“Gamers are people who not only move from hamster to hamster in order to stay one step ahead of their feelings, they will obsessively hoard hamsters and then go online in order to get irrationally angry about the choices that other people make in pet shops.”
5 Likes
This section confirmed my suspicions that, as far as the article is concerned, my preferences don’t exist. I do actually like engaging with explicit mechanics, and would continue to do so even in the hypothetical presented here. I don’t break out combat rules simply because I don’t know how to act out a combat scene without them, I play with them because I enjoy the structures and incentives the combat rules create.
I don’t think any given post is really obligated to address every possible player or preference, the hobby is too broad for that, but this feels like a pretty glaring oversight in an article that is trying to address the history of the hobby as a whole and is trying to draw conclusions about the nature of games and the way people approach them.
I guess it feels like the possibility that mechanics themselves could be appealing is, not just ignored, but denied? And that’s particularly alienating
1 Like
This article hurts my head. It doesn’t get around to providing a working definition of mechanics outside of some hand-wavey “whatever solves social problems” sorta thing, which ends up reducing the article to a complete tautology that doesn’t say anything.
What is System?
For me, ‘system’ refers to the complex social dynamics and unstated protocols that govern how people in a group interact with each other and resolve conflicts. The system governing how your group makes decisions is not necessarily related to the nature of the game you happen to be playing… I think that if most groups were to step away from RPGs and decide to start a folk band instead, they would see the same dynamics and decision-making processes emerge in the practice and the kitchen table.
System is so much more primal than mechanics that it often helps to determine such fundamental questions such as whether or not you decide to start playing RPGs in the first place and who gets to run them when you do. System is also central to defining the character of a session: When the group have a discussion over what their characters are going to do next, who speaks first and who speaks last? Everyone is going to be interested in slightly different aspects of the RPG experience, but whose interests get the most attention and are those interests meaningfully different to the stuff that the GM likes to engage with? If someone arrives at a game and seems particularly down or particularly enthusiastic, does this have an effect upon the content and vibe of the session? System is partly about hierarchy and decision-making but it also about flexibility and empathy.
In my experience, most group-terminating problems are not a result of playing ‘incoherent’ games but problems with the group’s hierarchies, dynamics, and decision-making procedures: Sometimes groups implode because people rub each other the wrong way. Sometimes groups implode because someone steps over an invisible line and the group lacks the ability to address (let alone resolve) the conflict. Disagreements over mechanics and rulings are common. Problems with mechanics and rulings are a result of systematic social problems.
I love this, because it acknowledges something important:
a) There are psychological processes that make activities 1) fun, 2) interesting, 3) engaging, where all three points are synonyms for each other. If we acknowledge that a slot machine, wanting to read a Wikipedia page, or watching a thriller stems from the same processes, you can start to take the first steps into designing with a clearer purpose. (hint: these stems from memory creation)
b) The emergent complexity of a session is so heavy, so realizing what I quoted above is a first step in unraveling what makes a session pop. Having participants as part of the system, and acknowledging that they are—for example—bringing in their own previous experience to the mix, will make you realize that no one is playing the same game ever.
A book that share the same thought as my previous post is Peter Brooks’ The Empty Space. He’s a renown stage director that divided theater into four spaces: the deadly, the holy, the rough and the immediate. Do you recognize this procedure … ? (GNS) … anyone?
The thing is, he broke down theater into the most basic component with one sole purpose. He emptied himself from all of his previous knowledge and experimented to learn about theater once again.
I’m not recommending reading the book, as it has nothing to do with roleplaying games, but the activity in itself is noteworthy.
I agree with short sections of this article. But I don’t know how I feel overall.
For a start, I think it displays some very loose definitions.
I’m a video game designer and am relatively knowledgeable of game theory. Systems and mechanics are terms that are relatively well defined, and their definitions are pretty similar when you move from different type of games. I don’t see why roleplaying games couldn’t use them.
For me, ‘system’ refers to the complex social dynamics and unstated protocols that govern how people in a group interact with each other and resolve conflicts. The system governing how your group makes decisions is not necessarily related to the nature of the game you happen to be playing…
When people say “the system” they refer to the game. The sum of its rules. In other fields of games, we wouldn’t use this word and we’d simply talk about the design of the game.
Now, if we’re talking about a system, then we’re often talking about a set of mechanics working together to achieve something bigger. In video games we tend to automate these, in board games not.
What he describes (the social dynamics and unstated protocols) are dynamics. Dynamics are not created directly, they result from the interaction between your game mechanics and your systems.
I personally am fond of the MDA model that describes games as the sum of their: mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics. You’ll see that system is nowhere here.
System is so much more primal than mechanics that it often helps to determine such fundamental questions such as whether or not you decide to start playing RPGs in the first place and who gets to run them when you do. System is also central to defining the character of a session: When the group have a discussion over what their characters are going to do next, who speaks first and who speaks last?
A system is definitely not more primal than mechanics. It is composed of mechanics. In the case of roleplaying games and board games, we tend to talk about rules, because unlike a computer game where the software than force certain constraints on you, rules kind of accept that players have to implicitly accept to follow them. If he’s talking about the design? Than, yeah, the vaporous conceptual thing that is the design encompasses some rules/mechanics, some systems that operate out of rules/mechanics, and some dynamics that are indirectly created by all these design decisions.
A lot of the churning through different systems, tinkering with rules, and obsessively buying new games stems from a desire to sublimate our feelings into either talk about dice probability curves or acts of hollow consumerism.
Or… let me suggest a groundbreaking idea. People enjoy it? Most of the roleplaying designers that I know engage in a ton of connected hobbies where you see a similar pattern. Designing is fun, being creative and tinkering is fun.
Now, this might be semantic, but I’ve seen continual attempts in the RPG scene to theorize it in a vacuum, where so much of the existing game theory works with it. People will often bring up the social dynamics are making it too loose and impossible to categorize, yet most games are social by definition. In the history of games, single player games are by far the minority.
I’m also quite puzzled in what the author’s point is? We’re talking about the demographical origin of the hobby, I see words like “repressed homosexuality, toxic masculinity and emotional conspipation”, I see a suggestion that the hobby’s biggest problem is its lack of institutional memory, I see an admission that the hobby comes from a realm of explicit rules and wargaming, and somehow the article seems to suggest that the hobby is kind of going off direction by focusing too much on explicit mechanics? And that it ought to remember that it should focus more on social dynamics? But we just said the hobby stemmed from the world of explicit mechanics?
He highlights certain elements of roleplaying games as if they were unique. Every table is different, social dynamics are so important, finding the right group is more important than finding the right rules. Almost all of these apply to other types of games. Playing board games with friends is so much about social dynamics, so is sports! If you don’t play competitive sports, you notice how loose people are with rules, how different towns play differently, or different amateur referee might enforce rules differently. Nothing of this is unique to roleplaying games.
If we accept the somewhat tendentious and highly idiosyncratic view that the history of the RPG hobby is a decades-long attempt by repressed white men to avoid discussing their feelings and admit that they are being creative then we must ask ourselves how far we have actually come since a sweaty and visibly-panicking Dave Wesely was cornered by two gamers who wanted their characters to fight a duel.
What am I reading? What is this?
In an ideal world, we would sit around our kitchen tables and erect our bubbles of fictive reality like spiritualists expressing ropes of ectoplasm. We would decide to undertake actions that alter the contents of that fictive reality and because our social system was robust and our souls were entwined, we would never need to reach for any formal procedures or explicit mechanics to resolve conflicts and maintain consensus as to the state of the fictive reality. In an ideal world, we would not need hundreds of pages of rules and endless discourse about how best to implement those rules, we would simply allow things to happen without differences of opinion ever serving as a distraction.
Really? We can already do all of that. The author can do it. The only barrier to this is the social dynamics the author keeps highlighting. People know that they can tell each other stories, some already do. But rolling dices is fun. Manipulating systems is fun.
I’m not saying that manuals of hundred of pages are required, I do agree that less rules and less texts is generally better and more palpable than a brick. I do agree that certain thresholds of rules, and lore and options can become a burder for some groups.
But are we suggesting that all pathfinder players that enjoy tinkering builds, finding interesting combinations and enjoying the different mechanical playstyles are repressed emotionally? And that only in following The Forge’s teaching and playing Story Now in a circle of harmony as we playing right?
I don’t think this is a Forge narrativism thing exactly. The Forge would keep “system matters” with the initial definition of “[mechanical] system,” but this article rejects that in favor of “[social] system.” which gives the appearance of compromise, but it’s really just a counter-claim.
“System” is all those, included with the “participant”. To quote Wikipedia:
A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole.) A system, surrounded and influenced by its environment, is described by its boundaries, structure and purpose and is expressed in its functioning.
That’s where the article stems from, in my interpretation. Not “system = mechanics”.
The article is basically a very verbose rephrasing of the Lumpley-Care Principle that makes allusions to mechanics without clearly defining them, couples with a few odd tangents that doesn’t fit.
Every “System (Does/Doesn’t) Matter(s)” discussion breaks down into two sections where someone puts forward some pretty obvious truisms (the way you play affects the play, a tautology), and then a whole smattering of brittle semantics to try to construct a theory of play mid-paragraph out of the author’s semi-unexamined aesthetics.
I say that as someone who has done the above many, many times.
This section is frankly disingenuous and cringe-worthy. Gygax was ALL about creativity. Wesley’s anecdotes and the famous duel is one of joy and revelation to the possibilities of the hobby.