements he felt were inferior, Ron used arbitrarily loaded language as his technical terms, giving them specific definitions well outside of their colloquial usage. This enabled him to say some pretty impolite things about certain games and certain communities within the hobby, and defend it by saying he's speaking on a theoretical level.

For a perfect example, he defined "incoherent" as any game with split agenda focus. His recurrent negative example is Dungeons & Dragons. Let me lay down some facts for you.

1. To this day, D&D is the single most popular RPG for sale.
2. D&D is also the longest running RPG franchise in the industry.
3. D&D, and peoples reaction to it, is the primary driving force in the RPG industry.

The only thing "incoherent" is that Ron Edwards doesn't understand why an RPG would focus on anything other than the story. In other words, it is only incoherent to him.