Celebrim
Legend
I guess that depends on what you mean by "game culture". For most of human history, "game culture" meant the culture of gambling. If you looked in a 19th century dictionary, the word "gamer" meant an athlete. In some cases it meant a hunter. Games are ancient and gaming as a pastime is ancient, but the modern gaming culture only really dates make to the mid 20th century and was popularized by companies like Avalon Hill. Before that, it would be hard to say that there was a culture of gaming, because there wasn't a large group of people that shared cultural artifacts and treated gaming as a central activity of their lives.
Despite the shortness of the sentence, there are four problems with that statement. First, you don't seem to have a clue what the word "fundamentalist" means. And secondly, if you go back and look at the development of the theory of games, the notion that games inevitably are based on a fiction isn't a new one. Roger Callois made the observation in 1961, before RPGs even could be said to have existed. Thirdly, I don't think anyone is arguing that narratives are the inevitable result of the play of all games. Parcheesi for example doesn't seem to have a story component to it. Among other things, it lacks anything that might be called 'characters', nor would it's board be mistaken for a 'setting' nor does its play end up creating through transcription anything like a plot or narrative. It's components of play have no correspondence to the components of a story. Even in the case of an RPG, I don't think anyone is arguing that a story is inevitable. All that is being argued is that story is not nor was not seen even from the beginning to be incompatible with playing a game. And fourthly, there is really no sign that any culture is being erased. Not only is it the case that there is today a vibrant culture continuing under the OSR, but there is now deep scholarly study on how RPGs where developed and played during their earliest period as a thing of historical relevance. But perhaps more importantly, when you actually do look at that information regarding the history of how RPGs were played, it is you who are out of step with the culture of gaming and you that are trying to do violence to it.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Books are of course real as well, but I can still classify them as fiction or non-fiction. But games never can be non-fiction in the sense that a book can be, where as they often are fictitious in the same sense that a book can be. The game of chess is a fictitious battle. When you play a wargame based on say Gettysburg or Waterloo, you are creating a new fictitious version of that battle separate from the reality of the actual battle. Within the space of the game, you are creating an alternative reality. The simpler and more abstract that reality, the less correspondence it has to any real thing, but in the case of games which have a component of simulation - which almost all wargames inherently do - you are also attempting to learn something about the actual reality. It's not a coincidence that RPGs are developed out of wargaming simulation, and in particular developed out of a desire to make that simulation more all encompassing and not simply confined to a fictitious battlefield.
Sure, but this statement is so broad as to be meaningless. The game 'Pac Man' is a pattern that people can puzzle out. The game 'Mrs Pac Man' is not such a game, but rather requires a very different approach since the ghosts don't follow a mechanical pattern. Instead of puzzling out the pattern and devising a superior strategy, Mrs Pac Man requires reflexes and spontaneity because the designers got rid of an analyzable pattern on purpose so that each game would be different than all other ones.
Game Theory does have nothing whatsoever to do with games, and in general classical game theory can't actually be applied to games. You very much appear to be someone that has heard about things and developed your own private theories about what those terms mean without actually studying them or closely investigating them. And now you are discovering that other people don't share your private theories, and are claiming that Gygax doesn't know anything about RPG's and von Neumann doesn't know anything about Game Theory and you have no idea how ridiculous you sound.
That's absolutely false, but even if I was to accept this as true for the purposes of argument, this statement would do no harm whatsoever to the notion that RPGs are both actions taken to achieve objectives within a set of rules in a particular fictional environment (what you call the board, and I gather together with the rules the "game pattern") and also that by doing so you are creating a narrative.
You keep throwing out these terms with no evidence and no definitions and nothing to point to. What in the heck are you talking about or do you even know? Seriously, Dragonlance was published before there was ever anything like Forge. Braunsteins were being played long before GNS or Vampire: The Masquerade. People were making up games like C&S because D&D paid in their mind too little attention to "who you were" as opposed to merely "what you could do", 10 years before you even are introduced to RPing. For someone claiming to defend "gaming culture" you are profoundly ignorant regarding what that culture actually is. At first I thought you were some sort of uber-Grognard, but you are actually a noob that didn't even get into gaming until the mid-80's. You seem to have made the fundamental mistake that because concepts were new to you in your limited experience, that they were in any way new to people who had been playing since the time you were in diapers. GNS has nothing at all to do with whether or not people wanted to have game plus story at the same time. If anything, you are here advancing GNS far more than I am. GNS argued that you couldn't have game and story at the same time, something I felt was as ridiculous then as your argument now is.
First, I'd happily usurp other people's culture with my own if I could, though I'd rather that they willingly embraced my opinions, beliefs, desires, and culture. But I haven't a clue regarding what "revolution" you are talking about. I have long been critical of Forge Theory and GNS. But GNS by and large has not been very influential over how or what the average game plays, nor is it even possible for GNS to reach back in the past and alter what people have played.
To whom? The only one here consistently devoid of any historical understanding and evidence is yourself. You haven't made a single citation. You haven't pointed to a single historical event. You have no historical understanding at all.
That's the understatement of the year.
Where are these people? Show me these millions? Don't you realize that you are speaking to a cross section of gamers that represent hard core D&D players with roots going back in some cases to the very beginning of the game? Haven't I shown rather thoroughly that none of those millions were represented at the tables of Arneson and Gygax? Statistically speaking, your millions wouldn't seem to exist. What evidence do you wish to present for the millions of people that you have just invented in your head?
No we don't. Modules weren't invented as part of D&D play until half a decade after D&D play began, and even then they weren't invented to be the means and focus of play, but as a means of sharing, recording and communicating the basis of prior play. They are strictly speaking optional supplements. You don't need a module to play D&D. Indeed, the module is a restriction on play that very much tends to give D&D a very specific story form. Quite a few people who prefer less narrative in their games tend to eschew modules. What modules actually are is something that by 1985, by the time you get involved in gaming, very common supplemental material available to novice DMs that had become for some tables the focus of play. But we don't need them, and quite a few tables did without them. Moreover, modules don't demonstrate that RPGs aren't narratives. Quite the contrary, without modules, it would be rather hard to prove on the basis of textual evidence that RPGs are narratives as all we'd be left to cite would be transcriptions of play, and reliable and complete transcriptions of play are very rare. But showing that Desert of Desolation or DL1 has a narrative is trivially easy.
Simply false.
Again, simply false. We only need a map if we wish to communicate to another person the space in which a game is occurring. But quite a few games I've played didn't have maps, and more over its trivially easy to show that since the beginning of play a significant number of events occur outside of or off any prepared map. Quite often you have encounters that just occur in an abstract space like, "On a road", with no map given to the DM to use and every expectation that if the physicality of the terrain plays any role in the encounter at all that the DM will improvise a map as needed.
This is a typical example of you taking a specific tool and implement for being the broad and general case. You could make a reasonable argument that we need a secret keeper who keeps secret the information and parcels out that information to the players as the game progresses, but you can't make the case that that secret keeper needs a physical screen to hide the information. The screen is merely one specific sort of tool that is entirely optional. I've known plenty of DMs even ones running dungeon crawls that did without one and simply relied on players not to peek, or simply set on the sofa while everyone else was across the room, or simply used a long dining room table.
While we are on this subject, lets return to your equally bad statement that the goal of any game is to "score points". No it isn't. Not all games even have the goal of winning, but even if we did assume that all games had the goal of winning, not every game would equate winning with "having the most points". Winning a game of chess has nothing to do with "points". Chess has a completely different goal of play than taking points. Points have been invented as a way to quantize who has the advantage, but people will gamble away piece advantage in chess precisely because the goal of play isn't to gain points. Uno isn't won by taking points. Golf is won by avoiding points. So even if we assumed that D&D was a game that had the goal of "winning the game", in no fashion are we to conclude that winning the game is necessarily the same as scoring points of some sort. Perhaps scoring points is how you define winning D&D, but its not how the game itself defined 'winning' - which by the way is a rather odd notion given that D&D doesn't define how it ends. I would argue that to the extent D&D defines winning at all, it defines it as, "When everyone at the table is satisfied that the game is complete." Exactly what satisfies a group that this is the time to stop and declare victory is going to vary from group to group, but since you formerly argued that modules are necessary for play, I think a good argument could be made that "when the module is complete" is a very common definition of "winning D&D". And yet, if that is the definition of winning, it has nothing to do with how many points you scored.
Ok sure. But this does no harm to the statement D&D was invented as a game with a story engine way back in 1973 when Ron Edwards was memorizing multiplication tables and had probably never even imagined an RPG. So what does GNS have to do with any of this? Why don't we just confine ourselves to looking at those modules you claim are so necessary to play and see what they tell us about whether D&D has a story? Let's begin with UK1: Beyond the Crystal Cave, shall we?
In 1961, Caillois in his highly influential book 'Les jeux et les hommes' defined games as being a human activity that was fun, circumscribed, uncertain, non-productive, governed by rules, and fictitious. More to the point, a game is a form of play, and play is always fictitious. "A play" is literally a piece of fiction. The theatrical definition of "a play" and the verb "to play" have a common origin. To play is to exercise ones imagination. To game is to exercise that imagination in a manner circumscribed by goals and rules, but despite goals and rules it still remains a fiction.
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