Academic Plague in gaming

[Psion]

Third Edition D&D was designed to gain (or re-gain) market share lost as a result of TSR's troubles and to build the hobby, ensuring a steady future revenue stream. Due to the explosion of 3.x edition and the opening of the 3rd-party market due to D20 and OGL, the "cure" had produced a rash of really bad D&D/D20 products. How many D20/OGL publishers have come and gone?

How many latched on to the d20 phenom early and are still going strong?

How many truly awful 3.0 products are languishing on shelves at your FLGS?

How many great products have become available that would have never been published under current realities of business at WotC?

How many times have you picked up WOTC's latest offering,thumbed through it, and said, "Huh, they had similar rules to this way back when in the Dungeoneer's Survial Guide,"

How many times have you opened up a book and remarked upon how much better things are now that there is some quality control and competition?

The glass appears half full to me.

 

[WayneLigon]

And yes, in the mid-late nineties, the existence of WoD game design theory (ie. story-based gaming) turned off thousands of players, who would have been into D&D if D&D had not been hijacked by those very same theories.

Why not just change your tagline to 'My hat of WoD no no limit!!!' and be done with it?

During that time, I remember a lot more people getting into non-D&D games (mainly because of TSR's business problems and their oft-mentioned fragmentation) than leaving the hobby.

 

[Nisarg]

Anyway, I don't think that Vmapire and such was specifically oriented towards non-gamers. My D&D group fell into playing it every week also (and never stopped playing D&D). If anything, I saw it bring in more people to gaming than anything. I lack to see how that could cripple th RPG market.

The people it brought in didn't make up for all the people who left. We lost hardcore gamers by the bucketfulls who were sick of everything being "like Vampire", and we gained a few goths who looked down on the other gamers, most of whom quit gaming once they got bored of being goths, and the few of whom stayed are largely responsible for the "academic plague" business I'm talking about.

What it specifically was oriented for was the story based game which emphasises role playing and gets away from combat based experience. .

No, it wasn't.
Vampire is a very early example of the sort of thing I'm talking about with the academic plague.
In first edition vampires there were essays by Mark Rein-"my dot is proof i'm smart"-Hagen where he ted about how Vampire is all deep and philosophical, how its something far superior to the childish game D&D, and what people are doing when they play Vampire is "storytelling" not "roll playing"... blah blah blah
And what were ALL of the modules in Vampire 1st Ed? DUNGEON CRAWLS.
Sometimes literally.
Where you went around killing things and taking their stuff.

So how was it justifiable?
Where did the "Vampire is superior" thing come in?
Well.. um.. they talk in big words, and they have a superior attitude.. they MUST be intellectuals!

Even though they aren't, at all. There was nothing new or revolutionary about Vampire. Just pretentiousness, just pseudo-intellectualism, just angst (which, if you don't know, is the emotional equivalent of pìssing your pants, there's nothing particularly "sophisticated" intelligent, or difficult about creating angst, its the shallowest and fakest of emotions).

In the newest edition of WoD, btw, there's redo of the same essay, accusing D&D of being "roll playing" while WoD is "storytelling". Its the same old lie.

Nisarg

 

[Nisarg]

Why not just change your tagline to 'My hat of WoD no no limit!!!' and be done with it?

During that time, I remember a lot more people getting into non-D&D games (mainly because of TSR's business problems and their oft-mentioned fragmentation) than leaving the hobby.

My personal experience is different.

Statistics on the decline of the number of people gaming in that era would also seem to present something different than what you are saying.

Nisarg

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Yes, the numbers declined - but blaming the decline on WoD is an undistributed middle fallacy. I rather suspect that the numbers would have declined faster without another game, in this case WoD to catch the attention of players.

An undistributed middle means that you are not establishing causality - rather like saying that 'mouse' is a syllable, so syllables go squeak... The number of players declined in the '90s, Vampire came out in the 90s, therefor Vampire caused the number of gamers to decline... You might as well blame Clinton. (Or even Monica Lewinsky...)

Bah. What it means is that new players did not equal the number of people leaving the hobby, not that new players were not brought in.

The Auld Grump

 

[Nisarg]

For those of you who haven't actually had the chance to visit the Forge, here is an example of what they talk about, and what I mean when I say "academic plague":

Victor Shklovsky, one of the founders of Russian formalism, made a distinction between syuzhet and fabula that is importantly applicable here. I’d like to point out, in passing, that such formalism was an essential groundwork for Vladimir Propp’s work on folklore, Roman Jakobson’s work on linguistics, and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth and ritual in the “savage mind.” All of these are applicable to gaming, though I believe Lévi-Strauss is the most so; I’ll get back to that briefly at the end.

[Incidentally, I have no idea how to pronounce “syuzhet” – I always hear it pronounced “soo-zhay,” like the French sujêt, but maybe someone who speaks Russian could help?]

We can roughly translate fabula as “story” and syuzhet as “plot” or “discourse”. To take one of many examples, the fabula of The Scarlet Letter is the story behind the events of the novel; that is, it is the complete story of what “really happened.” But the novel does not actually reveal the fabula: we never know exactly what Hester has or has not done. What the novel reveals, what the novel actually is, is syuzhet. Thus fabula is the meaning we grasp after when reading a work of textual fiction, but it may or may not be available within the text.

The quote can be found in this thread:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13560

And my thanks to Jim Bob at RPGnet for finding it (and to hyphz for having started the debate in the first place).

Now, to clarify the example, the above quote seems really smart, right?
But in reality, all he's saying is that "in books, some things seem to happen, but we never know what really did happen". That's it.
That's all he needed to write, literally.

The rest, the russian words, the attitude, everything, is just made to make you think the author is smarter than he is or saying something more important than he is.

Nisarg

 

[Psion]

I'm curious why you equate the forge to the whole (or even a significant portion) of the RPG industry. The forge is almost by definition fringe.

 

[Nisarg]

Yes, the numbers declined - but blaming the decline on WoD is an undistributed middle fallacy. I rather suspect that the numbers would have declined faster without another game, in this case WoD to catch the attention of players.

An undistributed middle means that you are not establishing causality - rather like saying that 'mouse' is a syllable, so syllables go squeak... The number of players declined in the '90s, Vampire came out in the 90s, therefor Vampire caused the number of gamers to decline... You might as well blame Clinton. (Or even Monica Lewinsky...)

Bah. What it means is that new players did not equal the number of people leaving the hobby, not that new players were not brought in.

The Auld Grump

Thank you for providing a good example of Academic Plague. You were trying to say something simple but felt the need to say it in complex forms.

Anyways, I do not deny that WoD brought people into the game, but my point is specifically that quantitatively AND qualitatively they were not a replacement for those who left.
I say the second because the TYPE of gamer WoD brought in were people who were far more likely to never play any RPG other than WoD (or, as someone on here mentioned, possibly KULT). They also were far more likely to see "playing vampire" not as part of being a "roleplayer" but as part of being a "goth" (or "dark servant of the night" or whatever title they envisioned in their pathetic attention-starved minds). When they grew out of their pathetic-starved-for-attention phase, and put away their goth toys, they also put away Vampire and never roleplay again.

Nisarg

 

[Nisarg]

I'm curious why you equate the forge to the whole (or even a significant portion) of the RPG industry. The forge is almost by definition fringe.

It was an example of something that is going on in gaming.
These people are out there, for sure.
But in a marginal hobby, the "fringe" of that margin often ends up with an undue level of influence.

It happened in Furry fandom, for example.. where the vast mainstream of furry fans just really liked anthropomorphic comics with cat-girls or bunny-samurais.
But the extreme fringe tie that element into their sexual fetishism, start taking over cons by making spectacles of themselves (both in terms of costumes and of sexually inappropriate activity in public places), flood the furry-art scene with pornographic drawings of 12-year old wolf-cub boys being raped, and next thing you know "furry" becomes a dirty word.
Probably 80-90% of the people who were into the Furry comics didn't have those um.. "views" or "opinions" about what Furry should be about, but they ended up being dominated by a small but very vocal/influential minority.

In the Furries case it was the cry of tolerance that let the fringe take over the whole scene ("you have to let me draw pictures of a horse-girl being eaten by a snake-man while she's violated by wolf-hermaphrodites! otherwise you're prejudiced!").
In the case of Gaming, it could well be academic plague.. there's the other side of academic plague.. for every pseudo-intellectual writing something complicated to try to seem smart, there's someone out there who's under the opinion that what the guy writes must be smart (because he can't actually understand what the writer is saying), so he decides to pretend he understood and supports the writers views/game/etc. in an effort to seem also smart.

There isn't much support for the Forge's games, but there is a general viewpiont in gaming fandom (at least online) that the Forge is full of really smart people and that the games they are making are really smart.
They aren't, and neither are their games.
Its just pretentiousness.

Nisarg

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Now, to clarify the example, the above quote seems really smart, right?
But in reality, all he's saying is that "in books, some things seem to happen, but we never know what really did happen". That's it.
That's all he needed to write, literally.

The rest, the russian words, the attitude, everything, is just made to make you think the author is smarter than he is or saying something more important than he is.

Actually, no, that's not what he's saying there. He's saying that in The Scarlet Letter, we don't know what really happened (the actual story), but that Hawthorne does present us with this other narrative (the story that we read when we read the novel). But all he's really saying is that there are two types of narratives involved in every story, one that is apparent (the plot, or discourse) and one that isn't always but still informs the plot (the actual story). I don't think it's exactly a world shattering distinction, but it's valid. And, no, he doesn't really need to write it down that way — it's rather overblown, although it's not as though he coined the terms he's using (fabula and syuzhet) — but we can't exactly force him to conform to our ideas of how people should write. To be honest, I think he might have a neat point, but it's writing like that that (in part) caused me to leave grad school. I just don't have the energy to parse it anymore.

Nick