Academic Plague in gaming

[Turjan]

Now, Amber is a very good example of WHYthere is a need to slam games like Nobilis.

Amber is diceless, and has been around for 20 years.
Nobilis is diceless, has been around for a couple of years, and is "sooo hot right now on RPG.net".

Guardians of Order have just gained the rights to publish a new edition of Amber.
Based on the fact that Nobilis is diceless like Amber, its shiny and new, is "Sooo hot right now on RPG.net" and seems more intelligent (but is actually just way more pretentious) than Amber, I have had to fight off hordes of fanboys on the GoO website trying to argue that the rules to Amber, quite possibly some of the most brilliant RPG rules ever designed, should be scrapped and Amber 2.0 should actually use the Nobilis rules as a shell.

So they would kill a truly brilliant game, for not being as pretentious as a game that isn't actually brilliant in the least.

That's why academic plague is so insidious.

Nisarg

Amber and Nobilis are both fringe games. They are both well known on rpg.net, but don't take rpg.net as a representative for the gaming community as a whole. Fringe games like Amber and Nobilis don't have any influence on the gaming community at all.

Fringe games have influence on game development. Game developers are always interested in new ideas, and that's why they look at fringe games. If those fringe games come up with something truly innovative and it fits the general style of mainstream games, these aspects will be integrated into the next editions of those mainstream games (just look at D&D 3E and its integration of aspects from Ars Magica or Runequest). If those innovations are not appealing to a mainstream public, they will stay with fringe games.

It's very rare that the aspects of fringe games are so appealing for the general public that these games get really successful by themselves. "Vampire" is the only example I know of.

 

[Sholari]

According a seminar my friend attended at Gencon Socal on the state of the roleplaying industry people are leaving the hobby and it was rather depressing. If there is anybody that did attend the seminar, I'd be curious to hear exactly what was said. I agree with the essence of what Nisarg is saying.

 

[pogre]

I left this thread and just read this:
GenCon SoCal Report on gaming which again suggests the RPG market is shrinking. It appears I stand corrected - there are fewer people getting into the RPG hobby these days. I hope the new basic game helps, but really, kids I know (I teach highschool) spend time on platform games above all else. Nothing written is going to compete with that.

 

[Nisarg]

The fact remains D&D is the dominant game on the market and has only reinforced its position with the latest edition and the OGL.

No one's contesting that. But in the past it occured that a number of factors combined to end up with D&D not being the market leader, and other styles of game design taking the industry standard and ultimately leading it to the near collapse of the game industry.

Don't think that couldn't happen again. Pretentious games alone won't do it, but that coupled with some blunders at Wizards, or a game that's become too top-heavy with materials or rules or power creep, could certainly end up creating another case where the whole gaming industry follows a pied piper to nowhere.

Nisarg

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

I left this thread and just read this:
GenCon SoCal Report on gaming which again suggests the RPG market is shrinking. It appears I stand corrected - there are fewer people getting into the RPG hobby these days. I hope the new basic game helps, but really, kids I know (I teach highschool) spend time on platform games above all else. Nothing written is going to compete with that.

Well, from my point of view(graduated high school last year), platform games CAN compete. It just requires that someone show these kids first hand what P&P style RPGs are like.

 

[pogre]

Well, from my point of view(graduated high school last year), platform games CAN compete. It just requires that someone show these kids first hand what P&P style RPGs are like.

I think you are saying someone who tries to teach these kids how to play can compete with platform games. Right?

I agree. I was referring to something written getting new blood into the hobby - like the former basic game did for thousands of roleplayers years ago. Getting started in D&D without someone showing you the ropes is harder than ever. The three corebooks are pretty daunting for kids.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

I think you are saying someone who tries to teach these kids how to play can compete with platform games. Right?

I agree. I was referring to something written getting new blood into the hobby - like the former basic game did for thousands of roleplayers years ago. Getting started in D&D without someone showing you the ropes is harder than ever. The three corebooks are pretty daunting for kids.

Exactly. But it doesn't have to be D&D. [/hijack]

 

[Nisarg]

I left this thread and just read this:
GenCon SoCal Report on gaming which again suggests the RPG market is shrinking. It appears I stand corrected - there are fewer people getting into the RPG hobby these days. I hope the new basic game helps, but really, kids I know (I teach highschool) spend time on platform games above all else. Nothing written is going to compete with that.

Nothing has to.
Its not like in the 80s and early 90s the video game didn't exist.
In fact, video games and rpg games have both been around for almost exactly the same length of time.

The problem is that back then, RPGs knew what they were: games, meant for some good social fun, capable of being relatively quickly learnt, and quickly played, and made in such a way that it was of wide appeal to the same 12-16 year olds who were playing the video games and reading the comic books.

Today there are people who see RPGs as "art" or as "literature", failed novelists and failed grad students trying to make RPGs into something they aren't, killing it for everyone.
There is also a very very insular and selfish mainstream of gamers, who want games made for THEM.
i.e. most gamers are in their mid to late 20s, and want games that appeal to THEIR generation, THEIR sense of style, THEIR education and THEIR views of the world.
Meaning the average RPG of today will turn off today's 14 year old.

I'm not saying that games have to be limited to a teenage audience, but if we want RPGS to still be around in 10-20 years we have to start making some RPGs that are specifically geared to them, and accessible to them. And with as much ease of playability as there once was in the good old days.

We need a really workable basic set, and well marketed.

And the average gamers have to start caring a hell of a lot more about getting 13 or 14 year olds into hobby. Imagine what would have happened if the guys my age had held this "this isn't for kids" attitude back when you were all starting out...

Nisarg

 

[fusangite]

At first, I looked at this title of this thread with trepidation... Are they talking about people like me? I wondered. But then I read the posts and was much relieved. It turns out that this wasn't a polemic against people who lord their slightly superior knowledge of history and myth over others, annoying though we are.

Speaking as someone in graduate school who is considered by people around him to be fairly clever, I want to state an unequivocal "yes" in responding to this post.

There is a real problem in a culture when the gap between its intellectual elite and the rest of the culture keeps growing. And that is certainly what I've been witnessing.

It is a cultural warning sign when the self-appointed intellectual elite of a culture stop talking to the majority and focus in on talking to eachother. It's nearly killed the Left at various times and places. One of the the things that characterizes this is development of deliberately occult terminology and the requirement that for dialogue to proceed people must possess or feign an understanding of it.

Another linked problem is a proprietary sensibility when it comes to terminology. Quite unfairly because I quite like him, I cannot help but recall my in-person meeting with one of the Forge contributors-- we got into an argument about postmodernism. (I mean what else is going to happen if you meet a Forge contributor and you're trying to make smalltalk? ) It turned out that what we were really arguing about was where the meaning of the term was located. To me, postmodernism was the thing that people generally understand it to be. To him, postmodernism was the thing that Jacques Derrida defined it to be. If you go to the Forge, you can find that about 50% of the dialogue about the GNS model is Ron Edwards fighting with people over sole possession of his terms. This is, of course, a danger when one creates new occult, poorly accessible terms.

Now of course I'm not saying that discourse should be limited to what Hong can understand. Obviously there are degrees of accessibility when it comes to terminology and language. But I think that we should, as a community, pay attention to the warning signs we are seeing.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Nothing has to.
Its not like in the 80s and early 90s the video game didn't exist.
In fact, video games and rpg games have both been around for almost exactly the same length of time.

The problem is that back then, RPGs knew what they were: games, meant for some good social fun, capable of being relatively quickly learnt, and quickly played, and made in such a way that it was of wide appeal to the same 12-16 year olds who were playing the video games and reading the comic books.

Today there are people who see RPGs as "art" or as "literature", failed novelists and failed grad students trying to make RPGs into something they aren't, killing it for everyone.
There is also a very very insular and selfish mainstream of gamers, who want games made for THEM.
i.e. most gamers are in their mid to late 20s, and want games that appeal to THEIR generation, THEIR sense of style, THEIR education and THEIR views of the world.
Meaning the average RPG of today will turn off today's 14 year old.

I'm not saying that games have to be limited to a teenage audience, but if we want RPGS to still be around in 10-20 years we have to start making some RPGs that are specifically geared to them, and accessible to them. And with as much ease of playability as there once was in the good old days.

We need a really workable basic set, and well marketed.

And the average gamers have to start caring a hell of a lot more about getting 13 or 14 year olds into hobby. Imagine what would have happened if the guys my age had held this "this isn't for kids" attitude back when you were all starting out...

Nisarg

That is pretty much EXACTLY how I feel about this. You just worded it far better than I could have. Then again, I don't feel that we should try to destroy the 'fringe' games because they do produce some good ideas that end up influencing the more 'mainstream' games.