Chess is not an RPG: The Illusion of Game Balance

[Bedrockgames]

I would think how people play the game matters a great deal.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The whole Star Wars and sci if thing is apt here I think. I am a hard sci-fi fan. As a kid I loved stiff like Rama more than Star Wars. But I think attempts to define Star Wars out of the genre are really just a way for folks like me to sneer at Star Wars fans. It clearly has connections to the genre and clearly had an influence on it. There is a spectrum of hard to light sci fi but the genre shouldn't be defined solely around the hard sci go end of the spectrum.

 

[Umbran]

Evicted? Why the negative phrasing? Defining a game as a story game or an RPG is helpful.

It can be helpful. It can be harmful. The effect of labels depends upon context.

You are in the context of a message board that has, over the years, seen a great deal of divisiveness. So, keep that in mind.

That's what genre definitions do. They allow for a common language in order to discuss something.

It is only common if we, in fact, agree upon it.

Sure, how people play games might be interesting in its own right, but, it's not terribly useful in a categorisation exercise.

Oh, it can be quite useful. Your Star Wars analogy rather proves that. Yes, from the point of view of a literary critic, Star Wars is at best Space Opera, and may well be fantasy. But, if you shelve it with the fantasy movies, the public will, perforce, be confused, and not find it when they are looking for it. This should tell you something about your categorization - it is missing something relevant to the bulk of users!

And, if your response is to say, "I don't care what users think! My ideology is more important!" well, then we know where we stand, don't we?

Designers are not perfect - sometimes, what they intend to make, and what the effectively make, are different things. What a thing is designed to do is not nearly so important as what is actually accomplishes, and that is generally seen in how people use it. If that lighter, in fact, doesn't light very well, and is rarely used to produce flame, but in practice gets used to open bottles all the time, well, that tells you something important, and you are remiss if you ignore it.

The categorization for the sake of having categories is itself useless. There must be a point to sorting things, or the activity is wasted energy. So, I ask again - what is the point of having definitions? What is the purpose of the exercise? What are we trying to gain? Tell us that, first.

And no, "a common language we can all understand" isn't sufficient. What is that language to be used to accomplish? Proscriptive definitions are not themselves something we can learn from, except in the sense that if we use them, and find we come to nonsensical results, we know the definitions are flawed.

Lots of people open bottles with lighters. Does that mean lighters are bottle openers? No.

Actually, if people use your lighter more for opening bottles than for lighting fires, that tells you something about your lighter design. The proof, sir, is in the pudding, not on the drawing table. This is something that the folks over at The Forge missed out on - their theories came from their heads, rather than from empiricism, and it shows.

 

[prosfilaes]

No, self-definition has to matter even if people don't always use the game to its fullest design potential.

Yes, what the creator thought of his creation does have to factor in. But I don't get what that has to do with the second part; it's possible the self-definition is unachievable in the game system or that the fullest design potential is more then what the designers dreamed of. I'd pull out Starcraft and probably OD&D for the second, and any number of failed games for the first.

 

[Hussar]

The whole Star Wars and sci if thing is apt here I think. I am a hard sci-fi fan. As a kid I loved stiff like Rama more than Star Wars. But I think attempts to define Star Wars out of the genre are really just a way for folks like me to sneer at Star Wars fans. It clearly has connections to the genre and clearly had an influence on it. There is a spectrum of hard to light sci fi but the genre shouldn't be defined solely around the hard sci go end of the spectrum.

I suppose that gets into what Umbran is saying about shelving the movie at the video store. The general public doesn't really care about literary criticism. So, which one is right? The general public for viewing it as SF because it has robots and lasers, or someone who is trying to categorise it by theme? Well, I suppose, at the end of the day, they are both right. You are going to confuse people if you put it in fantasy because that's not what people envision when they talk about fantasy. For those of us who spend probably far too much time trying to work through what a genre actually is, it's probably better placed in fantasy. It's pretty much straight up heroic fantasy - cast of thousands, fate of the world, classic quest themes, magic powers, wizards and knights.

So, I guess, the question becomes, when defining RPG, who are we defining it for? Is it for someone just off the street who has only a basic knowledge of RPG's? Then, fine, giant umbrella term it is. Is it for someone like probably everyone posting in this thread, who has played a number of different games, knows that there are differences between them and that those differences might be enough to warrant a different classification.

Then again, I'm all for simply using RPG as the umbrella term. It is what the general public would call everything we do. So, RPG gets shifted to the same level as Speculative Fiction as a genre classification, with story games, traditional games, and maybe a couple of other sub categories (horror? Comedy?) thrown in. I could certainly live with that.

 

[prosfilaes]

It's pretty much straight up heroic fantasy - cast of thousands, fate of the world, classic quest themes, magic powers, wizards and knights.

It's pretty much straight up heroic fantasy; a magical society spends a millennium working towards the birth of the Chosen One, whose his family gets killed and who is exiled to the savages, where he rides the wild animals to impress them and learns the gift of prophecy, then leads them swords in hand back to defeat those who killed his family and deposed him from his rightful place. And yet, I suspect most of the people who would blithely label Star Wars fantasy would object to my labeling Dune fantasy.

Wizards are pretty common in science fiction, from Star Trek's Q to The Rowan's T1s to E. E. Smith's Lensmen. You're cutting out a lot of what's understood as the genre by that definition. And it's a little suspicious that the statement is always about Star Wars, a popular piece, instead the more thought provoking discussion of stuff like Dune.and Stranger in a Strange Land.

there are differences between them and that those differences might be enough to warrant a different classification.

In the Dewey Decimal System, cookbooks covering Mediterranean cultures go in 641.591 and African in 641.596. That distinction was made because there are sufficient differences to warrant a different classification, and yet somehow it was done without defining one set or the other to not be cookbooks.

It's fine to classify works. The problem is when you then want to take a term that has a general understanding and attach a category to that term that excludes much of what's understood to be in that category. It's easy to say that Star Wars isn't hard science fiction, and uncontroversial, because the phrase "hard science fiction" actually is a decent fit to the concept you're offering.

RPG gets shifted to the same level as Speculative Fiction as a genre classification

I don't understand. You seem to be stating as objective fact the comparison of two incomparables. If we're talking by size, roleplaying games as a group are hardly anywhere near speculative fiction; on LibraryThing, the top 8 books are speculative fiction (all fantasy), whereas the most held RPG book (PHB 3.5) is in position 8,317, and there are 1.5 million uses of the tag "fantasy" and 74,000 for RPG. I don't know that I can claim that Monopoly has always outsold roleplaying games, but I bet there haven't been more then four months in the last 40 years where RPGs beat that one board game for gross sales. Including storygames takes a tiny genre of games and makes it a bit larger.

 

[Hussar]

Whoops, that was unclear.

What I meant is that RPG becomes the umbrella classification, like Speculative fiction, not that RPG is anywhere near the same size.

What I meant was that I'm not opposed to RPG being the overarching classification, same as Spec Fic , and that we then subdivide RPG into different flavours, same as Spec Fic gets subdivided.

It wasn't meant to be a comparison of size.

So it would looks something like this:

Games - RPG - (various more specific flavours of RPG)

Would that be acceptable?

 

[Umbran]

Wizards are pretty common in science fiction, from Star Trek's Q to The Rowan's T1s to E. E. Smith's Lensmen.

Nitpick - E.E. "Doc" Smith's work is generally considered Space Opera. It is Science Fiction only in the "shelving" sense I noted above. In terms of themes and tropes, it sits pretty well with, say, the John Carter stories - adventure, in space, with little or no science present.

 

[prosfilaes]

Nitpick - E.E. "Doc" Smith's work is generally considered Space Opera. It is Science Fiction only in the "shelving" sense I noted above.

And since when has space opera not been considered science fiction? It is science fiction in every generally accepted sense; the tags on Librarything for Galactic Patrol include 238 times tagged "science fiction", 82 times "sf", 53 times "space opera", 26 times "sff", 2 times "H. Beam Piper"*, 2 times "adventure", 1 time "hard sf", and 1 time "fantasy". (* Yes, I know that Galactic Patrol was written by E.E. Smith. No, I don't know why anyone would tag it H. Beam Piper.) Looking at those numbers, I'd say putting it in any other genre then science fiction is beyond minority into marginal. Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke considered E.E. Smith the first nova of twentieth-century science fiction.

These exclusions really do make excluding D&D from the RPG genre seem more reasonable.

 

[Umbran]

And since when has space opera not been considered science fiction?

Thank you for asking. That's kind of the point, now isn't it?

The term "science fiction" as a commonly used thing dates to about 1929 (before then, they were more often called "scientific romance").

The term "space opera" dates to 1941 (thank you, Wilson Tucker)

"Sci-fi" dates to 1954 (Forrest J Ackerman, of course.)

So, literary recognition of the distinction of Space Opera from other forms dates to about 1941.

We can argue about whether Space Opera (or Science Fantasy, for Star Wars) is a sub-genre or a parallel genre. That argument will be academic, and largely unconstructive. Kind of like the argument about "Story Game" and "RPG".