robotnik2004 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
robotnik2004) wrote2003-01-25 01:00 pm
robotnik2004) wrote2003-01-25 01:00 pm
Entry tags:
Off the Wagon
I've gone a couple of weeks without posting about RPGs, so I guess I can fall off the wagon now. Hell, I'm not even going to use LJ-cuts to spare the fainthearted. Watch me choke up your Friends pages with my geekiness! Moo ha ha ha haaa!
First, the following salvo from Ron Edwards, author of Sorcerer and Grand Moff Tarkin of the jargon-spouting indie gamers over at The Forge.
Why does role-playing culture not talk about its primary, defining activity? Oh, we talk about anticipating the experience, about buying and owning the games, and about playing them in the abstract, but rarely, if ever, about what we do while actually playing them—their content that we create. The literal act of role-playing is not a part of gamer culture, as we mainly discuss its trappings (the book, the system, industry gossip) rather than "what happened" during play.
Even when we do discuss the play itself, more often that not, the content is incoherent: "My guy did this, my guy did that," deep inhale, "and then he did this." Such talk may even turn into a litany of die rolls, punctuated by enthusiasm for what is, after all, a predictable outcome. ("And then, I got a 20!") If role-playing really were what it sounds like when described, it would be a worthless and pathetic thing.
This situation should change, if not in the overall culture, then at least in the experience of individuals. Role-playing is not perversion, we are not weird or fringe because we enjoy it, and frankly we should start behaving accordingly.
Comments, queries, cheers, jeers?
First, the following salvo from Ron Edwards, author of Sorcerer and Grand Moff Tarkin of the jargon-spouting indie gamers over at The Forge.
Why does role-playing culture not talk about its primary, defining activity? Oh, we talk about anticipating the experience, about buying and owning the games, and about playing them in the abstract, but rarely, if ever, about what we do while actually playing them—their content that we create. The literal act of role-playing is not a part of gamer culture, as we mainly discuss its trappings (the book, the system, industry gossip) rather than "what happened" during play.
Even when we do discuss the play itself, more often that not, the content is incoherent: "My guy did this, my guy did that," deep inhale, "and then he did this." Such talk may even turn into a litany of die rolls, punctuated by enthusiasm for what is, after all, a predictable outcome. ("And then, I got a 20!") If role-playing really were what it sounds like when described, it would be a worthless and pathetic thing.
This situation should change, if not in the overall culture, then at least in the experience of individuals. Role-playing is not perversion, we are not weird or fringe because we enjoy it, and frankly we should start behaving accordingly.
Comments, queries, cheers, jeers?
no subject
"Dirk Steele spat the cigarette from his KFC-encrusted lips. He drew his .45 from its holster. He shot the bad guy. The end."
And novels which allow for an inner narrative:
"Dirk Steele had mother issues. He shot the bad guy. The action filled him with a sense of ennui, and the smell of the gunpowder reminded him of taking tea with Auntie Madge in Prague. The end."
Is this a deliberate aesthetic choice, so that gamers can distance themselves from their personal connection to characters and events which, let's face it, we've all thought about as if they were real people and happenings? Is it that RPG-ers tend as a group to be form-oriented? *puzzle*
---Cleopatra Jones
Re:
no subject
Suddenly...
You're right about form and content, though there are certainly RPGs that try to bring in the interior life of the characters - and in so doing "mechanize" that interior life in an interesting way - Sanity points, Humanity meters, and so forth - I wonder how many gamers there are that have projected these mechanics onto their own psyche (the way we say "SAN loss!" from time to time). But the discourse (hee) that's really rare is, strangely, that which acknowledges the artifice of the whole game process. RPGers (post 1990s anyway) do talk about Dirk Steele's mother issues. What they don't talk about (much) is, um, the relationship between the form of the gaming session and the content of the game: What the GM had planned and what he made up on the spot. Why the players ignored clue X and went to clue Y. Why player A was fiddling with the Playstation while player B was working out Dirk Steele's mother issues, but both A and B were rapt with attention while C took tea with Madge in Prague.
Lots more one could say about this, but I think I hear somebody coming...