Casting Shadows

There is a YouTuber by the name of Adam Neely. I first encountered him when served his video (Link 1) on wrestling to understand and find appreciation for a form of music that he “hated.”

In that argument, I found a distinct and cogent pattern of conception and argument which perfectly parallels the RPG conversations which wrestle with the same issue of not being able to enjoy the full spectrum of what the hobby contains. It is so well put together and easy to take in, that I started using it as part of how I teach debate preparation skills.

This week, Adam Neely released a video essay on AI music creation which explores the practical and ethical aspects of making music as a musician and making music as the prompter of AI.

Again, it is cogent, well-supported, and easy to “consume.” While in RPGs we are also seeing the rise of AI production in games and it has been having similar effects on human creators and the economics of the industry, I am not sharing this essay (Link 2) because of that – at least not solely because of that. I am sharing it because it also manages to neatly express important elements of the experience of being the participatory audience which we can find in both the creation of music and in the play of RPGs.

Yes, these are long videos. Yes, it can be helpful to watch them versus just listening. Yes, there are skills to be learned from them.

Link 1: On the experience of seeking understanding of and appreciation for things outside our initial biases and preferences

Link 2: On the Experience and Ethics of AI and Human Music Creation

A third element which underlies sharing these two videos is that Neely is an interesting model of being interested in, unafraid of the work related to, and being an ambassador for research into any and all subjects which can help build skill and comprehension of one’s own pursuits. He models a wide-ranging interest in research and a willingness to do the work to integrate the information he gleans into workable and harmonious tools – all while remembering to cite sources (A mark of intellectual honesty and a process of showing your work which can benefit those who come along later). He is quite dedicated to studying the foundations of the history of and the creative processes of jazz. He is dedicated to the art of informed and skilled collaborative improvisational play and its later formulation and presentation to a passive audience.

This third element is a reminder of points he raises in Link 2 (above) and in a topic I find myself raising in RPG discussion. That topic is, of course, the fragility of new ideas from observations of new activities – such as the act of roleplaying games. Innovation and Preservation are two different drives, and the desire to know more about the things we are passionate about can accidentally force us down a path of preserving someone else’s perspectives on what a thing is, what we do when engaged with it, and what it all means. The ease of taking on the words of another, the surrender of our own perspective to the catchy jargon of a group who may or may not have seen all of what you see – or who were looking at something different altogether – can be a setback in finding an actual articulation of what is happening in the hobby as a whole.

RPGs are still a very new hobby and as we have explored before and as works like Peterson’s “The Elusive Shift” make it so easy to demonstrate now: WE ARE STILL HAVING THE SAME CONVERSATIONS THE GAMERS OF 1975 DID. The answers to these “first year” fundamental questions have, so far, served to broaden the hobby into factions and camps of preference, imprinting, and habit, but have yet to be encoded clearly and in ways that really resonate with the participants in the hobby on the same level that those primal questions do. We can label things all day and all night, but until the way games are written changes to help place them on the wider spectrum of RPGs for those who come to play them, the same old cycles will repeat.

Sadly, as the Neely video on AI also points out, there are those among us with agendas for the hobby material they produce, support, ignore or comment upon which has little or nothing to do with understanding the spectrum of options within the hobby and exploring the experiences of its participants.

However, I believe that gamers and the hobby in general are ready to explore the experiences RPGs can provide, but the tendency to look outward first, to adopt those catchy, but often obscuring, terms that circulate with unconsidered cut/paste ease is holding us back from – on a broader scale – the important personal realizations about what is at the heart of the activity and the understandings which will finally arise from within the hobby as a result.