Mark Wallace contacted me for conversation about role-playing mechanics and emotions or the resulting content, among many other people. He’s written and published a lot about creative developments just outside or underneath the acknowledged media; see The Mark Wallace Experience for examples and enjoyment.
He began the conversation with a bigger, relevant question: why role-playing games matter. This led me into the discussion of the medium as such, including taking shots at “entertainment,” “control,” and other things I’m sure you’ll recognize, and also framed the finishing points effectively.
For once, I was able really to hit Mark’s intended questions. as he helped me land my points and maintained the outline of what we had come to do. I do try to do this in interviews, but you can’t interview yourself and I’m often frustrated that a lead-in or groundwork doesn’t get completed.
His questions allowed me effectively to lay out the big principles, with examples, for things people are always asking me to present as text:
- Why role-playing matters, which concerns why I think it’s not a form of entertainment or gaming
- How do rules (mechanics, procedures) inform content and the experience (at my request, he reviewed Once again with feeling before the conversation, so we could hit this field running)
- What changed such that role-playing is now widely visible and discussed, which entails of course the change before that, how the grassroots activity became visible in the late 1990s
I’m a bit sad that he requested that I post audio only, as it loses the distinctive way people from our generation communicate nonverbally, and also, his work and study room is pretty cool.
This conversation also informed my eventual post about playing Amerika at the Happening (A light in the past), as it raises the potential tension between focused game design and social engineering. I’d like to keep addressing this across multiple posts, in terms of one’s driving need to express specific things, and front-loading provocative content toward that end, but not knowing fully what will be expressed as a played experienced. It includes opening up to the collective participation as a vulnerable and risky act, knowing that the eventual “message” will certainly not be thoroughly your own and may well be compromised as ultimate fiction, or changed internally through the experience.
5 responses to “Why things are the way they are”
I always mess this up: Tactical Studies Rules, not “Situations.”
The other key person in the original publication of D&D was Don Kaye, whose name I always forget only when I’m trying to remember it.
Between this and the linked interviews, there is a lot of useful information that I’m nodding along with. It’s good to have a point of reference.
That comment on RPG Hobby accepting the most tepid expressions of transgressive/edgy/adult content and themes REALLY speaks to me.
I recently called the current published version of Glorantha “Glorantha for Squares”. For me, a lot of geek marketed media comes off that way, especially in the past decade or so.
It feels like the ceiling for depth is “stoned teenagers at a late night diner”. It’s either quaint (oh, you put gore and tits in your otherwise typical fantasy rpg, good for you) or just flat out condescending (Misspent Youth).
A product line I swore I loved, but always came away extremely disappointed with upon reading is Planescape. The art is wonderful but for all the thematic posturing it’s a rather shallow expression of these ideas. I could just grab some Moorcock or Philip K Dick and run with those ideas a lot further than the boundaries imposed by the text – even using AD&D 2nd Edition as a start.
This is also linked to the failure of a social engineering approach. It’s limited by the design and so many feel entirely out of touch with my lived experiences. I couldn’t help but feel condescended too, by yet another white collar middle class take on “the struggles of the poor” or what-have-you. Are there games about these themes that work played by a variety of people? Yes…but many are just polemic internet posts, you play through, that lack depth or nuance for understanding.
I share a lot of those impressions, especially that role-playing always seemed to me perfect for expression and excess, yet textually it kept shying away, eventually to the point of plain denial. There was some Planescape discussion here recently where, in the midst of typing, I sadly realized that for me, it was simply about liking the art.
I think that social engineering notion of role-playing is badly out of touch with actual humans and also with play-processes. It simply doesn’t work. I tried hard in this conversation to articulate why, then, I myself have thrown my life-time away designing things like Spione, Shahida, and Amerika, as well as Mutual Decision and Vigil … and I hope it came through that play results in a patchwork expression among us. I even think that the open risk that “it” (resulting fiction) won’t be entirely on-point or thoroughly-reasoned is a feature.
I agree completely. The way I see it is there are games that give space for players to form their own perspectives, and others that rigidly impose the author’s own perspective. That no-guarantee of a story/message/experience has to be there. If there is a guarantee, any expression is either reduced to a madlibs prompt or overridden in unsatisfying ways. It’s very difficult to form a perspective from play with someone else deciding what play will be.
I thought I’d nail down the following point or extension, so my reasoning is all in place. I’m going directly from the point about the lack of guarantee.
… which is, that the activity therefore benefits from sectors of content or procedure which are either wholly deterministic or even immutable. Because that means the other sectors are, as I see it, further opened up or expanded as an experience.
The primary level is the organization of authorities, and the secondary or modifying level (or sub-system) is composed of constraints on specific authoritative input.
Therefore for any specific “thing” in content or procedure, it might be wholly set down as the way it is, or entirely open to whatever the people say (as organized by authorities), or as the “people say,” but provided with a certain shape or potentials due to constraints. This is why I cannot give a toolbox for “use this rule if you want people to be sad and reflective,” “use this rule if you wan people to get excited about a mystery.” Every single aspect of content and procedure, for a given set of rules, exists in context of how the other aspects are constructed. Using a die roll for damage presupposes about a thousand other things, and how it works is only good or bad depending on how they work.
I don’t think this is crazy talk as the general concept applies to just about any social group activity that does a thing, and the more specific feature of authorities, for example, is a quality of the medium we happen to be using.
The overall point being this: that the “open to expression” + lack of guarantee that we’re discussing is a feature of what is limited or prohibited due to the system we’re using, and that such limitations and prohibitions are productive and may be formed into a remarkable variety of content and procedure. They’re also inescapable. All fiction is content-bounded in some way, and any/all play in this medium requires organized authorities. “Free-form” and “no rules” is blather.
I recall in the 1990s a lot of excited textual talk regarding “this game is about what you can do, not what you can’t.” That cannot make genuine sense, and it only makes a kind of sense if we are starting from a broken context in which no expression was possible.