Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[Lanefan]

This is a fairly good read. I would boil it down to music theory and music artistry. A piano and guitar are different, but do work on the same tuning, notes, and playstyle. You can write sheet music that works for them both. That would be the mechanics side of RPG design and theory discussion.

For those who use or need (or can even decipher!) sheet music. Not everyone does.

The actual creation, writing, and performance is the aesthetic piece that's more subjective. This would be the adventure design, role play, etc... of RPG theory.

True, but again the music analogy has something to say. Years ago I knew someone who, if you sat her in front of a piano, could take the most complex piece of sheet music you can think of and play it to perfection.

But take away the sheet music, and she couldn't play a note.

I think there's an equivalency with DMs who can't run anything unless it's written out in front of them, and-or players who can't or won't go beyond the rigid limitations of what is on the character sheet.

p.s. - what the above has to do with RPG critiquing I have no idea; it's just a thought that leaped to mind on reading this post.

/sidetrack

 

[Aldarc]

I guess this is a good illustration of the difficulties. We can't even agree on what's a game world/setting.

I think a good starting point is admitting (all other things being equal) that different games play differently from each other and trying to account for those differences of experiences.

Fundamentally The Forge was not an academic institution. It was a creative movement born out of the Sorcerer mailing list. Was it respectful? No. Was White Wolf Magazine and 1990s design culture? Also no. Few creative movements are respectful of what came before because they are trying to tread new ground. I was at the Forge during those early days. It was raucous. It was contemptuous. But never any more elitist than any other corner of our hobby. I came into our hobby in the midst of the White Wolf Revolution. Those were heady days. Like brother against brother. The Forge was nothing in comparison.

Besides one or two rude things said don't cross out every contribution someone has ever made. It certainly does not diminish the work of innumerable people who have built on top of those contributions. The honest truth is that if you play the games most people play The Forge does not have all that much to say other than to remind you to please consider looking at your game as game from time to time. However it certainly had a lot to say about the type of play born from its movement. Strong elements of which have began filtering into more normie games.

Sure it was born out of frustration about its forbearers, but so was Punk Rock, Gangsta Rap and Heavy Metal. Also what we call Trad now came from its own revolution.

IMHO, it's potentially better to think of the Forge as an art collective. When you read what many past art collectives or circles said or how they talked about their artistic contemporaries and forebearers, the Forge is mild by comparison.

 

[Manbearcat]

I only have two things to say about this thread:

1)

2) I'm running 4 long term games right now and another one-shot which I'll pick up and run another session the next time I'm local; Blades in the Dark, Dogs in the Vineyard, D&D 4e, Stonetop and the one shot was a Moldvay Basic Dungeon Crawl.

While sharing some level of Venn Diagram overlap, every one of those games is rather different from the other in key ways. Because it is required by each system, I GM each of those games quite different from each other. The Forge had relevant, consequential ideas and concepts that helped me to become a better GM of not one, not two, not three, not four...but for all 5 of those games. So I appreciate the criticism, the analysis, and the tools for self-reflection/self-scouting/post-mortem that I attained from that place and its games (and the subsequent places that emerged afterward). When I perform well I know why. When I underperform, I know why. And I've got a good schematic to continuously aspire and work toward being better.

Thank you to all the contributors of the site and authors of the games at that place (and those that were inspired by it, spun out of it)!

 

[MGibster]

I think a good starting point is admitting (all other things being equal) that different games play differently from each other and trying to account for those differences of experiences.

Oh, yeah. I'm a rules matters kind of guy, and games do play differently. D&D and Call of Cthulhu have some similarities, but generally speaking, they play differently from one another.

 

[Umbran]

Given that, should one also assume that responses are made with ill-intent? Do they have a similar duty of civility?

Who speaks first in an exchange isn't relevant, if that's what you mean. I don't know if I'd call it a "duty". This is practical stuff about writing and communicating.

We should not speak of this as if it is a space of rational, considered assumptions. We are talking about our perceptions of psychological safety - this is at core an emotional reaction.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Preach it! The Forge's contribution to the hobby far outweighs the silly rhetoric of some of its participants. I think the reason it keeps coming up in this convo is that it would be great to have a similar set of discussions, but with a more neutral tone. That'd be great.

I do not agree regarding the continuing positive contributions of the Forge. Look at this thread, for instance. There is no mention of the Forge in the OP (I should know!). The thread explicitly is noting that we should be moving toward better and more neutral terms.

Nonetheless, within the space of a few pages, we are embroiled in yet another thread that's all about the Forge.

Let us look at this in terms of what has become the favored metaphor in the prior comments- music. Maybe the Forge was punk rock! Sure. But at this point, to torture the analogy, it would be as if fans who attended some shows of the Sex Pistols in the late 70s were showing up to a Public Enemy concert and lecturing Chuck D and fans of hip hop that they're all doing it wrong, and that punk rock is the avant-garde, and everyone needs to talk about punk rock. Except ... Public Enemy is closer in time to the end of punk rock than we are to the end of the Forge as a creative force. Really.

Which is why it is disappointing that we cannot have a discussion of RPGs that doesn't somehow end up with ... yes, the Forge (and Ron Edwards). There has been a bloom of academic material, coinciding with the explosion of popularity of RPGs. Even if you are a fan of the Forge, it is bizarre that it keeps getting dragged into conversations given the vast amount of things that it does not and cannot bother covering- including things that are incredibly important, such as issues of representation and diversity in roleplaying games; power dynamics; bleed; you know, things that matter and are important to people in the community beyond just the tired old debates of people from two decades ago that weren't interested in those issues.

There is (just as there has always been!) an amazing amount of truly great work done by Nordic LARPers in terms of defining the basic terms and going through the meta-ideas of the game.

There is some great and amazing work done on the history of the game; unsurprisingly, the various RPG theories advanced by the Forge were just the rehashed debates from the early years of the game. Much like music, it goes in cycles- punk wasn't new, it was just the current manifestation of the same cycle (the rebellion against the dominant paradigm). Music, art, fashion- plus ca change.

There are an increasing number of academic works and published articles exploring RPGs from a diverse number of perspectives and disciplines. Again, it is unfortunate that, for some participants, regular discussions by people here are not academic enough or use the proper jargon, but actual academic discussion are somehow too dry, or too historical.

There is some absolutely bang-up work about RPGs and their roles in expressions of queer identity and also how they can reify or subvert typical expressions of race.

If you truly are interested, there are worse places to start than this, which I previously linked to-

http://blackgreengames.com/thoughts/

Again, that's just a starting point, and will show you that there is an explosion of books, papers, articles, and even courses on all sorts of issues .... If nothing else, it will provoke some thoughts. All that said, at this point I think that it would be impossible to have a conversation about topics from the last twenty years without creating a "+" thread with a "No Forge Talk Please" rider, as suggested by @Umbran ... because it's clear that the use of the term theory or criticism in any thread is like a blinking neon light.

So I will think about whether it's worth doing, and maybe create a thread starter at some point in the future for a thread to see if we can avoid the inevitable.

ETA- Or, you know, someone else can start it!

 

[payn]

I do not agree regarding the continuing positive contributions of the Forge. Look at this thread, for instance. There is no mention of the Forge in the OP (I should know!). The thread explicitly is noting that we should be moving toward better and more neutral terms.

Nonetheless, within the space of a few pages, we are embroiled in yet another thread that's all about the Forge.

Let us look at this in terms of what has become the favored metaphor in the prior comments- music. Maybe the Forge was punk rock! Sure. But at this point, to torture the analogy, it would be as if fans who attended some shows of the Sex Pistols in the late 70s were showing up to a Public Enemy concert and lecturing Chuck D and fans of hip hop that they're all doing it wrong, and that punk rock is the avant-garde, and everyone needs to talk about punk rock. Except ... Public Enemy is closer in time to the end of punk rock than we are to the end of the Forge as a creative force. Really.

Which is why it is disappointing that we cannot have a discussion of RPGs that doesn't somehow end up with ... yes, the Forge (and Ron Edwards). There has been a bloom of academic material, coinciding with the explosion of popularity of RPGs. Even if you are a fan of the Forge, it is bizarre that it keeps getting dragged into conversations given the vast amount of things that it does not and cannot bother covering- including things that are incredibly important, such as issues of representation and diversity in roleplaying games; power dynamics; bleed; you know, things that matter and are important to people in the community beyond just the tired old debates of people from two decades ago that weren't interested in those issues.

There is (just as there has always been!) an amazing amount of truly great work done by Nordic LARPers in terms of defining the basic terms and going through the meta-ideas of the game.

There is some great and amazing work done on the history of the game; unsurprisingly, the various RPG theories advanced by the Forge were just the rehashed debates from the early years of the game. Much like music, it goes in cycles- punk wasn't new, it was just the current manifestation of the same cycle (the rebellion against the dominant paradigm). Music, art, fashion- plus ca change.

There are an increasing number of academic works and published articles exploring RPGs from a diverse number of perspectives and disciplines. Again, it is unfortunate that, for some participants, regular discussions by people here are not academic enough or use the proper jargon, but actual academic discussion are somehow too dry, or too historical.

There is some absolutely bang-up work about RPGs and their roles in expressions of queer identity and also how they can reify or subvert typical expressions of race.

If you truly are interested, there are worse places to start than this, which I previously linked to-

http://blackgreengames.com/thoughts

Again, that's just a starting point, and will show you that there is an explosion of books, papers, articles, and even courses on all sorts of issues .... If nothing else, it will provoke some thoughts. All that said, at this point I think that it would be impossible to have a conversation about topics from the last twenty years without creating a "+" thread with a "No Forge Talk Please" rider, as suggested by @Umbran ... because it's clear that the use of the term theory or criticism in any thread is like a blinking neon light.

So I will think about whether it's worth doing, and maybe create a thread starter at some point in the future for a thread to see if we can avoid the inevitable.

ETA- Or, you know, someone else can start it!

Problem with all that is folks don't seem interested in the conceptual context. They just want the names, dates, etc... all lined up and will argue about that instead. Perhaps, RPG theory is just too young to be comparable to something like music or even film. It will likely take a great deal of time before a wealth of knowledge and study is in place to foster this. It doesn't help this hobby is like a drop from the ocean of cultural artistry. It's just not popular enough to garner the level of discourse you want.

 

[Emoshin]

All that said, at this point I think that it would be impossible to have a conversation about topics from the last twenty years without creating a "+" thread with a "No Forge Talk Please" rider, as suggested by @Umbran ... because it's clear that the use of the term theory or criticism in any thread is like a blinking neon light.

I predict that by page 3 of the comments of a "+ No Forge Talk Please" thread, there will be an argument about defining what is and is not Forge talk.

I like the idea hypothetically, I am just wondering how one would clarify for everyone what language is not part of the + thread

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Problem with all that is folks don't seem interested in the conceptual context. They just want the names, dates, etc... all lined up and will argue about that instead. Perhaps, RPG theory is just too young to be comparable to something like music or even film. It will likely take a great deal of time before a wealth of knowledge and study is in place to foster this. It doesn't help this hobby is like a drop from the ocean of cultural artistry. It's just not popular enough to garner the level of discourse you want.

Not true! Click on the link I posted.

Read some of the journal articles. Go look at some of the books. Check out the larp wikis and their definitions.

It's all there. The hobbyist community is just largely ignorant of it. Heck, just basic stuff like (I know I mention this a lot, but still) The Elusive Shift is really helpful for understanding the history of theory and the early evolution of RPGs, and yet most people who are pontificating about topics using tons of jargon here refuse to read it.

I ... just don't know. I really don't.

ETA- to be more specific, it's fine for people to just play! It's a hobby, after all. But I don't understand why people are both so demanding that we truly examine games (especially using gatekeeper-y jargon) in hobbyist spaces, as well as refuse to actually engage with the serious academic study of the game. It's weird to me.

 

[Emoshin]

It will likely take a great deal of time before a wealth of knowledge and study is in place to foster this. It doesn't help this hobby is like a drop from the ocean of cultural artistry. It's just not popular enough to garner the level of discourse you want.

I can't remember what the book was, but one posited that some forms of societal transformation (maybe a paradigm shift in the sciences, I don't recall) historically was only manifested after the old guard with their old ideas basically retire from that sphere of influence.

So ya maybe, we just need time for the younger generation to basically take the center stage. i.e., they are the future, they are the ones who will set the tone for future discourse, whereas we older folks tend to be stuck in our ways