World of Design: The Lost Art of Making Things Up

In a previous article I shared differences between entertainment media and how it feels imagination is less often required of people today. What changed?

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

The most important thing that we've ever learned--the most important thing we've learned as far as children are concerned--is never, never let them near a television set, or better still just don't install the idiotic thing at all. It rots the senses in the head. It kills imagination dead. It clogs and clutters up the mind. It makes a child so dull and blind. He can no longer understand a fairy tale in fairyland. His brain becomes as soft as cheese. His thinking powers rust and freeze. He cannot think he only sees! –Mike Teavee, by Danny Elfman, from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

With most forms of entertainment you need to use your imagination because there are things missing that you have to add in. Games are part of that. You need to imagine things that aren't actually there. How much imagination you need depends on what kind of entertainment.

“A Fairytale in Fairyland”

Let's differentiate imaginative play from an unfettered imagination, which is wild imagining separated from reality, with imagination in the service of problem-solving or real-world entertainment. This kind of thinking is something we learn early as children but society gradually becomes considered “daydreaming” as adults, a negative connotation. As such, an unfettered imagination tends to be the domain of children who have more time and freedom to imagine. But even in childhood play, things are changing.

“It Clogs and Clutters up the Mind”

For example, with video games much less imagination is required than with tabletop games, because the video game can show so much more (now with photo-realism). There's a tendency these days to expect games and life in general to be highly attractive. We expect movies to be extravaganzas with lots of computer-generated special effects. We can even make a young Arnold Schwarzenegger as in Terminator Genesys.

These are all aids to imagination. As a result, imagination is no longer required nearly as much in play as it was before, due in no small part because of corporate branding. Kids don't just get a set of race cars and have to imagine the rest. Instead they get cars from the movie Cars, or go-karts from Mario Kart, and so forth.

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is an example of the power of imagination. Originally it was a radio program in Britain, which I happened to hear when I was living there in the late 70s. Then it was brought to TV (same actors), then it was a book, then a series of books, then a radio program again, and then a movie, and somewhere in there I suspect there were video games as well. I've always thought the original radio program was more entertaining than the movie or even than the books.

As the history of Dungeons & Dragons has demonstrated, there’s money to be made in creating content. In the past, it was expected that tabletop board games have lots of attractive artwork and bits, often miniatures. The less multimedia a game has, the more imagination required. This is in part a shift for Fifth Edition, which placed “theater of the mind” as a viable playstyle that involves descriptions only and no board or miniatures. Theater of the mind eschews props, but they can easily become a substitute for imaginative descriptions. For example, I rarely use miniatures (but do use a board and pieces); yet many people won't play without them.

“He Cannot Think He Only Sees”

When we stop using our imagination, we are no longer “thinking” but only “seeing” – processing information instead of creating it. In comparison, it seems to me that imagination is used less in gaming than it used to. The sandbox style of play in D&D is very much associated with the old school renaissance (OSR) and thereby older adults. But perhaps it’s just shifted online. Children play Minecraft and Roblox, worlds in which players are encouraged to create something from nothing.

The tension behind open world video games is that it costs money to create them. Emergent play by playing in a sandbox-style world is risky; players may have an amazing experience by interacting with randomly generated monsters and other players, or they may find it boring and quit. Given the upfront investments in these types of games, it’s critical that they have a means of getting players to keep paying and coming back for more. One way is to brand them, which is why corporations want to create branded worlds that have a unique intellectual property. In video games, subscriptions are one means of guaranteeing repeat play and therefore access to the imaginative world.

In tabletop games, designers can try to help player imagination but the ultimate decisions about a designer’s work are with the publisher, not the designer. Because aids cost money. Of course if the designer self-publishes then the designer decides how to spend money in order to get aids to imagination. Since tabletop publishers can’t “turn off” your imaginative play, they can instead produce pieces of a world that you must buy one book at a time, or explore one adventure at a time ("modules").

Modules often provide player maps and other visual aids. The popularity of modules can even be argued as a failure of GM imagination. To be fair, it's also a matter of convenience in a world that poses a great many calls on one's time. Even if you do buy an adventure, the imagination of the DM and players is still required. No two games run from the same published adventure are alike.

In my opinion, the ability to use imagination has atrophied from lack of use due to changes in media. Can we do anything to change it as individual game designers? Probably not. The best we can do is keep producing and hope that tabletop games continue to offer something no other medium can provide: unfettered imagination.

Your turn: Do you see a difference in how gamers today use their imagination in tabletop play?

 

[pemerton]

I think a barrier to being able to use imagination in some tabletop games is a drastic difference in what "makes sense" (even in the context of a fantastical world) from the perspective of a player's imagination versus what "makes sense" in the context of how the game is built.

For example: Most people have some general idea that being surrounded while in combat tends to be bad. However, my D&D 4E character was built around the idea that having as many enemies around me as possible was a good thing. I understand this because of experience with the game and understanding the mechanics and design mentality of the system, but it runs counter-intuitive to the general ballpark of how I believe most people would imagine approaching a fight.

<snip>

I'm not saying that a fantastical world needs to adhere to reality. However, I do believe that some common ground is helpful for an audience from whom a game wants imaginative thought and in-game engagement of the in-world narrative.

<snip>

A better example might be a player trying something "cool" in combat. For example, maybe they attempt to throw a rope and snare a fleeing enemy's legs -causing them to fall down. Or maybe they're a fighter using a shield, and they want to bash the villain with a shield to subdue the villain. Those ideas seem heroic or like something they may have seen in an action movie. Unfortunately, the game says that ropes are an improvised weapon, so attempting it means no proficiency bonus and you're rolling at a penalty which is impossible to produce success at your current level. In the case of a shield, the game might say you can't even attempt that without a special class ability or a feat. So, failure after failure while attempting to use imaginative ideas leads to the player eventually thinking it terms of what the game says is correct rather than what the player imagines.

Anecdotally, I've seen a lot of new players start with the first expectation and trying to come up with an imaginative solution, but eventually learn that how they would normally imagine a situation doesn't match up with how the game says they should be thinking.

I found this hard to follow. My intuition is that using a thrown rope to cause a fleeing person to fall down is fairly improbable, at least without specialist training. It seems like a "special move" comparable say to Wong Fei Hung fighting with an umbrella. Being able to take down all your foes when they surround you is also a special move (eg Captain America ricochets his shield from one to the next). So having built your 4e PC with a special move/feature, I don't get why you found it counter-intuitive or hard to imagine.

 

[pemerton]

What sort of imagination are we concerned with, in relation to RPGing?

There is the role of imagination in action resolution. There are different ways to support this. I saw quite a bit of this in Rolemaster play, because the players - especially players of spell users - have a wide range of ways open to them to change the fiction. Some of that is mechanical - eg clever spell combinations - but a lot of it is playing the fiction directly, relying on the fact that the system has the ability to translate unexpected fiction into mechanical outcomes where necessary (eg via the use of crit tables, or the move/manoeuvre table).

I also saw a lot of this in 4e play. 4e characters don't have the same lists of abilities as a mid-to-high level RM spell user, but the rules for translating even wild or gonzo fantasy moves into mechanical consequences are second-to-none.

Of the systems I've played, the one I would say that provided the least support for imagination in action resolution was AD&D: it doesn't provide the same range of ways to affect the fiction as a RM spell user has, and it doesn't have robust mechanical tools to support translation of imaginative play into mechanical consequences.

In RPGIng there is also the role of imagination in establishing and directing the "story", the sequence of events in play. The main threat to this, in my view, is GM pre-authorship of the fiction. This has been a thing in RPGing for a long time. There are well-known and robust approaches to RPGing that enable story to be a big part of play without anyone needing to pre-author it. Some of the best games for this sort of play are relatively recent, and so I don't see this imaginative dimension of the hobby to be under any threat either.

 

[Argyle King]

I found this hard to follow. My intuition is that using a thrown rope to cause a fleeing person to fall down is fairly improbable, at least without specialist training. It seems like a "special move" comparable say to Wong Fei Hung fighting with an umbrella. Being able to take down all your foes when they surround you is also a special move (eg Captain America ricochets his shield from one to the next). So having built your 4e PC with a special move/feature, I don't get why you found it counter-intuitive or hard to imagine.

The rope was just something I picked. The game says it doesn't work, so it doesn't.

I agree that it was a special move. Though, it's another example of the game being built around different ideas of what "makes sense" than what would "make sense" in most other contexts. My comments aren't meant to pick on 4E; I could have picked a lot of editions of D&D (or Pathfinder) because they have similar issues. To someone familiar with the expectations of the game, it makes sense. Anecdotally, it's been my experience that it doesn't make sense to most new players (before they are taught by the game to think differently). As said in my previous post, I -personally- did not find it hard to imagine because I was (at the time) familiar with the game's expectations. While I enjoyed the game, I had to retrain my brain to understand what the game dictated made sense rather than how I would otherwise imagine things going.

The rope example becomes worse if you're playing 3rd Edition or Pathfinder beyond about level 5.

A better 4E example might be that it was -per the rules- better to stay in a crocodile's mouth than attempt to escape. The effect of being grappled had no impact on the in-mouth PC's ability to fight. Yes, you were taking damage every round, but it was (IIRC) far less damage than the initial bite attack which initiates the grapple.

Depending on my expectations, imagining that might be better or worse. Imagining a fantasy scenario? It's a bit strange. If I'm imagining something with more of a mythic or superhero edge, it makes a little more sense. If I'm imagining a comedic take on combat, I think it fits.

Another example would be the classic archetype of a knight on horseback. It's a common fantasy trope to charge the big monster in a blaze of glory; imagining that isn't difficult. It kinda works as a paladin (or maybe a ranger). Otherwise? A mount tends to be more of a liability. Even worse, depending on what game is being played, spending money on that liability means not having the items or abilities the game says should be had at a certain level. I see that as a conflict between what a player would imagine versus what a game says is appropriate.

Is fantasy reality? Again, no. But I would posit that having a shared baseline understanding is good for imagination and buying in to a narrative.

The reason I brought up wrestling is because it is a similar fictional portrayal of an exaggerated reality. It is a type of fantasy. However, despite being fantasy, it tries to start from a baseline of being "real" which the audience can understand, imagine, and buy into. As more steps have been taken to move away from that baseline, viewership and audience participation has objectively and measurably trended downward. The audience which remains tends to be those who view it through the lens of it being more "game" than those who suspend belief and buy into the narrative.

I believe something similar happens in tabletop gaming and the ability of players to view characters as more than game pieces. In the context of gaming, the trend is not (I think) less players, but I think there are commonalities in terms of how those who play now view gaming through a different lens.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

I think that from one perspective. Roleplaying gamers as a group often feel much less imaginative than they did back in the AD&D days. Obviously, this subjective opinion is heavily weighted to my preferences and experiences, and is particularly focused on DMs.

To me the two things that have robbed the game of much of the imagination I'm looking for is the advent of the Adventure Path and the increased focus on the mechanics of the game. While we enjoyed certain adventures early on, the last "new" adventure I recall being really excited about was The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun. We played through all of the classics back then, but the larger percentage of what we played were adventures (and sometimes world) created by the DM. More often than not that was me. That was because that was 'the way you played the game' as I learned it from Holmes Basic/AD&D and Keep on the Borderlands. Keep on the Borderlands was a huge influence because it included civilization, several unrelated encounters, a large pre-prepared dungeon, and space set aside for the DM to expand upon in that vein. And that was the key - that the DM was responsible for expanding upon any published material.

For a published adventure, such as Tomb of Horrors or Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, the expansion was in the world around the adventure (whether home-made or based off of the bare-bones World of Greyhawk). But most of the time we were also running in adventures that were created by the DM as well. Preparations were also sparse, in part because the players/PCs rarely did what was expected.

The first experience we had with what would later be an Adventure Path style approach was when we tried to play the Dragonlance modules. That didn't last very long simply because we didn't like having to try to conform to a story that had been largely determined by somebody else. While the Against the Giants that led into Descent Into the Depths of the Earth had a 'story' element, it was really just a thread. Clues that there was something more, but there really wasn't a well-defined narrative.

We felt much more at home in the Forgotten Realms where adventures were much smaller in scope, easy to drop in, but largely unnecessary and, most importantly, the right kind of materials were released in large amounts. Lore, lore, and more lore. Things to help make the world feel like a real, living place, but otherwise left almost entirely up to the DM and the players to provide the narrative elements.

In short, imagination was of the highest importance in this approach, especially for the DM. The downside is that the job of the DM seemed a bit nebulous, mysterious even, and largely outside of the reach from the perspective of most of the people I played with. 'I could never do what you do,' was a common comment.

The Adventure Path, of course, greatly simplified this. The DM didn't have to worry about world design or consistency, nor tying together the setting with the whims of the PCs. I know some people who loved the Dragonlance modules specifically because they could essentially play out the novels. To us, it was too restrictive, and too unimaginative. Heck, we played D&D even when we didn't. Going for a hike in the woods? We don't need dice or rules, we can do the same thing as long as the DM has a good understanding and the players trust they will adjudicate fairly (and relatively consistently with the results you'd get with dice).

2.5e (Skills & Powers/Combat & Tactics) ushered in what would be very similar to the core of 3e, with more of a focus on mechanics. Instead of imagining yourself as another person living in another world, the focus started shifting to a collection of (largely combat-focused) special abilities, and optimizing to better 'win' the game. This started shifting things more toward the game side of roleplaying game. It also encouraged the splatbook. New races, classes, abilities, etc. as a substitute for imagination. In the quest to differentiate one character from another, people wanted more choices, to mash together in different ways. At least until the 'trap' and 'optimal' combinations are discovered and posted.

Did these really rob us of imagination? Not really. You can run the same sort of game with AD&D, BECMI, 3.5e, 5e and even 4e. All of the elements are present in all of these editions, although the rulesets themselves have different levels of focus on the different aspects. Furthermore, the AP and more mechanical focus makes it a much easier game to pick up, learn, and play.

I suspect that there are still loads of people that play in a way that leans more toward what we are looking for, although maybe not all playing D&D, but their numbers are now dwarfed by the tens of thousands playing a more casual game that is closer to how they play other games - learn the rules and follow them, rather than a focus on populating and writing the stories of these people in a great imaginary world.

And that approach is, in my opinion, brilliant. For a mass market game, the 5e design is right on the money for what is a complex game different than just about any other type of game people would have played otherwise. Sure, it bears elements and similarities to complex board games, card games like MtG, and video games. Many of those elements originated in RPGs too. But RPGs can be far more open in both game play and rules than any of those other types of games. My only criticism is that perhaps the possibilities of that more imaginative and open game is not promoted as well as it could be. But the reality is that we all play at different skill levels, including our imaginative skill. I'm pretty poor at the 'acting' type of roleplaying, but that doesn't mean I lack imagination, just that particular skill.

As for things like art, visual aids, minis, and other such tools? I think they are all enhancements to spurring the imagination. They help with the immersion within the imaginary world which is only a good thing.

 

[Von Ether]

I point to Appendix N ... and Hobbits ... and Deities and Demigods, 1st printing.

Gamers steal and mishmash their media since the beginning so the more things change ...

When I teach newbies, I describe CRPGs like movies. You got a visual feast, but things have limits due to budgets and technology.

ttRPGs are more like reading a book, though, you use your mind for the visuals and the "computer," the GM, is only limited by their imagination.

 

[Hussar]

Video games aren't as void of creativity as one might think...

Yeah, I have to admit, that's kinda the first thing that I thought of.

Or, something like Seven Days to Die. Or various other games which give you tools to create within the game. The line between video games as games and video games as toys is getting blurrier by the minute.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There is a reason we have those discussions. Socrates wasn't entirely wrong in that it changed how humans thought (and certainly must have impacted creativity).

And if that were the only or even the most important point made, I would agree with you. But the core point made, every time the fear of new media arises, is that the new media are simply bad. Writing makes us incapable of thinking, because it causes us to only interact with dead ideas, not living ones. Mass access to paper makes us incapable of communicating in the classroom, as we dirty ourselves with chalk dust and use a consumable medium. The radio makes us disconnect from each other, the television makes us incapable of envisioning things, the calculator makes us incapable of doing math, the computer makes us incapable of creative thought itself.

Once you strip out that core point of the above article, what remains? The whole introduction (and final conclusion) is that modern media atrophies imagination. What other possible point could there be to the statement: "When we stop using our imagination, we are no longer “thinking” but only “seeing” – processing information instead of creating it"? The only possible point that could remain is, "Using tools (e.g. visual media, 3D modelling, etc.) changes the way we think." But this is vacuous; of course the presence of more sensory information is going to change the kinds of thoughts we have. If it didn't, we would be insensate in both senses of the word: incapable of observing, and incapable of thinking.

Either the OP's point is just wrong, because new media do not atrophy imagination, or it is vacuous, because ALL new things change how we think, media or otherwise.

I mean it is without doubt that it impacted our ability to remember things (you don't have to remember information as much if you can look it up in a book). I think there is always a change that comes with any massive media advance (the printing press, the radio, the television, certainly impacted the way we approached things creatively, and the way we interacted with one another).

Actually, it is quite with doubt that it has impacted our ability to remember things. The only thing you can say without doubt is that it has affected our desire to remember specific kinds of things instead of others. Having the written word, audio and later video recording, etc. has changed how we evaluate things for remembering. But we still have astounding women and men memorizing things, both written and spoken. Consider how much of a badge of honor it is among nerds like us (who play TTRPGs) to memorize Monty Python sketches--which are almost exclusively memorized from their sound, not the written words (not least because comedic timing in the spoken word is very different from the written one).

There is going to be good and bad in that, and there is going to be a period where we adapt to the new technology. I think social media has given us many wonderful things, but it does have downsides.

Seeing as how the author never mentioned social media, and was instead talking about visual aids and video games, this feels more like you have read a number of meanings into the text that may not actually be present.

But one change I do see is a growing homogenization of creativity, and a tendency to create in anticipation of snark and a narrow range of critiques that gain traction online.I think it is also creating more of a conformist culture as well (especially in the arts).

I'm honestly not sure why you'd think that. Consider the creative uses of touchscreen elements (Nintendo DS), the rise of indie gaming with a variety of creative concepts (Minecraft; Supergiant Games' Transistor and Pyre; trans-genre games like Crypt of the NecroDancer), and even here at home in the TTRPG world, the creative design that's gone into relatively recent things like Apocalypse World (and all its PbtA children) and 13th Age (what with its Escalation Die, OUTs, and solutions to other thorny design questions).

Our--humanity's--art is not conformist on the whole. We are just as vibrant and creative today as we have ever been. You just have to know where to look--and be willing to consider things as art that maybe you wouldn't have five, ten years ago. Yes, there is a frustrating tendency from mass media markets to pander to nostalgia, but there has always been such a tendency as long as there have been people to pine for works of an earlier time. Yes, there's tons of shovelware and derivative crap....because, again, there always has been as long as there have been people to make things, we just have many many times more people to make them, AND many more of the people we have now have a chance to actually make something.

This is why I dismiss the OP's article. Not out of chronological snobbery--"oh, he's just repeating an ancient Greek idea, how quaint!"--but because the core point has always been fallacious, creativity and new media have never been the death of any part of our ability to do, and be, what is human as implied here. They have led to change, yes, and adapting to that change can take time. But none of these things gives credence to the idea that the youth have been corrupted and atrophied by the new tools and ideas that arose after the OP grew up.

 

[Hussar]

@Bedrockgames, AIR, has argued that things like social media leads to a lessening in the number of concepts that can be presented in RPG's. What he fails to understand is that it's not less, just different. Sure, you don't get prurient line art that's titilating to a 13 year old boy, but, instead, you get depictions of non-CIS couples in mainstream modules. Something that 30 years ago would have gotten the game banned faster than any amount of demonic scare.. Not less, just different.

 

[Haffrung]

As far as kids go? Nowadays, it might be Cars and Star Wars, but in old days it was Lone Ranger, Captain Midnight, etc. Sometimes it feels like kids are lacking in imaginative play. Not sure. But Lego is still super popular, so that's a good sign.

Actually, lego is a prime example of the decline of imagination. The overwhelming proportion of lego kits today are basically modelling kits. The picture of what you're supposed to build - almost always an object from lego's licensing partners like Star Wars or Harry Potter - is right on the box. The instructions are inside. Kids build the cool thing from that cool movie they saw, and then break it up and buy another kit. That's lego's business model today.

I'm not sure creativity itself is in decline. Modern tools can help people with music, artwork, adventure design. Give them access to advice and resources.

However, it seems pretty clear that imagination, that is literally creating images in your mind, has been in decline for decades. With the transition from a literate culture to an image-centric culture, we no longer needed to use internal tools to make pictures. Since TVs became commonplace, we've had all the images we need piped directly into our minds. So the neural networks responsible for creating those images internally have atrophied, or never been developed in the first place.

You can see this in fiction. Novels written in the mid-20th century were far more descriptive - part of the author's job was to conjure detailed pictures of landscapes and action in the minds of the readers. Whole pages were devoted to descriptions of a house facade, dusk deepening in a forest, the carriage of a train. That's no longer the case. Descriptive passages in fiction today are far less common or detailed.

In RPGs, this has meant that setting, and describing that setting, has become less prominent. Compare Gygax's lengthy outpourings of purple prose - whole paragraphs describing the eerie appearance of natural underground caverns - with the far more utilitarian and sparse descriptions in adventures today. You can read pages long reviews of RPG campaigns today, reviews that cover presentation, formatting, plots, NPC backstories, tactical challenge, etc., that barely talk about the physical environment that the adventure takes place in. The sense of immersion players might get from a ruined city, how evocative the mountain stronghold of the giants is - this doesn't fit into the dozen or so adventure elements reviewers opine on.

The confusion around exploration mode highlights the disconnect with modern players. Why does it matter what PCs do between encounters? What value is there in describing travel, or roleplaying the PCs exploring a necropolis? Let's get to the good stuff - the action scenes - and then lay out everything with minis or digital representations.

That's because RPGs are no longer about creating movies in our mind's eye. They're about characters and backstory and optimization and tactical combat and satisfying climaxes with big bad guys. They're not really about imagination anymore.

 

[pemerton]

Today I played a session of Classic Traveller. The PCs had joined forces with a rival group of explorers to uncover and enter an ancient alien structure they had unburied from under 4 km of ice.

The PCs found a door they couldn't open. One of the players had his PC - who, in the fiction, (i) knew the aliens to be psionically inclined, and (ii) had had his own latent psionic abilities awakened by interaction with the alien's spacecraft - attempt to open the door by thinking about it really hard. I called for a check, having in mind the classic PbtA 6-, 7-9, 10+ spread of results - the player rolled a 7, I narrated the door opening, and also rolled a d6 to apply the result - 6, as it happened - as a drain both to his psionic strength total and his endurance. Another player was conscious of the general hostility to psionics that is common across the Imperium and started taking steps to calm the NPCs even as I rolled for their response on the reaction-to-psionics table. He and the third player, between them, were able to say enough (and roll well enough on the reaction table) to calm the situation at least for the duration of the expedition - though once they leave, the NPC still intends to immediately execute the psionics-user.

For the basic architecture of the alien structure I am using the old module Shadows. But the NPCs, and the situation - an ancient psionically-inclined alien civilisation - is one that I and the players have invented through the play of our game. The idea of using psionics to open the door was the player's (the module assumes the use of brute strength; the PCs didn't want to damage an ancient archaeological site). The resolution method adopted was one I came up with (inspired by Apocalypse World). The other player and I thought of the psionic reaction issue at the same time. And it was the other two players who came up with the lines that enabled a roll on the reaction table to deescalate the immediate situation.

In my own RPGing, at least, I just don't find any evidence to support this "reduction in imagination" claim. And I doubt that my own RPGing is that much of an outlier in this respect at least.