Looking back on '06
Well, I've had an interesting year as a gamer. I started a small games company (Mob United Media) which has made me a few thousand dollars, following its business plan without any spectacular pretenses. I've played in or ran a whole bunch of games, from several original games using house systems to D&D and the World of Darkness. I got a bunch of contracts done and topped off the year with a contract for an entirely new project (that I can't discuss, unfortunately. It's electronic, it's not targeted at gamers and it involves some fairly revolutionary ideas). Lastly, I have two original games on my plate that I'll be developing instead of writing, fulfilling my interest in promoting creator owned talent.
2006 was my first full year of full time game writing and design. In previous years writing made up a significant proportion of my income, but it was always supplemented with other money. I was in a good position to ease into my current work and haven't been confronted by any particular shocks.
But the year wasn't free of disappointments. I still find much of the so-called "gaming community" (very little of which is actually based around playing games, now more than ever) disappointing. By and large, 2006 was a year characterized by intellectual cowardice. Various communities that talked big about theory, craft and shared practice were really fronts for people to be "safe." Levi Kornelsen's GameCraft established itself as yet another forum for useless backslapping after the tradition of Story Games.
What's missing is a place where people neither engage in ad hominems nor are protected from straight-shooting critique that isn't an ad hominem. This is difficult because you have people who have identified with their own ideas so strongly that they consider any challenge to them to be a personal insult. The refusal of these people to grow the fuck up (that *is* an ad hominem, by the way) is a big problem. I expect I'll have to create some kind of community myself, but I'm not sure what format it will take.
On a personal level, I didn't do as much play outside my immediate group as I wanted to. I did get some research done at a couple of conventions but I didn't get as much chance to play games at them. Then again, that kind of play is about 50% work-related, as my weekly gaming schedule is pretty full as it is.
As for new games, my notable purchases were Promethean, True20, Savage Worlds, Truth and Justice and The Burning Wheel.
This year has seen its share of iffy trends and ideas. One of them is the way Internet discourse has influenced game design. Having given it some thought over the past couple of years, I think this is one of the key unacknowledged forces behind design trends. The Internet rewards superficial novelty (picking the coolness out of the forest of text), brevity and rapid comprehension (KISS). This is the medium that invented "tl;dr." Many, many indie games feel designed around the reward cycle gained by having people talk about the game on forums, blogs and so on. Don't they tend to follow a single core concept to an extreme? Don't many of them revolve around a kind of elevator pitch, precis-or-nothing idea? Isn't there an antipathy for games that take time and effort to get comfortable with? There are exceptions (The Burning Wheel's an example), but it seems to me that these games are not really accessible for the sake of a tabletop group, but for the sake of posting about them in fora. But your comfort in posting about an RPG on the Internet is not an indication of its quality.
Anyway, we also got into "brain damage," which was Ron Edwards' borrowing of sociobiological rhetoric for gaming. Many gamers are giving Ron a pass on this as some kind of metaphor, but he's made it clear he believes it's literally true and I figure he's following a doctrine of neural Darwinism in doing so. What he has not done, however, is identified what a story is in a sociobiological context, which makes his critique kind of halfassed, even within its own rules. So Ron would do well to give the whole "just so story" on the sociobiology of the Big Model, or else it's just the arbitrary invention I believe it to be -- but *by his own standards.*
Moving from this, we've seen trends (over several years, not just 2006) in two directions, both of which harness the media utility fallacy. The first is to create games that substantially show the influence of computer games for the sake of garnering interest and ease of comprehension. D&D was like this and now, Exalted is very much like this. Story games are in fact starting to resemble traditional storytelling more and more -- that's positive in a sense, because it's a conscious mission accomplished. But the media utility fallacy is what you get when you argue for one medium using another, more popular medium. You end up with is an excellent argument for the *other* medium. The more D&D resembles WoW, the more people should play WoW, not D&D. A story game that uses stock phrases to construct a story is a great gateway to getting involved in oral storytelling, but not for using an RPG for this purpose.
It's now my opinion that "storytelling" (first WW and now the Forge), and "adventure gaming" (a term invented to distance D&D from RPGs) are both category errors founded in marketing and pretense. It is now *obvious* that recreational roleplaying is a distinct activity and not a sub-activity of wargaming, storytelling, etc. Roleplaying is even a mainstream activity now.
But the thing that the tabletop RPG community must accept -- must be beaten about the head with, in fact -- is that roleplaying, despite being one of the major new forms of entertainment of the late 20 and early 21st centuries, does not require tabletop RPGs. A tabletop RPG is a medium for the activity of roleplaying. MMORPGs, chat tools and fora are other media that support roleplaying -- the dominant media for the activity, in fact.
So the question for game designers in 2007 is this: What does your new game design offer that roleplaying in an alternate medium does not? I've asked this to many people and they invariably talk about the social element, but that's just dodging the question, as the social element often has nothing to do with the design. There are no concrete, in-design rewards for sharing meatspace. D&D currently has a good argument for this in the form of its miniatures play, which is annoying to do online because it either costs money (for special tools/MMO fees) or time (to set up webcams, house rules, etc.).
Your answer may well be "nothing," and that's OK. There's nothing wrong with designing a game for sentimental reasons. But the fact is that nowadays, we live in a world where we (tabletop hobbyists) don't control the direction of roleplaying and roleplaying doesn't even *need* our medium of choice. That's 2007.
2006 was my first full year of full time game writing and design. In previous years writing made up a significant proportion of my income, but it was always supplemented with other money. I was in a good position to ease into my current work and haven't been confronted by any particular shocks.
But the year wasn't free of disappointments. I still find much of the so-called "gaming community" (very little of which is actually based around playing games, now more than ever) disappointing. By and large, 2006 was a year characterized by intellectual cowardice. Various communities that talked big about theory, craft and shared practice were really fronts for people to be "safe." Levi Kornelsen's GameCraft established itself as yet another forum for useless backslapping after the tradition of Story Games.
What's missing is a place where people neither engage in ad hominems nor are protected from straight-shooting critique that isn't an ad hominem. This is difficult because you have people who have identified with their own ideas so strongly that they consider any challenge to them to be a personal insult. The refusal of these people to grow the fuck up (that *is* an ad hominem, by the way) is a big problem. I expect I'll have to create some kind of community myself, but I'm not sure what format it will take.
On a personal level, I didn't do as much play outside my immediate group as I wanted to. I did get some research done at a couple of conventions but I didn't get as much chance to play games at them. Then again, that kind of play is about 50% work-related, as my weekly gaming schedule is pretty full as it is.
As for new games, my notable purchases were Promethean, True20, Savage Worlds, Truth and Justice and The Burning Wheel.
- I bought Promethean for work as as a WoD completist, but I ended up being pleasantly surprised by the whole thing. Its only flaw is that its "monster type" doesn't really inform the game's fluff much. I'm thinking of introducing concepts from Promethean to my Mage game, but without creatures and golems and such. They'll just be alchemists.
- True20 was pretty good, if a bit overcomplicated. Conviction as a trait isn't very interesting to me, and I wanted a more abstract magic system, but this game is designed for a big tent and there are more than enough OGL tools out there to make the system one's own. One thing I liked was Take 5. I developed it independently in 2004 and applaud its use.
- Savage Worlds is slick, quick and does what it's supposed to do. That also makes it kind of uninteresting, as it lacks any big gimmicks to really grab you.
- T&J is a fantastic game. It's *so close* to what I want out of a superhero RPG, but it still hangs fire on the powers. I'm admittedly a bit of an eccentric about this, as I've never liked the feel of "built" powers in most games. T&J's discussion of the genre is notable for being remarkably evenhanded and concise.
- The Burning Wheel -- ah, what to say! This game is good, though the "good" is a combination of magnificent and awful that ends up with a positive balance. To avoid repeating myself, I'll just say that the overwhelming feeling I got was that the good stuff could be distilled into a superior RPG. It's one of these games that I'm far more interested in as a designer than as a player -- and not only have I intimated in the past that I think I'm not alone, I still believe it. But the games that exists will, I think, feature an uncharacteristically strong ability on the parts of players to stand behind their characters. The game has plenty of innovations (like Instincts) that support this kind of attitude and minimize the break between expectations and results that can bother players so much.
This year has seen its share of iffy trends and ideas. One of them is the way Internet discourse has influenced game design. Having given it some thought over the past couple of years, I think this is one of the key unacknowledged forces behind design trends. The Internet rewards superficial novelty (picking the coolness out of the forest of text), brevity and rapid comprehension (KISS). This is the medium that invented "tl;dr." Many, many indie games feel designed around the reward cycle gained by having people talk about the game on forums, blogs and so on. Don't they tend to follow a single core concept to an extreme? Don't many of them revolve around a kind of elevator pitch, precis-or-nothing idea? Isn't there an antipathy for games that take time and effort to get comfortable with? There are exceptions (The Burning Wheel's an example), but it seems to me that these games are not really accessible for the sake of a tabletop group, but for the sake of posting about them in fora. But your comfort in posting about an RPG on the Internet is not an indication of its quality.
Anyway, we also got into "brain damage," which was Ron Edwards' borrowing of sociobiological rhetoric for gaming. Many gamers are giving Ron a pass on this as some kind of metaphor, but he's made it clear he believes it's literally true and I figure he's following a doctrine of neural Darwinism in doing so. What he has not done, however, is identified what a story is in a sociobiological context, which makes his critique kind of halfassed, even within its own rules. So Ron would do well to give the whole "just so story" on the sociobiology of the Big Model, or else it's just the arbitrary invention I believe it to be -- but *by his own standards.*
Moving from this, we've seen trends (over several years, not just 2006) in two directions, both of which harness the media utility fallacy. The first is to create games that substantially show the influence of computer games for the sake of garnering interest and ease of comprehension. D&D was like this and now, Exalted is very much like this. Story games are in fact starting to resemble traditional storytelling more and more -- that's positive in a sense, because it's a conscious mission accomplished. But the media utility fallacy is what you get when you argue for one medium using another, more popular medium. You end up with is an excellent argument for the *other* medium. The more D&D resembles WoW, the more people should play WoW, not D&D. A story game that uses stock phrases to construct a story is a great gateway to getting involved in oral storytelling, but not for using an RPG for this purpose.
It's now my opinion that "storytelling" (first WW and now the Forge), and "adventure gaming" (a term invented to distance D&D from RPGs) are both category errors founded in marketing and pretense. It is now *obvious* that recreational roleplaying is a distinct activity and not a sub-activity of wargaming, storytelling, etc. Roleplaying is even a mainstream activity now.
But the thing that the tabletop RPG community must accept -- must be beaten about the head with, in fact -- is that roleplaying, despite being one of the major new forms of entertainment of the late 20 and early 21st centuries, does not require tabletop RPGs. A tabletop RPG is a medium for the activity of roleplaying. MMORPGs, chat tools and fora are other media that support roleplaying -- the dominant media for the activity, in fact.
So the question for game designers in 2007 is this: What does your new game design offer that roleplaying in an alternate medium does not? I've asked this to many people and they invariably talk about the social element, but that's just dodging the question, as the social element often has nothing to do with the design. There are no concrete, in-design rewards for sharing meatspace. D&D currently has a good argument for this in the form of its miniatures play, which is annoying to do online because it either costs money (for special tools/MMO fees) or time (to set up webcams, house rules, etc.).
Your answer may well be "nothing," and that's OK. There's nothing wrong with designing a game for sentimental reasons. But the fact is that nowadays, we live in a world where we (tabletop hobbyists) don't control the direction of roleplaying and roleplaying doesn't even *need* our medium of choice. That's 2007.
posted by Malcolm Sheppard at
3:55 AM
2 Comments:
But the thing that the tabletop RPG community must accept -- must be beaten about the head with, in fact -- is that roleplaying, despite being one of the major new forms of entertainment of the late 20 and early 21st centuries, does not require tabletop RPGs. A tabletop RPG is a medium for the activity of roleplaying. MMORPGs, chat tools and fora are other media that support roleplaying -- the dominant media for the activity, in fact.
Worth reading for that piece alone. Kudos.
By
robustyoungsoul, at 8:02 AM
Awesome post, though I didn't understand most of the references, you make some great points.
However, internet forums are not about designing RPGs. Most of the "verbs" (what you are physically doing while playing) in an RPG come not from the rulebook but from the DM. D&D can be played as a horror game, LARP game, tabletop boardgame, drama school exercise, cardgame... it all depends on the DM's strengths/weaknesses. The creators of D&D once said that, for their game, rulebooks were essentially unnecessary. Thus, RPG design is more about DMs exchanging ideas about methodology and less about designing formal systems on par with boardgames or gardens.
Of course, this does nothing to diminish the importance of your conclusion as a challenge to DMs to "think different" and find something in RPGs that you can't find in front of a computer screen, no matter how much the designers try to emulate it.
By
Capt_Poco, at 10:22 PM
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