Yudhishthira’s Dice

This started as a post on Fair Game, and as a series of responses on The Well of Urd and One Angry Polack, all of which I tell you to give a context on how this fits into the Blogsphere.

We’ve come a long way in game design. Some of the things people are talking about doing are breaking down RPGs and RPG theory into its component parts and rebuilding it from the ground up. Vincent is talking about shared characters and co-ownership, Ron is doing things combining real-life sins and character focus, Emily and Meg are talking about the character as imago vs. character as tool. We’re getting games that allow for more types of play than before: everything from Capes and Universalis to Breaking the Ice and Polaris are rocking the boat. And as our theory reaches out even beyond those marks we start to get into rougher shoals and people start to object.

A large reason why people start to object has to do with game damage, assumptions, and other roadblocks. “That isn’t how I’ve always played” is a thing we hear often. So is “I tried something like that once and it bit me.” We all know by now where I stand on this: The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Playing. Taking chances and pushing boundaries is a good thing, and going beyond your comfort zone can be as well. And in a hobby long dominated by dead-weight social conventions, fear of change, and the unexamined credo of “this is what gaming is” we have good reason to push for change.

However, it doesn’t end there. As we get farther and farther into the deep end of game theory, we are ceasing to talk about things that are about our views of game. We are starting to talk about things that are about our views of life.

When Mo and I started the whole MB typing thing, it was because we were starting to see issues in game theory land that weren’t just conflicts of game theory, but conflicts in the way people think and approach subjects. Do you want to think your way through game, or feel your way through game? Should game be about details or about themes? Should you get through game by cooperating or by competing? Should it go on and feel “real” or should it end and feel “authored” or one of a hundred other possible answers?

So today as I walk the rich talk going down on the Blogsphere, I start to see some issues coming up from some folks who are much brighter than I. Meg and Emily and Charles are on Fair Games talking about the need for conflict resolution at the player level vs. cooperative resolution at the player level. On one side of the possible extreme we have the idea that if we get out their naked and let the game do what the game does by the rules we’ve set up, we’ll create a good game through competition and the naked facing of ourselves and those we play with. On the other we have the idea that we need rules to help us work with each other so that we build something we all like without having to have anything stripped from us.

If this divide sounds familiar it should. It’s been a rather large deal in just about every sphere of life for the longest time. Do we get through life by cooperating, by competing? Some combination of both? Every time we get a high school coach trying to sell a concerned mother on the idea of her son playing a game where his job will be to crush another human being into the ground we see some of this. The mother thinks it might hurt her son, teach him bad lessons. The coach thinks it can only help.

Then over on the Well of Urd we get an excellent bit about character backgrounds and how we often get players coming to the table “finished” with a character. I, however, have to belabor a point (I always do) and point out that length of background has nothing to do with how “finished” a character is other than as a possible symptom of a deeper disease. This gets me thinking about Vincent’s recent talk about going into game without character backgrounds at all, and my thoughts about how in a movie you don’t start interacting with a character until the “play” starts. On the other side of this I have many of my friends who like some firm grounding of their character before they start play, because for them conflict arises from background.

Now, I bet we all know areas where this has been argued in writing textbooks and classes. (Egri, for example, tells you to do up a pretty damn complete profile of every important character you are going to use to address theme, while others tell you to only make things up as they become important.) However, it goes even beyond that and into discussions about how we interact with life in general. In rhetorical studies there are a lot of different theories about the best approach to take in different situations and with different audiences. There have, historically, been many rhetoricians who will tell you not to even go up to the counter to reserve a hotel room without a fully detailed plan and backgrounding going in. Then there are others who will advise that the best way to give a speech in front of your board of directors is to go in with your knowledge of the material and then use your honest expression in order to build an immediacy of appeal that will carry more emotional weight than a pre-written address.

So, we aren’t just looking at different ways of backgrounding characters here. We’re starting to move past those shallows and towards a deeper issue all together. How much of a creative endevor do you improvise? How much of life? Do you have a plan before you call to order pizza, or do you just do it as you talk?

Finally, I come upon Keith talking about the way that solid rules systems, especially in areas like IC social confrontations, allows everyone to participate equally and to have the same degree of fun – as opposed to the traditional “act it out” methods that allow social powerhouses to dominate the game. My response to him is that the rules certainly do readjust the power dynamic, but they don’t make it all equal. They just move the focus of power from those that can use unwritten (and unexamined?) laws to those that do better using codified and specific external systems.

What I didn’t get into, but I’m sure you can all see coming now, is that this isn’t just an issue of game support. In life there are multiple different takes on intuition and socialization and explicitly of procedure vs. organic structure that have influenced almost every level of our culture and civilization. So when we talk about favoring the explicit and external rules over the extemporaneous expression of a group of people, we are talking about a judgment not just about game, but about how we feel about those issues in life as well.

Same deal goes with my post about the Story of the Day and Naturalism in RPG narrative. As we change the way we tell stories we will be CHANGING THE WAY WE TELL STORIES. If you think that isn’t an issue of profound import in the way that people deal with the really real world and their relationship to it and each other, you haven’t been paying attention.

Now, as I’m a rhetorician it should go without saying that I think all things are contingent: so what you want from game isn’t necessarily what you want from the rest of life. Just because you want explicit system competition in game, does not mean you are an explicit system competitor in your family life. However, it does say something about you that you value one in one area of your life, and another in a different area. What it says I can’t tell you, you’ll have to figure that out for yourself.

So as we get deeper and deeper into game theory, we have to recognize that we’re getting into some deep waters of socialization, philosophy, and enculturation. We aren’t just talking about gamer damage, we are talking about paradigmatic views about the very way that life works. As we get deeper and deeper this will become more and more noticeable. As we start to develop games whose structural logic depends upon those playing it believing in communal resource sharing vs. capitalistic resource domination we’re going to start pushing at things that people will be even less comfortable with than issues like “GM or no GM?”

So as we go farther with this it is inevitable that we will come to cross purposes. Where we will build fully-functional, solidly designed, socially negotiated systems that do exactly what they want to do in exactly the way we want them to do it that will at the same time be absolutely unacceptable and unplayable to a vast number of people.

And I don’t mean “unplayable because they won’t give it a chance.” And I don’t mean “unplayable because it goes against what they think about game.” And I don’t mean “unplayable because of what their past games have made them.”

I mean “unplayable because of who life has made them.” And I mean “unplayable because it goes against what they think about life.” And I mean “unplayable because when they give it a chance it causes them active revulsion.”

When? Not now. Not long.

P.S. This is a good thing. Hearing about your game should suck.