Is it wrong for a game to have an agenda?
- Thread starter Crothian
- Start date
Crothian said:
I think that being honest and forthcoming about any background decisions in the setting will help readers understand and possibly accept the setting. There are two important things to consider, in my opinion. First, by including an obvious agenda within your setting, you are deliberately restricting your potential market. You may very well have a few players who are initially sceptical, but eventually are persuaded. There will be a great many more, though, who see the premise of the setting and say, "Eh, not for me."
The other point is that a negative agenda risks offending and alienating people. If the agenda of the setting degrades, debases, or otherwise devalues something that others hold dear, then you will upset them and possibly cause a backlash against you. Using your example, if your ooze setting not only champions oozes but simultaneously derides fungi, in particular, as inferior and unworthy competitors for the role of dungeon-waste decomposition and removal, then fungi-lovers will be angry and may slime your dwellling.
Arcane Runes Press
First Post
Alhazred said:
Anybody who's afraid of giving offense really ought not to be doing creative work at all. They just don't have the stomach for it.
I'm always a bit amused and a bit nonplussed that the things tha guarantee that other forms of entertainment will be garbage -- spoonfeeding the material, writing for a demographic instead of an ideas and worrying about hypothetical reception -- are, in fact, what many gamers demand.
And then people wonder why games and game settings all end up looking and feeling so similar.
Don't misunderstand me; working within a form is not easy and has its own rewards. But to a certain extent, when creators respond only to what they think fans want, you'll reach the point of diminishing returns.
I'm not talking about ignoring fans. I'm just saying that there is always room for something new, and that if creators took that leap in a sensible fashion, things would be better for it.
(Incidentally, most of the story-focued games in the 90s did not take that leap. They imitated games that did. Thus, there was a demand for games like Vampire and Ars Magica; there was most assuredly not a demand for a derivative game like Immortal or Legacy.)
Put another way, Arneson and Gygax must have made a leap of faith when they introduced the idea of the dungeon adventure. Similar leaps of faith are periodically needed to keep the hobby fresh and add to its body of ideas.
Where does an agenda come into it? Creative agendas are a part of a designer's arsenal. So is subtlety, satire and allegory. Disarming yourself of these just gives you less to work with; there's no sense in it.
This is a particularly important issue right now, because game design is, in my opinion, critically moribund. It's currently stuck between the orthodoxies of D20 design and the Forge. I appreciate the latter for being about practical craft, but I think less and less original* work actually gets done because part of the fanbase wats to adhere to certain rigid ideas about gaming -- and, well, they make a lot of noise. Monte Cook is a notable exception here.
The Forge seems to be mostly interested with perpetuating its own orthodoxy rather than investigating everyday gaming, and I don't have much use for most of the results.
I think the main problem is that ver the past 35 years or more, there have been some really interesting things going on in other creative fields, and nobody's really given them a look. Arts scholarship has gone off in a lot of exciting directions, from the scientific framework fr the humanities in vogue on the right to identity-based criticism on the left. All of this stuff is pretty agenda driven, and we haven't done a very good job in harnessing it.
*by original, I mean in terms of the way elements are brought together, not as a mysterious unique thing that comes out of nowhere.
I'm always a bit amused and a bit nonplussed that the things tha guarantee that other forms of entertainment will be garbage -- spoonfeeding the material, writing for a demographic instead of an ideas and worrying about hypothetical reception -- are, in fact, what many gamers demand.
And then people wonder why games and game settings all end up looking and feeling so similar.
Don't misunderstand me; working within a form is not easy and has its own rewards. But to a certain extent, when creators respond only to what they think fans want, you'll reach the point of diminishing returns.
I'm not talking about ignoring fans. I'm just saying that there is always room for something new, and that if creators took that leap in a sensible fashion, things would be better for it.
(Incidentally, most of the story-focued games in the 90s did not take that leap. They imitated games that did. Thus, there was a demand for games like Vampire and Ars Magica; there was most assuredly not a demand for a derivative game like Immortal or Legacy.)
Put another way, Arneson and Gygax must have made a leap of faith when they introduced the idea of the dungeon adventure. Similar leaps of faith are periodically needed to keep the hobby fresh and add to its body of ideas.
Where does an agenda come into it? Creative agendas are a part of a designer's arsenal. So is subtlety, satire and allegory. Disarming yourself of these just gives you less to work with; there's no sense in it.
This is a particularly important issue right now, because game design is, in my opinion, critically moribund. It's currently stuck between the orthodoxies of D20 design and the Forge. I appreciate the latter for being about practical craft, but I think less and less original* work actually gets done because part of the fanbase wats to adhere to certain rigid ideas about gaming -- and, well, they make a lot of noise. Monte Cook is a notable exception here.
The Forge seems to be mostly interested with perpetuating its own orthodoxy rather than investigating everyday gaming, and I don't have much use for most of the results.
I think the main problem is that ver the past 35 years or more, there have been some really interesting things going on in other creative fields, and nobody's really given them a look. Arts scholarship has gone off in a lot of exciting directions, from the scientific framework fr the humanities in vogue on the right to identity-based criticism on the left. All of this stuff is pretty agenda driven, and we haven't done a very good job in harnessing it.
*by original, I mean in terms of the way elements are brought together, not as a mysterious unique thing that comes out of nowhere.
In away, every game has "agendas" built in to them. Evil is bad, evil doers should be punished, right wrongs, seek justice, protect the helpless, etc. etc. The PCs are HEROES, and heroes NEED agendas in order to be productive, to have something to be heroic about. The CHOICE of the agenda is up to the GM/players, and is typically transient and flexible in many ways (our work here is done, on to the next crisis!), but there is always one there.
Without an agenda, RPG heroes would be little more than common thugs beating people up and taking their stuff.
-Reddist
Without an agenda, RPG heroes would be little more than common thugs beating people up and taking their stuff.
-Reddist
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