Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[clearstream]

'I have not seen this film, but it's rubbish because other reviewers didn't like it'.
'I have not seen this film, but it's rubbish because the premise sounds boring.'
'I have not seen this film, but it's rubbish because I don't like comedies.'

Without wishing to overtax this particular line of debate, I had some thoughts about it that amount to saying that in every case, one must have knowledge about X to develop, hold, and apply any theory about X. Leading to a conjecture that there is correllation between the extent of the knowledge and the power of the theory.

'reviewers' - I rely on the theorising of others about X (so anything we want to say about this, transfers to those others)
'sounds boring' - a minimal theory based on scanty knowledge, that would take additional effort and knowledge to develop into anything with wider applicability
'don't like comedies' - seems to rely on some pre-existing theory (classifying narratives), but otherwise same as above

In summary then, I agree that one can develop theories on lesser rather than greater knowledge. The risk will be that those theories will be shakier and perhaps ultimately succumb before theories based on greater knowledge.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't recall ever encountering the idea that an important function of a critical theory should be to provide comfort or assurance to people who have no real interest in exploring new things. For the person who knows what they like, and knows that they like it criticism seems basically unnecessary.

Unlike a book or movie or pretty much anything else where all we are in the end is passive consumers, in the RPG realm we as GMs actually have the ability to tweak or kitbash the system; thus a critic pointing out possible flaws or issues with something we otherwise like is still useful, in that if we agree with the critic re those flaws and issues we can then go in and try to fix them ourselves.

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side note: this thread reminds me once again of my annoyance/regret over parting ways with my Hardy Boys collection many years ago; in that I'd love to take some of the scenarios I only vaguely remember and try converting them to D&D adventures. I did this once with Kirrin Island from Enid Blyton's Famous Five books: used the site and village for a D&D adventure - worked OK for what it was - nearly 40 years ago when I really didn't have much idea what I was doing...

 

[pemerton]

Referring back to earlier discussion on the meaning (or lack thereof) of terms within paradigms, I currently don't know that there can be "a theory" of RPGs. That might be put as: any theory of RPG will be subject to examination and possible rejection as a theory applying to any specific RPG as grasped and upheld by some culture of play.

I'm not sure that RPGs should be very different from other cultural activities with a strong "folk" base.

 

[Hussar]

I think a large part of why it's hard to describe and critique RPGs is that they are essentially unfinished products. A movie or a book is a finished work that is passively consumed by the viewer/reader, but an RPG is a tool or a framework for creating something more or less unique. This means that the background of the reader/player colors their impression of an RPG much more than a movie or a book.

This right here is something I truly believe.

Rpgs are game creation engines. You can’t really have any common language between tables because no one creates the same game.

And that game that is created by that group is also very much in flux during play and cannot be meaningfully recreated by anyone else.

So how do you critique the “game “ when everyone only sees half of it?

 

[clearstream]

One common reason for exploring the margins is dissatisfaction with - or, at least, less than satiation from - the mainstream. Which means that reports from the margins back to those in the mainstream will often (i) involve expressions of dissatisfaction with, or at least of a desire to go beyond, what is happening in the mainstream, and (ii) will do so by reference to preferences, and to things that satisfy those preferences, which the mainstream is not very familiar with.

'Less than satiation' doesn't seem always right to me. Often it is - satiation for the time being with one mode of play and/or curiousity about another mode of play. If the sense intended is - a desire to scratch itches not scratched by mainstream offers - then for me that captures it better. One may be fully satiated by the gelato cioccolato, while remaining to be satiated to any degree by the lardo.

This is likely to upset some of those who are comfortable in the mainstream. Of course, it can provoke the curiosity of others of them.

I think it can create discomfort. What I personally find occasionally discomforting is where it seems to be felt necessary to denigrate the mainstream offer in order to promote an alternative. Rather than simply promoting the alternative. Perhaps the smothering weight of the mainstream can feel so oppressive that those more interested in the margins are forced into a habit of fighting back? [A better idea here might be that the starting point for counter-culture might often be to define itself against the current mainstream.]

Others above who have put forward or resisted the possibility of neutrality of critical theory are perhaps skirting around tensions like this one. I expect to some extent they are healthy. I'm more on the side that interesting and powerful critical theories are often opinionated (drawing power from their non-neutrality), while I might also accept that this can mean that they can fail to appeal to or have applicability for some participants. But this comes back to your point about comfort: discomforting the mainstream is often the important work of non-neutral critical theories.

 

[Hussar]

On this, and it might be worth a complete followup post ... I can't agree. I think that there is a difference between the polite rules that we use in our conversations (no badwrongfun, recognizing that different tables play differently) as opposed to simply throwing up our hands and saying, "In the vast endeavor that is human creativity, RPGs are the one thing that we cannot describe and critique."

The reason that I use films and literature as examples is because they are common and easy-to-understand analogies that are unlikely to draw serious pushback because people are generally familiar with them and the vocabulary (I also use music for this reason). But all sorts of creative endeavors have vocabularies for critique and theory. For example, a person could write a play. You could critique that play based simply on the words on the page. But the way that the play is performed- the choices that are made, the set designs, the acting, the blocking, the omission or addition of additional characters and dialogue, the choice of the period of time (or the choice to make it time agnostic) ... these are also part of live theater- which has a rich history of critique and theory as well.
.

But now you are critiquing a specific work or production. Again this isn’t really possible in rpgs because usually you aren’t there. All you can go by is someone’s description of their game.

It would be like critiquing a production of Les Mis while blindfolded half the time and not being able to hear the other half of the time.

We simply lack information.

Now that’s where live plays come in. But the problem there is live plays are often created as a product for consumption which changes the whole paradigm. Learning what we can learn about rpgs from Critical Role becomes rather fraught.

 

[Hussar]

There's an argument that all criticism/theoretical analysis comes from a place of ill intent. The sorts of analysis we're using as analogous - art, film, literature, music, that is the analysis of cultural production - were all designed to create a professional language barrier of exclusion around the object of study, alongside creating and then defending/attacking a canon of materal "worthy" of this sort of professionalised attention. It's arguable that The Forge was exactly this.

I don't think you can easily separate that out and have the study of the RPG space be some value-neutral, positive-vibes-only force. Rather, it's something that must be explicitly tackled by any criticism. It might be glib, but the development of professional criticism through the 20th century would've been very different if it had all taken place on the internet!

This is utter and complete ballocks. The anti intellectualism here is breathtaking.

 

[clearstream]

I'm not sure that RPGs should be very different from other cultural activities with a strong "folk" base.

It's hard to say, right?

On the one hand, it is common to be found mistaken when supposing that one's own cultural activities are in any way special in comparison to others.

On the other hand, to my reading of where game studies is today, games are proving to be a more complex cultural activity than books and movies. Contemporary games represent a culture-wide shift toward non-linear, dynamic, interactive "narratives" (let's call them for the sake of argument.) Object-subject interactions (and especially, change in the latter) notwithstanding, books and movies are linear, static (in the sense of being unchanged on subsequent reads or viewings), and (relatively) non-interactive (previous caveat applies). It has been very difficult to define what a game is (there is no current settled definition of "game", but rather a host of definitions all recognised to hold value.) There is no settled agreement on what parts make up a game. It is an extremely diverse phenomena. Espen Aarseth talks of ergodic literature, and has written interestingly on some approaches to an ontology (largely, but not solely, from the point of view of videogames.)

So far, I understand from this thread a sense that RPGs might be being seen to bear relationships or similarities with books and movies as subjects of theory. A better comparative might well be religion (VB has written a little on ritual elements of RPG, over the years). One can imagine how Buddhists might feel about a Christian theory explaining how their religion is lacking.

 

[Aldarc]

Literary criticism can be applied to any written work, whether or not that work is "significant", right?

So, I am left asking again - in a thread about criticism, why do we need to agree about the significance of a game? Can't the critical framework be applied regardless of whether the game is significant?

Most definitely! I agree that we don't necessarily need to agree to the significance of a game when it comes to applying critical frameworks and these various critical frameworks can be applied to insignificant games. However, IMHO, the common use of discussing significant works is, IME, often about providing a conversational starting place or even historiographical benchmark: i.e., about understanding the development of works in the field. I think that this is distinct from establishing a "canon" in the sense of greatest works in the field.

Regardless of the varying levels of design quality or good-/badness anyone may ascribe to Apocalypse World, for example, I would say that it had a profound impact outside of mainstream TTRPGs to the extent that it became its own "game type" that others copied: i.e., "Powered by the Apocalypse." Also regardless of the game's popularity, this game made waves with many other TTRPG designers, including by designers of more mainstream games like D&D 5e or reviewers like the Alexandrian and GnomeStew.

So I think that Apocalypse World gets discussed in a similar way that the computer game Rogue. Rogue became a hallmark for the genre of "Roguelike" or "Roguelite" games for people on UseNet in the early '90s as it was the "first," at least according to them. Is Rogue as significant in its quality or popularity as the Roguelikes that followed in the forty years since? Not really in the grand scheme of things.

So if I wanted to talk about PbtA games and how they function in comparison with other games out there, it seems like Apocalypse World would be a significant work in the context of a conversation trying to understand why there are a fair number of PbtA games out there, describing their chief characteristics, or even why Vincent Baker's name shows up in a lot of TTRPG inspiration and thanks credits.

And by that, we most certainly can put Dick and Jane books up for criticism - but what they are trying to do is much different than what Finnegan's Wake is.

To be honest, I don't think that Apocalypse World was ever trying to be Finnegan's Wake. I think it was trying to be the basis for a fun game for Vincent Baker's wife and friends, probably in the way that the story of Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus was just meant to be an entertaining story for Mary Shelley's friends around a campfire rather than a desire to be a revolutionary pioneer of modern science fiction or monster horror stories. For the record, I also don't think that 5e D&D wanted to be Finnegan's Wake either.

I definitely agree with you here that what Dick & Jane books are trying to do is different than what Finnegan's Wake is. I also think that point gets lost when it's applied to non-mainstream TTRPGs. They are not trying to do what D&D or Pathfinder are doing. So why are they being criticized for not doing things the way that D&D or more traditional games do them?

Jargon of all kinds exists. Acting as if there's one small group of people who use it and they need to stop seems to ignore whole swaths of the hobby and the folks who discuss it.

Nah. I don't use any jargon or game theory principles at all in my TTRPG games! Right now I'm running a West Marches sandbox style hexcrawl game focused on dungeon-crawling and hexploration since I hate adventure paths that railroad the PCs. Even as the DM, I wanna play to find out what happens. Anyway, the players were free to be hack 'n' slash murder hobos if they wanted, but I told them that I preppred unbalanced encounters and would run this sandbox as a living world. In Session 0 the table decided in favor of a rules-lite system that used TotM set in my homebrew world instead of a crunchy grid-based system. Last week I had to fudge the dice to prevent a TPK but I regretted it after getting into an OOC argument with the metagaming rules lawyer about how their character critical hit should have worked against the BBEG according to RAW, but I reminded them that it's (a) rulings not rules, (b) that they may be right per RAW but not per RAI, and (c) their dice were cocked. They are something of a rollplaying munchkin anyway, but that's what they get for treating Strength attribute score as their dump stat.

This right here is something I truly believe.

Rpgs are game creation engines. You can’t really have any common language between tables because no one creates the same game.

And that game that is created by that group is also very much in flux during play and cannot be meaningfully recreated by anyone else.

So how do you critique the “game “ when everyone only sees half of it?

Then maybe critique the game creation engine itself, particularly how that seen half affects play in the unseen half.

 

[clearstream]

So far, I understand from this thread a sense that RPGs might be being seen to bear relationships or similarities with books and movies as subjects of theory. A better comparative might well be religion (VB has written a little on ritual elements of RPG, over the years). One can imagine how Buddhists might feel about a Christian theory explaining how their religion is lacking.

Quoting myself, there might be something in religion as the (or a) comparative.

When I read a book or view a movie, the relationship is reasonably tightly subject (me) to object (book or movie.) When I play an RPG (and already, I am forced to caveat by specifying non-solo) I am part of a group involved in ritualised activities.

Subject is complex. Our principles as a society come into play along with principles defining our orientation to the game.

Object is complex. Our principles as interpreters come very strongly into play in translating the principles of the designer into the actual play. I feel like the record of debate on forums like this one suggests that the meaning of rules is more frequently and intensely contingent than the meaning of the written phrases comprising a linear narrative. And riding on top of that web of meaning - whatever we have interpreted it to be - is the foam of our shared imagined space: itself an object of our play. And more - what I have said so far is very obviously incomplete!

Unsurprisingly then, we experience arguments that have trappings of religious positions. One group might find that another's carefully worked out explanations or theories not only have no meaning in their paradigm, but may be hostile or destructive to meaning in their paradigm. I think @Campbell expressed something like this (although they will speak best for themselves as to if that is right.)