d20 Design and Games in General

[mearls]

Howdy all,

I've started a LiveJournal that serves as a platform where I can talk about issues relating to games, game design, and d20 design in particular. I'll also post the occasional bit of game design work to illustrate a point or demonstrate a theory of game design. About once a week, I'll post an editorial about games, designer's notes on a book I wrote, and my thoughts on developments in d20 and the RPG biz.

My first essay concerns violence in games. Do RPGs cause violent behavior? Is violence inherently tied to RPGs? The article can be found at:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/mearls/

LiveJournal supports user comments, and I encourage anyone with a thought to contribute to post on the site.

So what do I know about game design? I've been working as a full-time designer for over a year now and have sold over a million words to companies such as Fiery Dragon, Fantasy Flight Games, Paizo Publishing, White Wolf, Mongoose Publishing, Necromancer Games, Sword and Sorcery Studios, Atlas Games, and others. I hope that my experience can serve as the starting point for some interesting dialogues on games and game design.

Thanks!

 

[2WS-Steve]

Mike,

The journal is cool and looks like it will spark some nice discussion.

However, LiveJournal charges a fee or requires some kind of referral in order to register an account. While it looks like you can post a comment without being registered that means retyping in name and other info. If you wanted it to be more of a forum for discussion perhaps an EZBoard, Mortality.net forum, or something similar would be more convenient?

 

[mearls]

Mike,

The journal is cool and looks like it will spark some nice discussion.

However, LiveJournal charges a fee or requires some kind of referral in order to register an account. While it looks like you can post a comment without being registered that means retyping in name and other info. If you wanted it to be more of a forum for discussion perhaps an EZBoard, Mortality.net forum, or something similar would be more convenient?

I thought about other options, but LiveJournal offers me a few things that other places don't. First, it's free if you know someone who has an account, though I paid since it's cheap and I dig the entire Internet/community thing.

Anyway, it all comes down to control. I have a fair amount of control over the journal, it's free/extremely cheap, and the format helps push topics along. Once a new topic goes up, the old one is always pushed down towards the bottom of the pile. Best of all, it's very, very easy for me to update the site while I'm offline. Still, I may end up opening a forum or something similar at some future point in timy, but for now I consider this to lean more towards a publishing venue than a discussion space.

Anyway, I may end up moving the site elsewhere if it proves popular, but I suspect that LJ should fill my needs for now.

 

[2WS-Steve]

That sounds cool.

Regarding the column and the article (and I know that this is a terrible place to post this but I blame watching Itchy and Scratchy) I wonder how much we'd be willing to give up even if we had incontrovertible evidence that a particular activity increased the incidence of violence in a culture. The article seemed to assume that all that mattered for purposes of regulation of television and video game violence was whether or not the factual claim of "TV violence causes actual violence" is true.

We permit all kinds of activities that increase the risk of injury to others (such as driving, martial arts training, and so on). In some cases, such as alcohol use, we even allow activities that clearly contribute to violence.

 

[mearls]

That sounds cool.

Regarding the column and the article (and I know that this is a terrible place to post this but I blame watching Itchy and Scratchy) I wonder how much we'd be willing to give up even if we had incontrovertible evidence that a particular activity increased the incidence of violence in a culture. The article seemed to assume that all that mattered for purposes of regulation of television and video game violence was whether or not the factual claim of "TV violence causes actual violence" is true.

We permit all kinds of activities that increase the risk of injury to others (such as driving, martial arts training, and so on). In some cases, such as alcohol use, we even allow activities that clearly contribute to violence.

There's two factors at play here.

First, television violence qua television violence does not necessarily have to breed actual violence. I'd love to see the same studies replicated in different nations and compared to the results found in the US. My personal theory is that the specific instantiations of violence depicted in the US media is the root cause. Compare a Hollywood action movie to an Hong Kong action flick or a Japanese anime. All three depict loads of violence, but Asian cinema focuses much more on the effects violence has on the hero. In an American movie the hero regularly walks away from a fight in perfectly good health (or with a few cosmetic wounds) and the audience can easily tell which sympathetic characters are disposable stand-ins who are meant to die.

OTOH, Asian cinema has no qualms about killing off likable characters or showing the main characters in genuine pain or sustaining serious injury in a fight. Violence is shown to have dire consequences. The heroes don't effortlessly walk through fights.

Second, drawing a line between TV violence and alcohol causes a few problems. First, alcohol provides a specific context for violence. That doesn't excuse it, but it does make it more predictable and easier to handle. If I see an angry drunk, I can better deal with it. With TV/videogame violence, the issue is general behavior. Beer may cause me to pick a fight in a bar, but too much TV violence may cause me to pick a fight in the office, or at a bus stop. That doesn't excuse violent behavior driven by alcohol, but in such a case the violent behavior is tied to a specific stimulus. We can combat it by restricting sales to certain age groups, or holding bars and bartenders responsible for allowing customers to drink themselves insensible, and so on. The basic human desire to get messed up on something, anything, is too deeply ingrained for it to be easily countered via legislation (witness huffing, sniffing glue, and other patently stupid things teens do to get high. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegutt, when someone has to deal with a reality they don't think they can change, they alter their insides to make the world seem better.)

Violence in the media, OTOH, is something that can at least be tinkered with, and is a pervasive problem as it affects everyone who watches TV. Worst of all, consider how many people expose themselves to violent content on TV without realizing its effects. As the study I pointed to mentioned, it's alarmingly how thoroughly the study results have been covered up or ignored in the media.