Casting Shadows

No matter how easy something is to find, if you look in the wrong place or while distracted by something else, you will not find it. This is one of those basic and annoying truths of life. It applies in gaming conversation, too. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t be bringing it up here. So, when after 50 years the question of “What is an RPG?” is still floating around, seemingly unanswered, we can deduce that asking the question and not answering it has become a tradition, or that we haven’t been looking in the right place for a satisfying answer. That makes sense, right?

If we look at card games, we don’t see an epic history of card gamers happily declaring that they don’t know what such games are, nor does this crop up among board gamers. In a reductive sense, the absence or presence of the titular item helps sort that out.

• Rules to use with playing cards for playing a game and sorting a winner from the loser(s)? Check: card game.
• Rules to use with a board, folding or otherwise, for playing a game and sorting a winner from the loser(s). Check: board game.

Yes, Internet, there are variances and nuances even in these simple ideas, but as mildly humorous comparisons, it’s sane to let them go in favor of allowing oneself to grasp the larger point: the medium of play is a feature in the name of the category of game, and is visible and tangible, whereas this is not necessarily so in the case of RPGs. There is a lot of partisan attention paid to the two elements in the name, ‘roleplaying game,’ and plenty of disagreement on definitions to go around. Meanwhile, the medium of play and how it gives structure and places demands on participants in order for play to happen, is in use through the whole argument, and by that I mean verbal communication. Roleplaying games are, to borrow the reductive naming logic of other more common games, Conversation Games.

-Runeslinger

What does that mean?

You know what it means, even if you haven’t played one. The role of word, gesture, and tone in the exchange of information is the essential ingredient in any RPG – even the very limited ones in choose your own adventure books and computer-based versions. Take it away and the RPG can no more happen than a game of Crazy Eights can take place without cards.

To help illustrate some aspects of this more publicly than I have been motivated to do in the past, I was very pleased to receive the support of six fellow gamers in a project that took us a few months to coordinate and execute due to the wild life I lead here in the future.

You can read all about them in THIS POST, and about how the plan was executed in THIS EARLIER POST.

The current phase of the project has produced two panel videos curated very carefully in terms of the background questions asked in preparation for discussion, the questions asked by the moderator (me) during the discussion. and the choice of participants in each discussion. Both discussions were moderated by the same person using the same tools, context, and questions. Each group was exposed to the same material as preparation and given the same amount of time to consider it prior to recording their panels. Those panels then sincerely explored a series of questions which expose some of what it means to be a roleplaying gamer and what it means for something to be a roleplaying game. What transpires as a part of that is a glimpse of some of the alchemy of play and the simple magic of human interaction and conversation when even one element changes: the content changes completely while the structure remains the same – just like an RPG.

Conversation is the medium of RPGs.

Our games build on that fundamental tool of verbal communication that we rely on so heavily and branch outward from there into variation on that simple theme of an idea being shared between minds, and actions, reactions, and interactions playing out in a game of cooperatively holding onto and expanding the idea without causing it to be lost or to fragment. Our win condition is enjoyment of the idea and our responses to it.

Everything else is built on the exchange of information in conversation. The core of what an RPG is, and the foundation of all it can be, is this.

The Panels

Panel 1: On the Realities of RPGs as Conversations (2hr runtime)

Panel 2: On Other Realities of RPGs as Conversations (1hr runtime)