Yudhishthira’s Dice

Over on anyway Vincent is, as usual, busy accidentally on purpose kicking over a hornets nest. There’s a lot of noise going on over there, and so I thought I’d step over here for a moment to say a few words that are indirectly related to what he’s talking about.

The first thing to say is: there is more than one way to “tell a story.” In fact, there are more than a hundred ways to do it. Between mode, audience, medium, and cultural variables the amount of things that go into making a story are massive. Even in RPGs you can play a very gamist game and end up with a story – and do so regularly. However, I think that in the far fringes of RPG theory land we’re coming to the point of going off into separate directions, and I think it could do well to look at those directions and some of the cultural and rhetorical stuff going on behind them.

First off “story play” and “storytelling” are very loaded terms, and very much given to value judgment and asshattery. So I’m going to try to stay away from them. All games can result in story, the question is how they go about doing that. Simulationism, for example, can make great stories – but Sim is more often concerned with making great experiences than great stories. It is more important that you get to do the thing and feel the thing in the moment than the construction of the story. That you got to climb the wall and rescue the princess is the point, not what the climbing and rescuing do in narrative structure terms, much less in moral statement terms*.

Then there comes Nar, which is assumed to be about addressing premise. This started off as a very character centered thing – you have a character, that character addresses premise, and through that builds theme and story. However, there is still a degree of essentially experiential creation of story going on in most first and second generation Nar games. That is to say, you now consciously think about the construction of the story, but you still construct it through your character.

Now Vincent, and others, are looking at taking some of that (all of that?) element out: they want you to interface with the construction of the story from an external POV. That is, you do not guide the story through character, you guide the story as an equal teller of the story. The game can have experiential elements to it, of course. Any writer can tell you that it is possible to get very into your own story. However, the point isn’t to “do this guy” or “push this guy” or to “experience this thing” it is, fully, to “tell this story as joint authors not tied to specific character elements.”

Understandably a lot of people have issues with this. It moves the whole “role playing” thing off the table. Really, in a hard-line version of some of the games Vincent is directing his platonic laser-pointer towards there wouldn’t be a huge amount of the experiential, of the playing or experiencing, the characters. It would be about constructing the story, rather than living the story.

Now, one of the reasons this is difficult is that our culture (not just gamers, most normal people too) have a rather odd relationship to story. We can all appreciate a good story, from Shakespeare to Spiderman 2, but we can’t all tell a good story of that type. And it is that last point that is important. Of that type.

Here is something Neel said on anyway:

“The games I run and play in aren’t stories. When we play, me make this gigantic tangled mass of narrative. There’s too much stuff in them to be a story. We make stories out of them, by taking a particular point of view, and highlighting some bits of the mass as important, and sidelining other things.

When you take a point of view to get a slice of the game, you get a story — protagonists, antagonists, and supporting characters emerge. However, you can slice a game in multiple ways, and get multiple stories. And in each slice, who the protagonists are is different. All from the same play session.”

That, I think, is the way a lot and a lot of people construct story for their game. It is a perfectly functional mode, and one that can construct story from multiple creative agendas. (Though different creative agendas will result in different ways and power dynamics of how the story is built, the story can still be there in the end.) One of the reasons this works so well is that its what we’ve learned to do over years of gaming: it goes well with the experiential mode and mixes the ability to “be there” and also “tell that” into one activity.

However, I’d say there is another reason that it comes easily to a lot of RPers. While we often lack the ability to tell a crafted story that is built from the ground up in our culture, we are very good at telling “the story of the day.” It’s something that a lot of people, gamers and non are quite good at doing. (It’s also something that many are quite bad at doing – but that’s not surprising. Remember, 90% of everything is crap.)

The “story of the day” is the anecdote, the funny or sad story, the appeal to joint humanity and call for emotional response that has come to dominate the field of oral storytelling in our culture. I’m a big story of the day teller, to the point that my friends, while endlessly entertained, often will turn to my wife and say “and what actually happened?” My semi-infamous Lancaster Saga is a written story of the day cycle. They work better when told orally then written, and have resulted in me having rooms full of people hanging on my every word for hours at a time. I’m a good storyteller, yo.

The thing is though, I’ll tell these stories that I’ve been telling for a while now, and then when I’m done someone who “isn’t a storyteller” and who didn’t practice will often step up and tell a story just about as good as the one I just finished. Shorter, usually, but quite complete as a story and very much in the mode of social-communion that oral storytelling is supposed to fill at the social level. People, normal people, can do this. People, normal people, are good at this. Despite the fact that they suck at trying to write a story or construct a novel.

The reason for this is that there are different skill sets getting applied. When you write a novel in a mode other than the expressionist, you are constructing and deliberately laying out a lot of plot work, a lot of external control, and creation from the substratum. OTOH, when you tell a story of the day you are taking events that really happened and simply making them coherent, taking an angle on them that semi-intuitively builds your narrative pattern based on a naturalistic model. You have too much stuff going on in real life to make a story, so you take a slant on it, highlight the important points, and then build them into a simple narrative. The rhythm of experiential events forms your skeleton, the highlighted events your muscles, and then all you have to do is apply the skin of your angle and intention to get a story.#

If you’re now saying that sounds a lot like what Neel wrote, you get a gold star.

Lots and lots of people can do this. They do it naturally. They do it instinctively. It is part of our cultures heritage of oral storytelling, and so being able to do that in the oral storytelling medium of RPGs only makes sense.

Now, what Vincent is looking to do is to divorce RPGs from that mode and move them more fully into the mode of “constructing a plot from the outside” – which is how most novels and screenplays get written. This will necessitate the development and support of a whole new set of skills, a set of skills that many people don’t have at all. What’s more, doing it collaboratively and as you go will require yet another set of skills – a set that even the great novelists and screenwriters of our day don’t necessarily have. They aren’t doing this real time, they’re able to move back and forth and pre-plan and pre-play as much as they like. We can’t do that, and so have a harder road to hoe.

Which doesn’t mean it can’t be done. In fact, I look forward to it. I’m excited by it. I think it can be done, and what’s more will be done. But I do understand how and why people get freaked about it. It is, fundamentally, not the same type of game as those that we’re used to playing and does not tell the type of story that most of us are good at telling.

Hell, it won’t be a type of story that anyone is good at telling. It will require a combination of skills from different areas (impro, dramatic writing, oral storytelling) that are pretty rare. Which just means we need excellent mechanical support to make it go, to give people who are interested tools to build new skills.

And for those who aren’t interested? No worries, and no value judgments. Our societies bourgeois power-discourse value system based on sellability is crap, and there is nothing inherently more valuable or worthy about writing a novel than telling a story of the day. No one is (or should be) saying that one is better than the other. What I am saying is that I like both, and have so far only been able to successfully and repeatedly do one – and I (and others) are now looking for ways to do the other.

Next: Myerrs Briggs game type test.

* Though it is worth noting that John Kim, and others, have pointed out that reflection upon experience based play like this can lead to celebration/reflection/meaning in a way not dissimilar to the anthropological understanding of myth-mysteries, so hey….

# One of the reasons that people who are bad at the story of the day are so bad at it is that they fuck up one of these levels: either they tell you all the details (screwing up the pacing for the whole event), don’t hit the right highlight events, or don’t take any angle on it and just spit out the unexpurgated contents of their minds at you. I leave the conclusions about how this interacts with RPGs and story creation to you.

In this example (written because Mo is running game tonight, so I don’t have to prep!) I’m going to take a situation and run it through two different ways: one with a pushing player, one with a pulling player. This may illustrate some of the difference between the modes, or it may cause more confusion as the particulars get in the way of the conceptual, but it seems worth trying.

The situation: It is a swords and sorcery universe. Dagon (played by Brand) and Suleiman (played by Ben) are both PCs in a GMed game of uneasy allies in the court of a corrupt wizard king. Suleiman has a beautiful sister, Marlina who has been eyeing Dagon. Both men suspect she may be a spy. This has caused several clashes between them in the past.

The Push: Brand decides that he wants Marlina dead. So he initiates a conflict in which he declares his goal being killing her. Ben objects, as the character is important to his character. He reacts and tosses in all the resistance he can offer to try to keep his sister alive. They have the contest, and Dagon wins with a minor victory. Marlina is horribly injured, but lives in critical condition. Now Suleiman is going to have a new action in response to what Dagon did. He can’t not but take a new action because of the things that have happened.

Why isn’t this a pull if Ben is reacting to what Brand did? Because Brand didn’t do it with Ben’s buy-in, he didn’t open up a space for Ben to step into. He pushed his way into a space, and he did it to get what he wanted out of the story. Now, because (we’ll assume) there is a functional social contract at the table, he’s excited about Suleiman’s counter-push, which will drive the story further onwards.

The Pull: Brand decides that he wants Marlina dead. So he proposes to Ben that Dagon kill Suleiman’s sister and that Suleiman finds out about it just too late to stop it, so that they will become enemies. Ben likes this idea of enemies, but doesn’t actually want his sister dead. So he suggests that Dagon try to kill his sister but fail, which alone will make sure that they have hatred. Brand thinks the idea is great, but wants to know if he gets stopped because Suleiman’s spy network alerts him in the nick of time or if it is because of Marlina’s innate vitality. Ben agrees, and they have a contest to see if Suleiman’s spy network gets him the information in time to stop Dagon (failure for Dagon) or if they fail, but Marlina survives because she is so tough (success for Dagon). They have the contest and Dagon wins, meaning that Marlina lives due to her own efforts, making Suleiman not know it is happening until too late, and adding the sting of shame of failure to the betrayal. So now Suleiman hates Dagon, and will take action against him!

This is a pull because Brand got Ben’s buy-in ahead of time. Ben is already good with what is going down, and so the question becomes about how it goes down rather than what happens. In the push example Marlina could have ended up dead if the result had gone down differently – as that was what Brand was pushing for. If he’d been more successful he would have gotten it. In this example, however, the real contest isn’t about his ability to kill the sister, it is about Suleiman’s ability to find out in time to stop it – making the story in this moment as much about Suleiman as Dagon, and both are moving together to see what happens.

Either way, push or pull, you now have an injured sister and a feud a brewing. The issue is about how and why it happened, and what the dynamic between the players around the table was. This is why it’s so frustratingly hard to take actual play examples and say if they are push and pull. Unless you know specifically what the negotiations and intentions around the table were, it can be damn hard to figure out if it was push or pull.

As you can see there are ways in which this isn’t really a new idea at all. People do things like the second example all the time. However, the ability to do such things is almost always only at the social level of the lumpley system. Because of that it can work or fail without the clear guidelines of mechanics or a lot of support from the book. But there does seem to be a lot of room in there to bridge the gap, and to make the pull more supported by the mechanics. What if Brand had been able to bribe Gary into going along with it, rather than simply overriding Gary or simply negotiating things out in advance? A lot of current systems do a good deal, either explicitly in the rules or implicitly in the tone of their text, to encourage the first. So how can we develop ways to encourage and actively support the second other than just saying “work together?”

There is also a lot of rhetoric used in design and play support circles that I have a feeling doesn’t match up to what happens at the table a lot. The Lord Macho Nar Yanger talked about this: he comes off pretty damn hardcore and pushy when he talks about play online – your ability to push and author and drive yee-haw! But, at his table, he probably does a fuck lot of pull. Its just that the current rules trends and rhetorical movements tend to support push and sound push (which Mo talked about in her first post, there is a lot of push at the Forge and similar places – not just in rules, but in the general level of interaction).

Now, this might be changing. In the past little while there have been several people looking at this, and putting forward mechanics to do what we’re asking about.

Lets take a couple of rules from actual games and look at what they support and urge in play. In these examples I’m using rules that are GOOD, on both sides, so anyone thinking I’m slagging anyone here is flat wrong.

Here is a bit of text from Nine Worlds (page 23 of the Artesia edition):

Here, we have two players disagreeing about “what happens next.” The player wants Alexander to escape Mars, but the game master wants Alexander to be caught by Atlantean pirates. So, the two state these intentions as their goals, and they begin to resolve the conflict. The winner will see his goal fulfilled; the loser almost certainly will fail to achieve his aims.

Now, as we know from Chris (more than once) the way that texts introduce us to ideas is important. Players reading this section of Nine Worlds get a message: this is how you deal with conflict and drama. You step up, you push your idea, and you win or lose based on the system resolution. For many players this is a wonderful change after years of being unable to push in their games (or, for that matter, being able to pull…) because in many trad games players are relegated to the roll of reactors, unable to push or pull effectively. And for those that like the “LEFT SIDE! STRONG SIDE!” of push, getting a game where you can push is manna from heaven.

(As a note, Matt does give a lot of info about the ways that you can do this kind of Push healthy and with support – with a lot of collaboration after the push. Nine Worlds is very well set up in that way.)

The thing, however, is that kind of reinforcement has been less strongly supported in many Nar games of the last generation for pull play. Pull play is, I think, assumed and lightly encouraged – but mostly as something to do on the social level, rather than something on the mechanical level. As a result in the energetic, directed rhetoric of the Forge and Indie games, it often gets relegated to a lesser level. It doesn’t get the support that push play does. Part of this is because many of the current generation of Nar players like push more. I do. For sure as fuck I do. Part of it may also be that push is more easily identified and seen as empowering after years of dysfunctional fuckmook play in trad games. But just as the pushers were FUBARed in those games, the pullers were too. And so….

There does seem to be a new wave of looking at ways to support more pull based play with mechanics and specific and implicit rhetorical stances. As an example look at this bit from anyway.

Now, contrast a system that works this way: if you win a contest you can force a flashback on another player – if you win the contest with the high card you can narrate it as well*. You can say if your character and theirs were allies or enemies, who is involved, and what is going on. If you do it well, the experience could rock.

But the social backgrounding and feel of the game would be different than what Vincent describes. In the mental-game he sets up, you have to get direction from another player in order to give direction to their character. There is automatic collaboration going on, as neither of you can push the entirety of what you want. You MUST work together to buy into each other before the resolution, because the mechanics don’t give you any other choice. Combined with a game that gives strong words encouraging collaboration and such, this could make a powerful statement for pull play.

Similarly, the several types of bribery mechanics (Matt and Christian) give examples of times where you have to work together, to entice each other to buy in before conflict resolution. You don’t push your will onto the game, you try to get others to buy into what you are doing by buying in to what they are doing. With the right support, this again could give pull players the kind of manna that push players get from Nine Worlds and similar games.

For many people these Pull mechanics will not be fun. For many they won’t seem to have a point as they’re doing things that they largely do because of the social part of the lumpley system anyway. But there is a significant section of gamers who, from the noise we’ve already heard about the idea, will find it as freeing as I found my first game of Dust Devils.

*As a note I think the “big hand wins, high card narrates” bit of Dust Devils is brilliant in the way it modifies and softens push play.

Okay, there’s been lots of discussion since Mo first started talking about push and pull. I’m going to try to put my thoughts on it in here, after talking with Mo and running this post by her, to deal with some of the confusion that’s come out of the mingled enthusiasm and misunderstanding that’s come from the posts. Sometime in the next few days Mo should be doing a companion post to this one that talks about push/pull in actual play that we’ve done or seen, which gives the practical grounding to this otherwise aetheric bit of jabber.

First, let me say that a lot happened with push/pull in a very short time. Mo started talking about it in terms of social dynamics: the way that players approach the process of making decisions in game. It then quickly morphed to become partly about techniques, ephemera, and ideas around how this may be codified in game and the ways in which games may have already mechanically reinforced one or the other. Some people hooked onto the social angle, some to the ephemera, some to the mechanics and some to he theoretical possibilities. So when they all started talking to each other there was a lot of miscommunication because they weren’t all talking about the same thing anymore. Maybe I can take a small step towards fixing that.

To start with the social level, which has to come before the mathematical game theory level in my brain because that’s the way the discussion started, let’s look at Mo’s comment about “a space to fall into,” as it has become pretty infamous. That one is an interesting social/rhetorical bit, and not one I see a lot of mechanics to point at in terms of providing clear examples. That one more has to do with the way that the person at the table is working with others in order to get their desired response. So, let me try to elucidate in terms of rhetorical strategies.

When you are in a debate, or giving a speech, the commonest method of getting your point across is to build your fortress of logic, maintain it against assault, and then wear down the opposition before you to drive your final point home and win the duel of wits. You point out the gap in their reasoning, and then fill it in with your superior logic. (Or just superior ability to manipulate through words, but lets assume some honesty for now.)

When you are a teacher, a parent, or someone trying to Rorschach someone else, however, there is another common method. You build your fortress of logic, move it forward to the point that it fascinated the other person, and then before you reach the final point you pull back and let them reach the final point all on their own. This is the stereotypical “So you know if A is B, and B is C, and C is a dog….” A moment passes, a grin “Then A is a Dog too!”

That first one is a push, you overwhelm their argument. That second one is a pull, you create a space and let the other person overwhelm themselves. Obviously sometimes one technique works better than another (you rarely change an entrenched opinion with the second, but it is far easier to build process understanding with the second than the first). That is what Mo was talking about, more or less, with the gap. You do still build something, you do still put ideas forward, but in the end you let the other person decide if they are going to buy into those ideas or not.

Now, at the start of the conversation the reason this is at a different level than mathematical game theory is that we are, for the nonce at least, talking about social dynamics that go outside the normal role of mathematical game theory. Let us take, for one moment, the prisoner’s dilemma. Those of you who know the logical structure will know that it does a very good job of describing the logical choices that the prisoners have to make. It lets you know what the strengths and weakness of each position are. It also doesn’t tell us a lot about why emotional human beings in real life chose as they do. We’ve all watched Law and Order, right? How often do the confessions have to do with the logical structure of “if I squeal and he doesn’t” and how often with “I’m gonna screw the bastard because he was screwing my wife” or something similar? Push and pull were not, initially, looking at the moves of the game in logical sequence – they are looking at the motives behind, and the methods around, ways of gaining and using influence.

There is a real way in which, when discussing P&P I’m reminded of something that Ron (I think) said about looking at the script of a finished game and trying to say if it was G, N, or S. Basically, he said that you couldn’t. Because GNS doesn’t have to do with if a story is told or not, it has to do with who got to say what, when, and why. So if you’re looking at the finished product, you’re looking in the wrong place. Same deal with push and pull – if you’re looking at a lot of statements after they have happened it can be really hard to tell if they are push or pull, because you have to watch the dynamics of it as they are ongoing. It isn’t so much about the result as it is about the power dynamics between the human beings that lead to that result.

So when on anyway Tony LB said that you couldn’t look at chess and say which move was push and which was pull that is because, by the rules at least, there is little pull in chess. You can bait someone in, but that’s just so you can spring on them and overwhelm them in the end. The point of chess is to push. The game theory of RPGs, however, is a little more complicated by the mix of modes and the interactions of people, stories, and power discourses. Even then you can push and pull outside the realm of game theory, in the social sphere (Illusionist GMs who are good at keeping the PCs from knowing they’re on the railroads are really good at it) – but with those understandings I think we can look towards some mechanics that may reinforce push and/or pull as viable ways to play the game.

Lets take a simple case at the mechanical level: Dust Devils vs Breaking the Ice. Both are very fine games, and both could not rock harder. I say this to dispell any lingering misconceptions that anyone is saying that pull is better than push or any such silly thing. Both are good, both have their place. They just are different ways to move things, is all.

In Breaking the Ice, you want Kate to love you. To do this you must convince Kate’s player that you’re doing cool things. You have no way of forcing Kate to love you. You have no way of forcing Kate’s player to give you bonus dice, or re-rolls. And yet you need those bonus dice and re-rolls, so you have to do things that please Kate’s player. You have to entice him to give you dice by doing things that please him. Similarly, Kate’s player cannot force you to do anything. He can suggest, he can entice, he can bribe you with dice — but in the end its all bribes and enticement.

The kick in the head about Breaking the Ice is that even if you entice each others dice out, you may still not have Kate fall in love with you. That is because in BtI the push all comes from the system. There are a limited number of dice, and a limited number of rolls. So even if you work it, you may fail in your mutual goal. That’s where the tension comes from. But both players pull all the way through. Neither gets to force anything on anyone at any time.

Now, otoh, in Dust Devils, you want Kate to love you. You start a conflict with the stakes “Kate falls in love with me.” If you win that conflict Kate falls in love with you. If you get high card, you get to say how Kate falls in love with you. This is push. You see what you want, you get it. (Or don’t get it, based on how the game goes.) By the rules the GM may or may not be able to refuse the conflict on its face, but once it starts (is accepted) he who wins, wins. If you push your system and take the stakes, regardless of what the others may want you to do, you can happily have Kate love you. You don’t have to entice points out of the GM, you don’t have to work to gain his approval. You pushed, you won, you get.

Now, there are obviously going to be social contract issues that mess with this. There are ways of others at the table pulling you back (or pushing you back), socially. There are also probably social pulls around the table where people sweet talk you into the ways you do and don’t handle your narrations (or social pushes, for that matter…). However, in the absence of a problem, you push, you win, you get.

So, in terms of mechanics working on their faces, there it is. At the grossest level of mechanics, pull means you have to bribe, entice, sweet talk, and lead someone by the nose to get them to where you want them. Push means you can bowl them over and take what you want, if you can win it. We already have lots of push mechanics, and people are starting to work on some nifty bribery based mechanics (like here and here) that show some of the possibilities for pull as bribery — you can tempt, you can build holes and step back, but you can’t force and take.

Now, I am certain that there are more subtle levels of push and pull – but the difference between gaining narration rights over someone else’s character, and bribing the player of that character to do what you’d like to see are at least a step towards the differentiation. It’s harder to do that “open a space” thing with mechanics, as of yet, because… well, because I’m not quick enough to think up a way to do it. I’ll bet money that it can be done though.

At this point there was once some talk about Capes that has been removed because it was grossly wrong and caused a lot of confusion. I feel a little bad about removing it, but it was not helping and was confusing the issue, so has been taken down. Thanks to Alex F for helping clear things up. The difference between push and pull in a game like this is the difference between forcing someone to address something and showing them something you would like them to address that they might also like to address. Guess which Capes does?

P.S. A note, thanks to alephnul, it is also possible to, in a more simple setup, just read a pull as a counter proposal with pre-acceptance. That is, something is on the table, the puller proposes that the other person fill the void, with the understanding that the new proposal is accepted. Thus when you pull in this mode you give something, and the other person does not have to push in response because there is no resistance to overcome. Essentially the pattern becomes “I love someone, tell me who it is” (proposal, judgement already made that your response will be accepted), “Well, it’s Kate!” (proposal, accepted on its face because the judgement that it was good enough was made before it was said).

When used in that way pull requires a lot more trust, openness, and vulnerability. It isn’t the only way to use pull, but it is a very strong statement when it is made. That is a pull of a very different kind than the “competetive pull” of Capes, or the coercive pull of a bribery system, and may point the way to a mechanic based “open up a space for them to step into.”

So, that’s four games with mechanics, some social backgrounding, and ideas about bribery and opening holes. What do I need to do next guys and gals?

When I was in Aikido years and lifetimes ago, we would frequently get new members of our class of all stripes and walks of life. Almost inevitably there would soon be a white-belt group that included someone who had never really fought before and someone who had some training in boxing or experience in street fighting. And many, many times the streetfighter would have a harder time the first several months than the newb. Many of them would walk out of class cursing, knowing they could kick the newbs ass in a real fight — but unable to keep their balance right durring a crossover.

You get the same deal in any number of formalized skills when teaching a person with ad-hoc or talent based training. Same deal with retraining established patterns from one formalized skill to another. Where the newb only has to learn how to walk, the experienced guy has to unlearn how to walk, then relearn it from the ground up.

It occurred to me recently how much of the discomfort many of us feel towards innovation in RPGs is due to this process. When you go from being a stud to being a suck who is FUBARing every other game it really bites. It makes you wonder why the hell you’d even want to put yourself through this.

I know I went through this when going from my old Illusionism to my now healthier and more Nar based GMing habits. Hell, I’m still going through it. I recently managed to utterly FUBAR a game of Nine Worlds because in the midst of a game that fully and powerfully supports a Nar agenda I fell back into task-resolution-as-railroading mode. It was bloody awful and humiliating.

(Want to see what happened visually? Thanks to John Harper of the Might Atom, I can show you. In Nine Worlds you should do this:

and I did this:

FUCK IT WAS UGLY.)

The thing about it is that I’ve been willing to do it, and continue to be willing to do it, because I knew myself well enough to know I wasn’t happy with what I was doing in game. I am now becoming happy with what I am doing in game. So really, I sold myself on the idea.

However, there are lots of others out there not sold. Many don’t need to be sold – they actually are happy with what they are doing now. Bully for them. There are others, however, who are not happy and either won’t admit it or can’t bring themselves to change it. It’s gonna be hard, and they probably know that.

So how do we sell people who need but fear change on taking a chance and following through on that change? Dogs has done a pretty decent job here by hiding how much the game will change your play until after you’ve played it. Burning Wheel as well. Actual Play posts have also done wonders, and Paka managed to get me into Dogs with his AP posts.

But besides making games that are good for cross over, in what other ways can we convince people that taking the plunge is worth it? Especially when you’re trying to convince people who have already changed once, who now are balking at changing again. (I’m thinking of those who’ve come to games like Dogs, and are now looking at issues of playerless and playerful and GMless play and pull instead of push games and going “THE FUCK!?”)

Is it really something they have to come to for themselves, or are there ways to finesse it?

Or, in other words, how do we sell things that people may really want, but don’t want to admit that they want?

Or should we even try?

Every time I read part of the ongoing argument about “are RPGs art or not” my immediate reaction is “what the hell do you mean by art?”

See I’m a post-positivist, a social constructivist, and a neo-Marxist. So when I hear the word art I do not instantly think of subjective purposiveness without a purpose, or any Kant, Hume, or Socrates. I think “power.” Art is a loaded term. Art is a word used to give value to one human endeavor or activity above another. Art is a way of saying “This thing is important to my stance on the human social condition and gives/takes power away from the part of society I inhabit.”

This can be anything from Du Bois’s “”Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists …” to the Frankfurt school’s contrasting of “mass culture” with “high culture” and “folk culture.” (The short version of which is “pop” then “art” then “craft” as judgmental terms meant to divide power along class lines – the rich and powerful decide what is art, pop is given to the mass of the middle class, and the things pursued by those without the cultural capital to enforce their taste on a large or marketable segment of society are relegated to the place of “folk crafts.”) For me personally the biggest influence on my thought is probably Gramsci and his take on art’s role in hegemonic distribution. Art, he says as I do, is something that people use in order to make everyone else accept their cultural power plays. If it is art, after all, you are a bad person if you try to stop it, a pig if you don’t understand it, and a bore if you try to dismiss it.

So every time I see these discussions I don’t start thinking, “Well what would Kant say?” I think “Why is it that we do and do not find RPGs worthy of giving them a title of power and prestige?” So I watch the arguments, and look for the power dynamics behind them.

Many gamers who answer “yes” are saying “I believe that games are worthy enough to be given the social position of privilege and power because they are important to my life and I don’t want to feel like a loser. Its art because that makes me important.”

Many gamers who answer “no” are saying “I believe that games should just be fun, and I don’t want to take them seriously. If I have to admit that the games I play might say something about me, then I’ll feel weird.”

So, with all that context, my answer to the question of “are RPGs art” is: “Yes” and by that mean “I believe that games are worthy enough to be given the social position of privilege and power because they are fun and they are play, and fun and play are very worthy things.”

Remember why I titled this blog? Because empires rise and fall upon games. Religions are based around fun and its place in humanity. Games create fun, and they have the potential to do so in a non-commercial*, personal, and individual way. That is wonderful. That is fun. That is serious. That is Art, because I want it to be important. Not because of some real an sich disembodied judgment of quality, but because it is a statement of social construction that I consider worthy of making.

Folk craft my ass.

*Think for a few moments about the folk-craft vs. pop culture vs. art implications of the Forge’s emphasis on owner creation and distribution. No, seriously.