Casting Shadows

What if, for the sake of discussion, everything that you believe to be true about roleplaying games were true, but let’s also note that that “you” is not the singular, but the plural. We can rightfully expect, I think, for the sum of all those perspectives to seem chaotic. Of course, not all that each of us believes to be true about RPGs really is true, but a lot is – at least, from a certain point of view.

However, despite this, there is a pervasive view that “we don’t know what RPGs are,” and that runs into “RPGs are Storytelling” which contradicts “RPGs are games of let’s pretend” which has some friction with “RPGs are explorations of an idea” which barely gets along with “RPGs are problem solving.” From distraction, through wish-fulfillment, past gambling and chance, across the stage of the theatre, down into a valley of violence, and on down the railroad to Sandbox City or Random Chartville or across the peaks and passes of improv to Collaboration Stadium there are points of alignment and points of friction. There are compatibilities and incompatibilities.

What cannot successfully run into conflict is the notion of RPGs functioning as a conversation. While that idea can be and has been misunderstood, it is the medium upon which the hobby must stand. Ultimately, no matter how we choose to approach an RPG, no matter which part of the broad spectrum of games and approaches we end up in or choose intentionally, even if we play solo, the format of play is the framing of ideas in conversation between the varied inputs of the game. Remove one of the players and the experience of the game changes. Remove the system, thereby taking one of the participants in the conversation away and you are left only with moments of pretend, possibly with imagination, but more likely with comprehension.

The conversation which is RPG play is accented by our culture of play. The intrinsic aspects of who are as people, how we communicate ideas and process them, and how we naturally interpret the actions, reactions, and interactions of others with all of our personal strengths and weaknesses and learned understandings give us a particular dialect in our gaming which is as much regional and tied to lineages of exploration, transmission, and teaching as it is individual. This is our culture of play.

The rest is what we bring to the conversation. Sometimes what we bring matters in such a way as to affect the satisfaction of one or more of our fellow players. When it doesn’t, it isn’t particularly important. When it does, it is quite important unless the affected party or parties choose to play a less-satisfying game or have not learned what they like, yet. These are the procedures we learn or develop for play, the conventions we have accepted if not agreed to, this is tone, genre, choice of game, choice of group, houserules, and the intentional and unintentional approaches we take to a style of play (recently being mistaken for culture).

At a certain point in the conversation about what RPGs are, the topic got derailed into the things “we prefer” and that has stunted RPG discourse since the 70s.

Rather than look at what they are, and what that means we can do with them, the usual nonsense has taken place. You know the nonsense I mean. We see it daily in all arenas of human interaction. People share borrowed opinions without considering them, people choose to work against something they dislike rather than working for something that they like, people choose to persuade or bring social force into defining (often redefining and limiting) what is “good.” Some just want to stay out of it and miss most of the discussion around them – taking sides if necessary for expedience. And so on.

Does it matter?

It matters in the sense that the focus on the surface of the topic such as who wrote a game, or what company published a game, or in what year it was published, or how cool the cover is means we rarely go below that surface. It lends a sense that being an RPG is a sort of binary situation where something is or is not an RPG. This can often go a step further, of course (as all that suppressed association with games being about winning, rules, and skill has to go somewhere) into acquiescing to bias and assigning preference-based tags of “goodness/correctness” to the games we enjoy, and disregard or worse to the ones we do not. I am speaking in the mean here, not in specific cases. The internet bears me out.

What makes all of this particularly interesting is of course the context of the silent majority who manage to focus on playing their games and staying out of all of this by dint of never giving these arguments any thought at all. Our voices are not even a faint echo in their game rooms between games.

The Point?

There are very few either/or elements in these games we love. Some important ones can seem to be:

• A group of gamers either enjoys or does not enjoy a given game at this point in their history together.
• A designer either does or does not have a broad understanding of the spectrum of roleplaying games
• A game either does or does not communicate its designer(s)’s intention well
• Play of a game will either be more or less rooted in a clearly understood intention; theirs and/or the designer’s
• Play of a game will either lean toward the experience of its characters or toward influencing the flow of a story

However, the more you think about things like these from the perspective of each person involved and the degree to which things change in intensity between them, the less certainty there can be about any given group, game, or writer being neatly aligned with one side or the other of a spectrum. We find that there is a large mess in the middle where different things are true in different amounts at different times – pretty much all of the time.

Is that the point?

You tell me. Are you willing to go further?

What if there are some either/or conditions in and around gaming which matter? What if the way a game is written and then understood by a group has a binary outcome in one important aspect? What if what the game requires to play it either does or does not interfere with how a group intentionally or unintentionally chooses to enjoy their play? In other words, what if the style of a game interacts in harmony with or in opposition to the culture of play within the group? What happens?

If a game emphasizes mechanisms which give greater granularity and fine control over the creation of a story, those mechanisms will in turn minimize the capacity to play In-Character. At best a constant shift between IC and OoC will be required. The design of the game and how the group understands how to play the game has a direct impact on the conversation they must have to play the game which in turn is their full experience of that game. It will, in effect, either be or not be about empathizing with the experience of the character. It will either be or not be about influencing the flow of the story of the character. It will be Story as By-product or Story as Product.

The more this matters to the members of the group and the more in alignment they become, the more their intention for play begins to matter as well. Their culture of play is then drawn upon to shape and define a style of play which in turn limits the games they can choose to play or create to play. How aware they are of the influences working on them during this process directly informs and limits what they can communicate about it to others directly or in RPG discourse or in the games that they write.

So, looking around and finding that gamer discourse about the games we play is repeating the same questions and finding the same problems that the original groups did in the 70s we are pushed into accepting that we have not communicated in the games we are writing what it is we want a given game to provide and the different approaches it works better with. That in turn forces groups to reinvent and rediscover well-trodden territory in search of new understanding in the midst of what could have been known and well-explained information.

In arguments over preference instead of something which matters, we form tribes and camps of these preferences which barely even serve the people living in them willingly, let alone helping anyone discover more about the hobby that thrills them.

Ultimately, what we see in the fabric of the hobby is all true, from a certain point of view, but it’s also true that our eyes lie to use and that there are none so blind as those who will not see.