Hammer was only to attempt to find a simplifying analogy. It was by no means intended to be the final and complete statement as to the sort of tool I intended. I like your thought about abstract tools, I just hoped to narrow it more.
Ah. In that case...well, "game" covers a hell of a lot of things, doesn't it? Hangman is a game. Riddle-guessing is a game. 52-pickup is a game. Solitaire is a game. Tag. Duck-duck-goose. Capture the flag. Every single video game and computer game ever made, including things as divergent as DOOM and Dear Esther. I could go on, but the point: these tools seem to be designed with an enormous variety of purposes in mind. And, for many of them, different people will engage with them for different reasons. I don't generally play shooters, because I don't derive enjoyment from most games of that kind, but DOOM 2016 was a phenomenon and, I gotta say, even as a casual not-much-for-shooters guy, I liked it. One of the things I was really surprised about with it, though, was the degree to which it used
subtle things to tell a story. The Doom Marine in that game has more personality than some fully-voiced JRPG protagonists, purely through
first-person camera movement and hand gestures. That's damned impressive.
Going back to the abstract tools thing, I used mathematics for a reason. Math has branches; "game" seems to have branches too, things like computer games (an application of programming, visual design, etc.), board games (involving physical materials that are irrelevant with nearly all computer games), word games (which often have informal rules and favor aesthetics over all other considerations), playground games (often employing physical motion and diagrams), sports (a HUGE category all unto itself), etc. "Game," in the abstract, refers to an enormous family of things, and distant families may have almost nothing in common (e.g. playground games and computer games), yet they're all still "games."
If you'd like an example of something I think would be analogous to TTRPGs specifically, then something like "statistics" comes to mind. It has an over-arching character or nature, something that refines it down from the extreme abstraction of "mathematics" in general. But within statistics there are still a number of disciplines; they share
some techniques in common, but descriptive, inferential, theoretical, and applied statistics are all distinct focuses within that wider umbrella. One can then use these more specific tools for various motives, e.g. scientific experiments, census and survey collection, data-mining, forensic accounting, gambling, etc. Asking, "what is the
purpose of statistics?" is asking about what direct activities it is designed or intended to perform; it is a question about what its
makers (or, I guess, "founders") wanted or sought. It has no specific relationship to asking why someone would feel motivated to apply statistics to their particular situation.
Is the thought here that a roleplaying game is a neutral vehicle for play (we can write anything with a pen)?
Well, sort of. The pen in the abstract can do anything. But we do have specialized pens, for specialized uses, yes? That's more or less what I'm driving at, but for RPGs. E.g., calligraphy pens are generally shaped differently, because they are specialized for the purpose of producing artistic flourishes. Ballpoint pens are specialized for workhorse tasks, and are generally low-cost. Sharpies are widely used for labelling things, especially boxes. Dry erase markers are
especially specialized, but incredibly useful in their narrow area of focus. Etc. The analogy, then, is that "pen" is an umbrella, which contains more specialized categories inside it, and within those categories there may be identifiable attributes, the
design goals we can identify in those pens, and then (hopefully) generalize to other, similar pens, e.g. dry erase markers have many similarities to permanent markers, but the two
absolutely should not be used in the same ways because of their critical design differences.
But none of those design differences need be
inherently determinative of what reason or reason(s) a person might use a pen. Ballpoint pens, dry-erase markers, and permanent markers are all used extensively for the purpose of
education, and yet an analysis of the design and purpose of the pen will tell you diddly-squat about education or why people would want to educate using them, other than the generic (and rather useless) "they're used to draw or write, and drawing and writing can be useful for education."
But far more importantly, is there a way to reword your question to more crisply disambiguate between
- What purposes are there for roleplaying games?
- Why do people choose to use roleplaying games?
If roleplaying game is correctly inserted that way?
My interest, with my model, is the former. What are roleplaying games
designed to pursue, or perhaps what can we identify as designed pursuits? Going back to the "statistics" example above, it's sort of like asking what the subfields of "statistics" are. Those subfields may have specific relationships with other things, e.g. theoretical statistics is usually not very useful outside of math itself, so it will not very often have people feel motivated to use it, whereas inferential statistics is incredibly useful in nearly all fields (because, y'know,
science) and is thus something many, many people are motivated to use for whatever ends they're pursuing.
To rephrase the two questions, then, would look something like...
- What things have designers made roleplaying games to do? Are there things that they could be made to do, but haven't?
- Why do people choose to play any given roleplaying game? Are there player interests that could be met, but haven't been?
The former is a question of what things the game is made for doing. The latter is, more or less, what players
get out of playing it, what they find worthwhile in playing. Naturally, there should be relationships between these things. But the answers to the former should be different from the answers to the latter.
