Negatrons past

Perhaps the negatrons have ineffectuated. I haven't posted in a while.

I was reading Ben's blog and came across the following humble quote in an old post:

The point is that creative agenda is often overlooked as a cause of unhappy play, not that differing creative agenda is always the cause of unhappy play.

For some reason I really liked that.

I really really really have to go back and read the Big Ron Essays sometime and get my head around them or not. I have a feeling I have some issues with the ideas behind the concept of "Narrativism" -- to wit, that in order to speak clearly about Narrativism one has to believe that we understand exactly why literature is literature -- what makes a good story a good story. My belief, as a former grad student in (admittedly ancient Greek and Latin) literature, was that the jury was still out on that point.

Oh, sure, you have individuals like Lajos Egri who have their ideas about what makes good literature good, but I didn't know that anybody considered it a closed issue. It's an open question what makes good literature good.

And if it's an open question, and we're using the answer to define one of the categories of our theory, where does that leave the theory?

Like I said, I don't know if I've ever made it through those essays so maybe this is not really relevant. I won't be able to intelligently frame it till I do more homework than maybe I am willing to. We'll see.

Astral Negatrons

Joe in his comment to the previous post ("A Forge Pas"), says -- "OK Ed, new rule: no more Forge for you. You seem to stir up some sort of trouble, or get snarky every time you go there ;-)"

And he's right. I don't know why I've had such a damn chip on my shoulder; it's partially explainable by the "Prolegomena" (couple posts earlier) but that doesn't seem to catch it all.

I was reading the "Turk and Helga" thread on the Forge as referenced by Ben's Continuity post (to which I added some comments) and I thought how much fun the game sounded like and for some reason saw very clearly this negative attitude I'd let creep up on me, like a goblin sitting on my shoulder. (Perhaps it's a demon from Ron's Sorcerer...)

I'm gonna have to read the article Ben linked to and quoted too, even though I don't think much of Claude Lévi-Strauss's theories of myth. Just read the first few paragraphs and found it interesting.

This post was mostly babble. Please move along and go about your business.

UPDATE: No, it's not really such a mystery to me, the snarkiness. I just read a couple small forge threads because they were referred to elsewhere or I was watching them, and there's just something in the tone typical Forge discourse that just gets my blood pressure up. The protocol of the Forge is such that people don't openly call each other doody-heads or threaten each other with bodily harm, but there are at least some posters there who keep just saying things in a way that provokes hostility in me for some reason. And the funny thing is the ones I'm thinking of right now are people I've met in real life and had a perfectly nice time with, but when I read some of their posts my fists clench. I don't know what's up with me with all that but I think it really would be healthy of me to heed Joe's advice on this one. Get he hell off the Forge. I'm not up to it these days.

A Forge Pas

I guess that thread was old and I shouldn't have posted to it.

I will never understand the weird etiquette of that place.

UPDATE: OK, maybe I'll understand it, but I will get bitten on the ass by it nonetheless. :)

Ben and James on What Gaming Does To You

Ben Lehmann writes:

Playing games effects our lives. Some people come out of it with positive effect. Others come out of it with negative effect[...]

It is possible to design a toxic game -- one which is fun and happy making but causes its players to withdraw from society, to reject productive lifestyles, and to shy from normal social interaction. Frankly, I think such games already exist, although you might be surprised about my opinions on what is what, there.

He's commenting on this post by james_west (not to be confused with James V. West), which is about the different directions people he knows who game have gone.

The main thing I wanted to post here was one thing where I believe gaming can actually mess with people: to the degree that games try to represent reality with their rules ("simulationism"), they provide a set of assumptions about reality which people (especially young people who are still coming to understand the world around them) may swallow without questioning them.

I don't mean believing that real life is like silly genre conventions -- that there is real fireball-casting magic, or stuff like that -- but more like the basic assumptions about the structure of reality or what is meaningful and relevant about people, life, and stories.

One thing I can think of off the top of my head is the notion that being "skilled" at something is an unambiguous good; that there is really such a thing as objective "competence" which is a scalar quantity (or a bunch of related scalar quantities).

Reading the "mindfulness" books by Ellen Langer, especially The Power of Mindful Learning, exploded this myth in my head and it was hugely powerful for me. And I realized the myth had been implanted by games as well as the culture at large.

One way games can avoid giving people inaccurate representations of the world which they unconsciously assimilate is by disclaiming to represent the world at all -- which is something that Narrativist and Gamist designs are more ready to do.

I have seen a more or less Simulationist game which subverts this assumption: Mike Holmes and JB Bell's Synthesis. In Synthesis, you may have 3 dice in "Classical Guitar," which will let you play Classical Guitar well, but those 3 dice could be used against you if you were doing something which classical guitar training might interfere with, like playing punk rock guitar.

Skill is only ever skill in doing things a particular way, and learning is only ever learning a particular way of understanding things, and either can bite you in the ass and keep you from doing or looking at things a different and possibly more useful (in some contexts) way.

So that's one thing that gaming can do that will hurt you: it can impress upon you limited and limiting ways of looking at the world, and it is likeliest to do so in the areas where it seems to be representing things which are most mundane and "realistic."

There are other things I might add to the discussion, like questioning James West's assumptions about the relative value of different kinds of jobs, assumptions that he himself warns may seem "elitist and egotistical," so it might not be fair to him to criticize them. But the big thing that hit me when I read all this was "yeah, I am personally familiar with detrimental effects of games on your way of dealing with the world, though it's nothing to do with what james is talking about and I don't know if it has anything to do with what Ben is talking about due to lack of details provided."

I don't know that I wouldn't have picked up the same detrimental assumptions without games, but games definitely reinforced them, specifically the "simulating" aspect of rules.

UPDATE: John Kim's response, linked also in the comments below, mentions his concerns about "nature vs nurture" assumptions promulgated unconsciously by role-playing games, which he's written up in an essay. Note that this is exactly the same kind of issue which I've complained about; it's not necessarily something about RPGs per se but something about particular simulationist rules patterns which are widespread (but need not be universal) in RPGs, which subtly or not-so-subtly imply something an obvious truth about the "real world" which might usefully be questioned.

Prolegomena to Any Future Snark

This is Ed talking about Ed talking here, not Joe, just for the record.

I use this space to snark and rant and stuff, and I often snark and rant about Forgite RPG theory, that is, GNS theory and everything about it.

One might get the impression from this that I particularly dislike GNS theory and Forge games, that I wish they didn't exist or something.

That's completely the opposite of the truth. about 95% of the RPGs I've bought in the last 4 years have been indie RPGs whose creators frequent the Forge. About 90% of the RPGs I've played in the same time have been those. To pull numbers out of my ass, I have about ten times as much fun playing or running the average Forge/Indie RPG than the average traditional RPG.

I love this stuff. I'm really happy it exists. I might not care at all about RPGs if it wasn't for the Forge and its habitues.

So why diss it? Well, we always hurt the ones we love.

No, seriously, it's not you, Forge, it's me.

As I've mentioned, I am by nature a theory junkie and a movement toady. I tend to want to find a theory to explain everything, and act and think in terms of the theory, and I tend to want to find a group of cool like-minded explorers and theory-creators and groove on what they're doing. The Forge tempts me so much on those issues, and I don't want to get too deeply sucked into it.

So I seize on things where it seems not to work, or alternate ways of looking at things, or really deviant takes on it -- like this thread Paganini started about G, N, and S being less big a deal than people may imagine, things like that.

For my own sake, I set myself against the theory because I am inclined to just swallow it whole. My snarks and questions and doubts and objections may be irrelevant to someone who doesn't share these concerns, or share my own theory-oriented character flaws, or who does share them but is not interested in challenging them at this point.

I just wanted to let this be known in this space cause I think it would be really easy to give totally the wrong impression from the adversarial stance I tend to take towards the Forge and GNS theory. I in fact value it immensely. And that's why I want to keep its value in perspective.

Usagi Yojimbo

About a year ago, I picked up the Usagi Yojimbo RPG, by Gold Rush Games. I had, at the time, gotten pretty into the comic and thought it'd be cool to maybe run a game in the world. It took me a year to finally get around to it...

Last weekend, Ed came over for a short visit, and I suggested we give it a try. He made a character, Miyabe Ikuta, bounty hunter and goat. I took one of the sample adventures, tweaked it a little, and we played. I have to say, it was a lot of fun. They system is pretty basic in that it doesn't really get in the way of the story. What we both really liked was the card based combat.

Basically, the player and the GM have three maneuver cards: Total Attack, Cautious Attack, and Total Defense. Each picks one secretly and they reveal them at the same time. Depending on which they chose, different things might happen. For instance, if they both choose Total Attack, the person who rolls higher with their combat skill will hit, and do double damage. If, on the other hand, one chooses Total Attack and the other Total Defense, nothing happens; the defender holds off the attacker that turn. It's a nice little system. In fact, one scene in the game had Ikuta playing a game of Go with the head priest of a temple and Ed suggested we use the cards for the game. It worked rather nicely.

The game ended with Ikuta saving a blind priest from a group of spirits, and promising to escort the head priest to a Go tournament in a neighboring fief. We both agreed that there must be more of this game.

So over the last few days I've been thinking about the game, and possible adventures. I've been thinking about the Usagi comic, and jidaigeki series, like Zatoichi. There is a simple formula: Hero enters town, finds that there is some sort of trouble, works at sorting the trouble out. Rinse and repeat. Sounds pretty Dogs in the Vineyard to me. Just an observation, I guess.

Ed did a drawing of Ikuta and of a character I made, and will probably never play, Takeyama Isamu. I posted the pics here.

why again?

Ben writes about whether "gamism" or "narrativism" are better ways to reach the coveted "mainstream audience" as opposed to the lame "gamer audience."

Why does one want to do that again?

Maybe we could try to find a way to make "Advocate" and "Out" magazine appeal to straight people, too, or to make "Ebony" appeal to white people, but why?

I know it's been Ron's big hobby horse for years now, how to create the coveted "game for non-gamers," and he's doing it right now with "Spione" and all that. But what's wrong with making roleplaying games for people who like roleplaying games?

I'm feelin' grumpy.

I have a hard time reading this project, this "making gaming for non-gamers," with the implicit assumption that that would be superior to gaming for mere gamers, as anything but self-hatred among gamers ashamed of their marginal, geeky status, maybe displacing that self-hatred onto the munchkins who play less enlightened kinds of games.

Like I said, I'm feelin' grumpy.

A Little Game Design 101

Not to be missed, a little game design 101 from Vincent's point of view.

Highlights: that stuff on the so-called character sheet? That's not a character. The character is in your head. That so-called character sheet is to track resources for the player's control over the story. Vincent takes it on and builds it up from a minimal level.

Controversial claim: the game-mechaniccy-stuff does not under any circumstances "represent" the character or other facets of the game world.

Antitheoretics

For most of my life, I've tended to be a complete theory junkie.

Theory junkie? What's theory addiction?

It's this idea that you have to do things right and to do things right you have to know about the field. You have to learn the theories. You have to humbly educate yourself about what people have already learned, learn the how to's and the how not to's.

If you're lucky there's an elite theory you can learn, that's better and truer than the commonplace theories people muck about with. So finding the right theory is important. You learn the wrong theory and you'll be using ineffective techniques. The right theory is a royal road to success.

I've recently come to believe that's all bullshit. That there isn't a right way of doing things, there are only different ways of doing things, and theories are optional, and that they have drawbacks as well as advantages; theories tend to blind you to ways of doing things that are not foreseen by the theory, and there *is* no real, true theory that correctly describes reality. Not even science.

So with that recent realization.... I come to look at the Forge. And I think that there are different ways of looking at what's cool with the Forge.

You can look at it as cool because they have built a new theory of RPGs. GNS Theory. The Lumpley Principle. Conflict vs Task Resolution. "Addressing Premise." All that stuff. You can say, "ah, finally, we have theory which ACCURATELY represents what gaming is really about. Now we can learn that theory and use it to design far cooler games than we possibly could have before, with our old inadequate incoherent concepts of what gaming was about!"

According to this understanding, it makes a lot of sense the way the Forge has tended to be run in later years, which is that whenever somebody brand new shows up to talk about things, one of two things happens. Either he presents raw data in terms of gaming experiences, which people use to talk about game rules in terms of the theory they all know, or else he tries to talk theory, and he is thrashed about the head until he gets it all "right." His first 50 posts will be met by "yeah, that's great, but we discussed that three years ago. Please read these sixteen tangentially related threads, in which we proposed and abandoned six sets of terminology. Don't you dare get mixed up and use the earlier rather than later terminology. That is so 2002. Once you get up to speed, we may deign to listen to you. But at that point it's not likely you'll remember anything you had to say." Hey, that's cool, if you're all about the theory. It seems brutal but it is necessary! Our theory which we've discovered and built is the important thing. It's truth, the reality about gaming we have discovered. Ignoring it leads you into sheer folly, into Illusionism or Impossible Things Before Breakfast or Icoherence or Abashed Simunarrativism or whatever the holy fuck. We are building a religion, we are building it bigger! We are straightening the corridors and adding more lanes!

Of course you also get people like Lumpley who is totally into GNS theory but also cares a lot about letting other people in on the act, and he makes his own forum and goes to a heck of a lot of trouble to present this to people in terms of real, lived, gaming experience, and to connect with them where they're at, and he's actually open to feedback from mere mortals and listens to what they say without spamming their asses with forge thread homework. And it doesn't hurt that he's an incredibly fine writer. And people do dig that. And that is cool.

But the snarky way I've described parts of this theory-positive reading of the Forge phenomenon makes it obvious that I'm not entirely thrilled with that way of looking at it.

The second way you can look at what's cool with the Forge is not that it came up with the New Right Theory about how games work, but that it broke through old assumptions about how games could work, by gathering together people who were going their own way. GNS theory is a part of that, not because it is right and the old ways are wrong (though there may be some points on which everyone would agree that that is the case), but because it presented a compelling alternative viewpoint which gave people a new perspective, and with a new perspective they started seeing new things. But it wasn't just the theory that did it -- it was the gloriously positive attitude that the Forge has had for creator-owned/indie RPGs of all stripes. (And that is Ron all the way, baby. I may seem down on Ron's theories and the way he communicates on the Forge sometimes but the value of his just generally pro-indie stance, which goes way beyond this theory or that, is hard to overstate.)

After all, the Forge has always been for and about creator-owned RPGs in general, not just creator-owned RPGs that happen to recognize somebody's pet theory. And some of the really cool early Forge games were made by people who weren't bigtime theory mavens. I don't think of Jared Sorenson as a huge theory ween. Nor James West (of whose art I am a total fanboy). I don't know how deeply Mazza and Holmes had drunk of the theory cup, but Universalis doesn't seem to me to be obviously implementing common Forge theory ideas. They were people out there making cool weird games that they liked, in their own way.

Hell, West created what many consider the ultimate minimalist Narrativist engine, the Pool, while thinking he was creating a Gamist game. The Pool is one of my favorite indie games. And Dan Bayn designed Wu Shu (another of my favorites) in blissful ignorance of GNS theory, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, as I said, I'm a sucker for theory, and I used to be all geeked about Forge theory. And I'm just... I dunno. I just am wondering if it's really that important. It's important in the minds and experience of people who have tied it to their real life gaming experiences (and that's one thing that has made Forge theory as good and helpful as it is -- the insistence on "actual play") -- but what if there are important things to learn about play which would be occluded or obscured by the assumptions inherent in Forgie ideas?

Or what if they just don't happen to be very relevant or helpful to the gaming a particular person or group wants to do?

Or what if the way they are presented doesn't happen to be a way that a particular gamer is able to usefully assimilate?

Or what if GNS theory is in its own way as limited and limiting as the vague conceptions of roleplaying that went before it?

I no longer trust theory the way I used to. I value ignorance and naivete in ways I didn't before. I am suspicious of judgments in ways I wasn't before.

I value the games and game designers of the Forge, and its culture and community, for different reasons than I did before. And some things about it that I valued before, I don't value so much anymore.

And yes, I'm probably exaggerated in these ideas. People who have suddenly realized a wrongheaded way they've been thinking for most of their lives tend to oppose it with unnecessary vehemence and enthusiasm. No doubt I'm there.

Man, I've been wanting to write this post for a while.

Unseen -- Episode 2

Man, I really didn't want to do a crazy write up like I've done for previous episodes. I started doing it and it almost destroyed me. Instead, here are the highlights.

Lost in a Forest

Robyn spent much of the episode in a strange dream-forest where she was chased and tormented by Whitney. She discoved that she is to be Odin's sacrifice. Virgil overcame his funk to figure out how Odin kidnapped Robyn out of his car... it was a magical portal. With Lewis's help, Virgil opened the portal and tried to rescue Robyn, who was being held in Whitney's basement, but was unsuccessful, and got cut by Odin for his troubles. Before the portal closed, Lewis tossed in a transmitter. Some ravens tried to cause them some trouble, but Agent Severin, from the shadows, used some heretofore unseen magical powers, from the glyphs that cover his arms. Lewis and Virgil found where the transmitter was... Whit's house. They busted in and interrogated him, only to hear a car racing off. Odin had Robyn. A car chase through Chicago ensued and ended on I-94 with Lewis using the "Banshee" and insane and untested sonic gun, which destroyed the glass in every car within a quarter-mile radius, and made Odin bleed from the ears. Odin jumped off an overpass, and a raven flew away. He had escaped, but Robyn was safe. Elsewhere, Sydney has discovered Lewis's bus and was very very interested. The Colonel was alerted that Agent Severin has taken part in a "breach of protocol." All's well that ends well at Julie's Place.

Next Time on Unseen:

- Fade in. Street sounds. Side of a brick apartment building. Through the window we see Lewis and Susan eating dinner, drinking wine. Sydney is watching them from a fire-escape, with her camera. A close up of her face. Her mouth is covered with a glyph covered hand -- glyphs like Agent Severin had...

- Twilight. A gothic church surround by old brownstones. Near the roof of the church, gargoyles. A shadowy shape moving between them. Glowing yellow, reptilian eyes...

- Afternoon - Robyn, in a baseball cap and sunglasses. At a cemetery, laying flowers on a grave.

- Close-up on a youngish Catholic priest, holding a crucifix before him, shouting something in Latin.

Oh, also it is Virgil's spotlight episode, our first one.

Now I Want Polaris

Ben posts a tiny excerpt and that little excerpt totally hooked me.

Reno 911 Meets D&D

I will call down a mighty reckoning upon you!

Direct link to video.

"Look, I've got about 10 points of I wanna beat you with a stick left."