Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[Old Fezziwig]

While true, I'm not sure the fact the obviously-intended-to-be-a-screwdriver can function as a vaguely functional hammer is anything particularly useful to know.

Ha, fair enough. That's not quite what I was meaning to say, though. And I don't think it works with tools the same way as texts. For instance, Nabokov loathed Freud, and went out of his way in some of the prefaces to his novels to disclaim readings relying on "the Viennese Quack." But it doesn't matter -- whether he intended for his work to be read that way or not, a reader can read it that through that lens with some success.

This thought's a little half formed, but it's kind of getting to the same place: I wish I could remember who said it, but there's a joke about text and meaning that compares it to a suitcase being checked at airport security that boils down to the author saying, "I don't remember packing it, but I can't deny that it's there."

 

[MGibster]

I'm going to expand on this idea a bit. People should be able to accept criticisms of their favorite game. When I first started running Call of Chtulhu, I ran into a major problem with The Haunting, a classic adventure many of people have run through, in that the investigators failed most of their investigation rolls to view the history of the house, its owner, and other details. This didn't stop them from being able to complete the rest of the investigation, but because they missed out on a lot of background information, the adventure just wasn't as fun for them.

When I brought this issue up, a flaw as I saw it, a few old time CoC players just told me, "Oh, that's not a flaw. I just give the investigators the needed information without rolling it." Which is good advice, but at the time, that wasn't how the game was played with the rules as they were written. Or if they were, those rules are buried deep in there somewhere. In 7th edition, the rules specifically say to make sure players get the clues they need, but that wasn't present in earlier editions to the best of my knowledge.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Perhaps. It was, however, notably less limiting than what had been suggested, so it seemed a good starting point. I'm not bound to limiting criticism to only what the author intended, I just think it is a good starting point most of the time.

Critics lie to themselves, too, though. See Mr. Scorsese's discussion of Marvel movies for an example. There does need to be a sanity check on whether the criticism is validly applied.

I agree with your first point -- it is a useful way to enter a text sometimes, even if only to orient yourself.

I feel like Scorsese and Marvel movies are probably a bit of a third rail here, but I'm sympathetic to his take. Aside from being a genuine reflection of his lived and informed experience, the Marvel movies do work differently than other movies in terms of narrative and meaning. Comic books and serials are famously all second act in terms of structure, and, even granted Hollywood's previous forays into serialized storytelling, they still feel and work very differently than other movies. I'm not as willing to say they're not cinema, but they're clearly a very different type of cinema than Scorsese's films or his influences. Like, there're no meaningful touchpoints between Avengers: Civil War and 8 ½.

 

[niklinna]

This right here is something I truly believe.

Rpgs are game creation engines. You can’t really have any common language between tables because no one creates the same game.

And that game that is created by that group is also very much in flux during play and cannot be meaningfully recreated by anyone else.

So how do you critique the “game “ when everyone only sees half of it?

Well I guess we'll just have to chuck the entire fields of Linguistics and Anthropology, then.

But now you are critiquing a specific work or production. Again this isn’t really possible in rpgs because usually you aren’t there. All you can go by is someone’s description of their game.

It would be like critiquing a production of Les Mis while blindfolded half the time and not being able to hear the other half of the time.

We simply lack information.

Now that’s where live plays come in. But the problem there is live plays are often created as a product for consumption which changes the whole paradigm. Learning what we can learn about rpgs from Critical Role becomes rather fraught.

You know, there's more than one person in the world, and they can communicate with one another. Oh, wait, we've chucked the entire field of Linguistics, haven't we? So much for that idea.

There's a little book from the early morning of RPGs, called Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds, in which a professional anthropologist joined a couple role-playing communities specifically as a participant-observer, and, you know, documented them, and even made some tentative steps toward theory. I'm sure an anthropologist today (or, you know, more than one) could handle live plays like Critical Role as a particular instance or variant of this human activity.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Like, there're no meaningful touchpoints between Avengers: Civil War and 8 ½.

I think you meant Captain America: Civil War.

But you could do a lot of good work comparing the two. Starting with the nature of self-reflexivity (famously, 8 1/2 is a very self-aware and self-reflective work, and this work by the Russos is staggeringly self-aware as well) in both pieces. Going on to the themes of alienation from modernity, which is certainly present in both- either as deeper themes or as homage.

From there, you could move on to the shared visual grammar in the films, which is easy to discuss given the widespread and neutral terminology used in films! Arguably, this would be the easiest given the heavy influence that 8 1/2 has on so much later cinema ... including ... Captain America: Civil War.

Perhaps you're rolling your eyes when you look at this. Maybe you're thinking, "Oh, I choose poorly. That happens to be one of those Marvel movies that was at least attempting a little more." Or maybe you think the whole thing is ridiculous because 8 1/2 is "art," and MCU movies aren't.

I mean ... the point is that they are comparable. You can discuss them in relation to each other. Would it make more sense to talk about 8 1/2 in terms of, say, Irma Vep? And Civil War in terms of De Palma's oeuvre*? Sure! But not nearly as fun!


*Quick- genius, or schlock?

 

[Aldarc]

One of the biggest tripping points about Blades is that it is fundamentally not a heist game. It has a single mechanic that can enable heists, but it is fundamentally a game about being criminal doing criminal things. Scores are often messy. They do not need to be complex or depend on everything going off without a hitch. A score can be as simple as negotiating a deal or pulling a hit off. It's more Sons of Anarchy / Peaky Blinders than Italian Job. Unfortunately, the perception of Blades as a heist game still runs fairly rampant and that has caused a fair number of mismatched expectations.

Yeah. Blades is a crime gang game; however, Leverage is a heist game.

Critics lie to themselves, too, though. See Mr. Scorsese's discussion of Marvel movies for an example. There does need to be a sanity check on whether the criticism is validly applied.

You say this as if we should all agree that Mr. Scorsese is lying to himself, but I'm not sure how Mr. Scorsese is lying to himself nor do I take it as self-evident as you seem to do here. I also don't see why potshots against Scorsese somehow help validate the point you are trying to make here. It feels like unnecessary mudslinging that opens up the conversation about his criticism of Marvel movies. Moreover, it would probably be rude of me to accuse you of lying to yourself just because we had differing opinions and perspectives about some subject matter.

I think it depends on the context.

Very often, other games are mentioned as evidence that the way someone has said RPGs "must work" is not true. I think this often happens because the way D&D works is often assumed to be the way RPGs work. I say this because at one point, it's pretty much what I thought. I had played other games, but none of the ones I played had really pushed the form much from how D&D does things.

But I was simply ignorant of many games that did things differently and how.

And people absolutely did explain things to me. That was step one.

I've told this story many of times before, but Fate was really my first game outside of the traditional box. I couldn't grok what Fate was about or how to run it, especially aspects and fictional scene framing. Declaring story details by spending a Fate point seemed preposterous! Where was the magic system?

I put it on the digital shelf, so to speak, for about six months. I only picked it up again when I read other people discuss it. I also picked up the Book of Hanz which was recommended. That's when it all just "clicked," and I knew it was a paradigm shift me. Suddenly there was an interesting new world outside of how D&D and similar games approached roleplaying games. And when I understood how Fate approached gaming, suddenly some other games I heard people talk about started making more sense: e.g., Dungeon World, Cortex, Burning Wheel, etc.

In a thread about criticism, it was asked whether we could all agree that AW was a significant game. I asked why we needed to agree on that to engage in criticism. The need to agree is the question, not anything about AW.

I agree with you that agreement on this point isn't necessary for criticism itself.

Are they?

Remember, most of the language we have for RPG theory and criticism doesn't come from D&D circles. It came out of the reaction to D&D, such that judgement against how D&D does things tends to be baked into the language with negative connotations. If anything, what passes for formal criticism in RPGs seems, from where I sit, is biased for non-mainstream games, not against them.

This being separate from folks who look at or try a non-mainstream game, don't personally like it, and express negative thoughts about it for not being like D&D. That's less formal criticism, and more engaging in personal expression - and that may lean toward D&D simply because there's lots of fans of D&D out there, who like what it does.

Is this true though? If we are talking about the Forge, then my understanding is that this wave* of RPG theory and criticism initially came out of the reaction to the Storyteller system failing to live up to what it claimed it was for rather than D&D. I can't tell you how D&D fans made the Forge's criticism, theory, or discussions to be about D&D rather than the Storyteller system. This is not to say that they never talked about D&D, but I'm just not sure if your characterization is historically accurate when we are talking about the origins of this criticism or that it is oriented primarily around D&D. I suppose if we paint in a broad enough strokes then everything in the hobby is a reaction to D&D as the prime mover.

* Because yes this was not even the first wave of RPG theory or criticism, especially if we are meant to believe what Jon Peterson wrote about the long disagreements in the hobby over roleplaying and game design. The Forge was not born in a vacuum. It did partially adopt and reappropriate preexisting terms, theory, etc. GNS, for example, was a modification of the preexisting GDS Threefold Model from the '90s out of RGFA on rec.games.frp.advocacy.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I already answered this, but I'll expand. The idea was put forth by @Lanefan that RPG designers may not have any more to offer on RPG design than the rest of us. Then @pemerton countered that Vincent Baker created In A Wicked Age, Dogs in the Vineyard, and Apocalypse World and that likely gives him some specific insight beyond those who have not designed such games, and asked if we would ignore the input of a person with such expertise in other fields. To which @Thomas Shey said yes, we would do so when there is "no standard of what counts as technical excellence".

So then I asked if we can't collectively acknowledge that Apocalypse World would count as an example of technical excellence.

My point was not about "winning the significance argument". I feel like that take ignores the trajectory of the conversation that led to that point.

It's more about the attempt to find some common ground in the form of an example of technical excellence. It could have been Sandy Petersen or Greg Stafford or Ken Hite or any number of other people and their games. They could have been mentioned as perhaps having more (or at least significant) insight than most of us about RPGs, as well.

And to be clear, my position is that when you want common agreement, the answer to your question seems to be clearly "no". We (when using the whole body of people who participate in these discussions) can't, in fact, agree to a common standard. I could enlarge on why I think that is, but that's almost not relevant to the basic question.

 

[kenada]

But I can say that after my first game of Scum and Villainy (not Blades, but Forged in the Dark), when I discussed how I had run it with people here, I got incredibly useful feedback about how I was, in fact, "playing it wrong," in the context of how the system is written. @hawkeyefan @Manbearcat and Ovinomancer were super generous with their time, and I used what they shared to wrap my head around storygames. It helped me run my first PbtA campaign, and now my current Scum and Villainy, and generally to become a better GM.

I had a similar experience a while back with @Manbearcat and Ovinomancer over PMs. I was arguing that scores can be expected to succeed, which was based on my group’s experience with Scum and Villainy. It turns out we weren’t doing some things right, and that’s definitely not a valid assumption. I found that conversation helpful for clarifying some of my own issues I was having with our game. It’s a bit unfortunate that our Scum and Villainy game was (and continues to be) on hiatus because it was starting to head in the right direction, and I’d have liked to see how it went with those issues addressed.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, approaching a game with a radically different play paradigm from what you're used to can be really hard. My FLGS group is similar, but they're really pushing to try Blades, and I'm worried we're going to fall into similar issues. Especially with combat, since my group is very tactical grid-focused.

Well, you can always question whether a given example of "something new" is going to be useful to try if it avoids elements a group is very fond of. That doesn't mean nothing new will ever work, but the "new" probably needs to land in areas a group is not wedded to.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

I think you meant Captain America: Civil War.

I certainly did. Thank you.

Perhaps you're rolling your eyes when you look at this. Maybe you're thinking, "Oh, I choose poorly. That happens to be one of those Marvel movies that was at least attempting a little more." Or maybe you think the whole thing is ridiculous because 8 1/2 is "art," and MCU movies aren't.

No, this is where I depart from Scorsese. I think the Marvel movies are art, but I'm not sure they're the same art or a fork in the medium or what. I'm inclined to say they're different, but they're certainly art. As far as rolling my eyes, only at the fact that I screwed up the title and clearly need to watch both movies again.

Quick- genius, or schlock?

De Palma? Both. He's made brilliant movies and absolute trash. All of it's well-made and visually interesting. When I'm feeling argumentative, I'm inclined to claim that he's the most interesting of all the American directors of his generation. It's not at all his best movie, but Snake Eyes is a personal favorite, and the opening shot is electric.