Snarf Zagyg
Notorious Liquefactionist
Well, it happened again! Another thread, ostensibly about one thing (discussing the division of narrative authority within 5e) turned into another thing (jargon-filled general discussion about RPG theory). Which is thing. Thread drift happens! But given the recurrent nature of this issue, I thought I'd put forth a general resource and guide for people when it came to TTRPG theory. Sort of a beginner's guide to understanding some of the concepts and idea, with links to allow you to go and do your own research.
And also a big plug for my latest good read- The Elusive Shift: How Role Playing Games Forged their Identity.
A. What is RPG Theory, and Why is it so Contentious?
Well, I think the (slightly jokey) response to that is probably familiar to most people- the debates about TTRPG theory tend to be so bitter and divisive because the stakes are so small! But I think that it goes deeper than that; in effect, RPG "theory" encompasses a great number of different areas. It is about the design of the games, it is about the play of the games, it is about describing what the games are, and it makes normative (that's a jargon term for "value-laden" or "is it good or bad") statements about what games should be. I'm sure that there are a lot of other factors, but that's a good start.
We can see the difficulties in inherent in RPG theory just from the beginning- what is an RPG? Is it just a "standard" TTRPG like D&D? What about TTRPGs that don't have a standard arbiter referee/GM like Fiasco? What about LARP? What about children's games like Cops and Robbers? What about CRPGs? And so on. Defining the subject is incredibly important- and that's just part of it.
More importantly, any person familiar with this board's strong disfavoring of "one-true-way-ism" instinctively understands that when you move from the descriptive (this is how this game functions) to the prescriptive (this is how this game ought to function), you start running into problems- the issue of what games should be. People tend to be very protective of how their own game functions, and what provides them with "fun." Telling someone that they are doing it wrong is rarely met with open arms and acquiescence.
Finally, there is one more additional issue; when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. This is similar to the @Malmuria "basket" analysis- which is to say, if your theory predicts that TTRPGs fall into a finite number of baskets (say, 3 baskets), then you will forever be limited to articulating how something goes into a particular basket, or why it should or shouldn't be in that basket. A long time ago, I took an advanced critical theory course where every week, we had to write a paper analyzing the same text using a different method of critical theory analysis. One week it would me Marxist theory, another week psychoanalytic theory, another week third-work approach (measure it against the standards articulated from another work, like Burke's On the Sublime and Beautiful), another week semiotic and structuralist, another week post-structuralist, another week authorial intent, and so on. The purpose was to show how the same text would produce different meanings depending on the approach used; that instead of focusing on the "correct reading" it was best to think of different theoretical approaches as different tools with which to retrieve meaning. There wasn't a single correct theory- but the theory you used was determinative of the types of meaning you would end up with. A Marxist approach tended to reveal a lot of elements of class struggle and power relations, whereas a psychological analysis is more likely to reveal elements of the characters' conscious and subconscious motivations.
In a similar way, many arguments about RPG theory devolve into arguments about whether the theory even applies (are you using the right tool) or, worse, jargon.
B. We have to backburner your annual until we've leveraged the pivot-to-video into actionable engagement with our disruptive client-centered approach.
A brief aside about jargon. Jargon (or any kind of specialized language) is both helpful and unhelpful. If you think of any specialized field- medicine, law, banking, computer science, and so on, it will have jargon. Jargon can serve a very useful purpose- it can allow people with a shared interest in something technical to describe something quickly without having to use regular language each time and "re-invent" the wheel. It's a linguistic shortcut used by people with a shared interest.
Of course, there are other instances of jargon as well, outside of technical fields. Think about almost any area- when there is a shared group, there is often a shared vocabulary. This gets down to the smallest groups- I am sure that all of us have friend groups, and in those groups we have verbal shortcuts from shared events or people we have known! If everyone remembers that terrible night in Toledo, then it would be normal for someone in the group to say, "We don't want another Toledo" and for everyone to nod in agreement. (I am sure that someone is getting ready to start typing, Shakra, when the walls fell.)
The trouble with jargon, however, is that while it can help in-groups communicate more effectively, it is also incredibly off-putting to other people; in fact, it is can be considered both a feature and a bug. If you've ever spoken to a professional (a doctor, a lawyer, a banker) who can't be bothered to explain things and "dumb it down" for a "mere layman" or dealt with a close group of friends that talks entirely in "in-jokes" and doesn't explain them, you understand what this means. When you have invented terms, people will use them as a weapon to exclude others- "Oh, you don't understand what I mean by XXXXXX? Well, obviously you just don't get it."
Given that there really isn't a standard for academic RPG theory (as discussed below), many disagreements about RPG theory are just arguments over what jargon is being used. "Oh, that's not a railroad. That's player agency!" Or, "That's not skilled play, because other types of play have skill." And so on.
C. All of this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
Finally, the most frustrating thing about many conversations regarding RPG theory is the extent to which they are forced to continually re-occur. RPGs sprung from a loose hobbyist market, and have both attracted a number of very smart people but also usually lacked the type of money or prestige that would generally attract the attention of traditional academia. Which means that the wheel keeps getting re-invented when it comes to RPG theory.
Here is where I'm going to plug an excellent resource- we are all familiar with Playing at the World, and with Game Wizards, but I think that it's a shame that we haven't had time to discuss Peterson's recent book, The Elusive Shift: How Role Playing Games Forged their Identity.
The book is essentially about how the early TTRPG community (the D&D community) grappled with this new thing that they had, and how the early scholars and theorists in the 1970s were already discussing the exact same issues that we keep coming across today. Reading through it was like seeing the same debates I see here, just from more than 40 years ago. Seeing the creator of Chivalry & Sorcery go hardcore into creating a realistic game, and then realizing that the game he made didn't work to create the stories and drama he wanted to the extent that he advised ignoring the rules? Yeah, seems familiar.
This lack of institutional knowledge and a consistent approach is what tends to bind us. We don't remember what others have said and done. We use poorly defined terms or jargon to exclude people from the conversation. We don't bother having a consistent baseline, relying on anecdotes that can't explain the experience of others (for example, while "play experiences" might have limited value, it does little to disentangle the players/referee from the system itself). And there is a frustrating inability to be able to discuss any sort of "best practices," because usually, instead of discussing best practices to run a type of game, you end up with theory about what a game ought to be.
D. So is all RPG Theory useless?
No, of course not! Obviously, it's fun for people to discuss. And helpful for some people to make their own experiences better. But when it comes to systemic looks at real RPG theory, I think that some of the following might be helpful:
1. Role-playing Game Studies. This is an academic work, but is interesting and has the majority of chapters available to the public on-line.
2. The Elusive Shift. Jon Peterson's book. Available at amazon and others.
3. Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001–2012. William J. White. Available at amazon and others (expensive).
4. Designers & Dragons. Shannon Applecline. (I think some of this has been superseded by newer material from Peterson, but sill good). Available with a free TSR section of 100 pages at evilhat.
5. Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. Pat Harrigan. Available at amazon and others.
6. Great roundup of web-based resources at Black & Green Games.
7. Playground Worlds. Some ideas, with a strong emphasis from the Nordic community, available on-line.
These are just starting points. Some of the resources are older, some are newer. They treat the subject of RPGs seriously. If this is something interesting to you, and if you enjoy it, I recommend looking into these resources. While many of the debates in RPG theory are just refinements of the ones we have seen since the 70s, an increasing approach to looking at the systems in an academic manner is fascinating.
....or, you can just grab your pizza, your beer, and your d20 and have some fun!
And also a big plug for my latest good read- The Elusive Shift: How Role Playing Games Forged their Identity.
A. What is RPG Theory, and Why is it so Contentious?
Well, I think the (slightly jokey) response to that is probably familiar to most people- the debates about TTRPG theory tend to be so bitter and divisive because the stakes are so small! But I think that it goes deeper than that; in effect, RPG "theory" encompasses a great number of different areas. It is about the design of the games, it is about the play of the games, it is about describing what the games are, and it makes normative (that's a jargon term for "value-laden" or "is it good or bad") statements about what games should be. I'm sure that there are a lot of other factors, but that's a good start.
We can see the difficulties in inherent in RPG theory just from the beginning- what is an RPG? Is it just a "standard" TTRPG like D&D? What about TTRPGs that don't have a standard arbiter referee/GM like Fiasco? What about LARP? What about children's games like Cops and Robbers? What about CRPGs? And so on. Defining the subject is incredibly important- and that's just part of it.
More importantly, any person familiar with this board's strong disfavoring of "one-true-way-ism" instinctively understands that when you move from the descriptive (this is how this game functions) to the prescriptive (this is how this game ought to function), you start running into problems- the issue of what games should be. People tend to be very protective of how their own game functions, and what provides them with "fun." Telling someone that they are doing it wrong is rarely met with open arms and acquiescence.
Finally, there is one more additional issue; when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. This is similar to the @Malmuria "basket" analysis- which is to say, if your theory predicts that TTRPGs fall into a finite number of baskets (say, 3 baskets), then you will forever be limited to articulating how something goes into a particular basket, or why it should or shouldn't be in that basket. A long time ago, I took an advanced critical theory course where every week, we had to write a paper analyzing the same text using a different method of critical theory analysis. One week it would me Marxist theory, another week psychoanalytic theory, another week third-work approach (measure it against the standards articulated from another work, like Burke's On the Sublime and Beautiful), another week semiotic and structuralist, another week post-structuralist, another week authorial intent, and so on. The purpose was to show how the same text would produce different meanings depending on the approach used; that instead of focusing on the "correct reading" it was best to think of different theoretical approaches as different tools with which to retrieve meaning. There wasn't a single correct theory- but the theory you used was determinative of the types of meaning you would end up with. A Marxist approach tended to reveal a lot of elements of class struggle and power relations, whereas a psychological analysis is more likely to reveal elements of the characters' conscious and subconscious motivations.
In a similar way, many arguments about RPG theory devolve into arguments about whether the theory even applies (are you using the right tool) or, worse, jargon.
B. We have to backburner your annual until we've leveraged the pivot-to-video into actionable engagement with our disruptive client-centered approach.
A brief aside about jargon. Jargon (or any kind of specialized language) is both helpful and unhelpful. If you think of any specialized field- medicine, law, banking, computer science, and so on, it will have jargon. Jargon can serve a very useful purpose- it can allow people with a shared interest in something technical to describe something quickly without having to use regular language each time and "re-invent" the wheel. It's a linguistic shortcut used by people with a shared interest.
Of course, there are other instances of jargon as well, outside of technical fields. Think about almost any area- when there is a shared group, there is often a shared vocabulary. This gets down to the smallest groups- I am sure that all of us have friend groups, and in those groups we have verbal shortcuts from shared events or people we have known! If everyone remembers that terrible night in Toledo, then it would be normal for someone in the group to say, "We don't want another Toledo" and for everyone to nod in agreement. (I am sure that someone is getting ready to start typing, Shakra, when the walls fell.)
The trouble with jargon, however, is that while it can help in-groups communicate more effectively, it is also incredibly off-putting to other people; in fact, it is can be considered both a feature and a bug. If you've ever spoken to a professional (a doctor, a lawyer, a banker) who can't be bothered to explain things and "dumb it down" for a "mere layman" or dealt with a close group of friends that talks entirely in "in-jokes" and doesn't explain them, you understand what this means. When you have invented terms, people will use them as a weapon to exclude others- "Oh, you don't understand what I mean by XXXXXX? Well, obviously you just don't get it."
Given that there really isn't a standard for academic RPG theory (as discussed below), many disagreements about RPG theory are just arguments over what jargon is being used. "Oh, that's not a railroad. That's player agency!" Or, "That's not skilled play, because other types of play have skill." And so on.
C. All of this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
Finally, the most frustrating thing about many conversations regarding RPG theory is the extent to which they are forced to continually re-occur. RPGs sprung from a loose hobbyist market, and have both attracted a number of very smart people but also usually lacked the type of money or prestige that would generally attract the attention of traditional academia. Which means that the wheel keeps getting re-invented when it comes to RPG theory.
Here is where I'm going to plug an excellent resource- we are all familiar with Playing at the World, and with Game Wizards, but I think that it's a shame that we haven't had time to discuss Peterson's recent book, The Elusive Shift: How Role Playing Games Forged their Identity.
The book is essentially about how the early TTRPG community (the D&D community) grappled with this new thing that they had, and how the early scholars and theorists in the 1970s were already discussing the exact same issues that we keep coming across today. Reading through it was like seeing the same debates I see here, just from more than 40 years ago. Seeing the creator of Chivalry & Sorcery go hardcore into creating a realistic game, and then realizing that the game he made didn't work to create the stories and drama he wanted to the extent that he advised ignoring the rules? Yeah, seems familiar.
This lack of institutional knowledge and a consistent approach is what tends to bind us. We don't remember what others have said and done. We use poorly defined terms or jargon to exclude people from the conversation. We don't bother having a consistent baseline, relying on anecdotes that can't explain the experience of others (for example, while "play experiences" might have limited value, it does little to disentangle the players/referee from the system itself). And there is a frustrating inability to be able to discuss any sort of "best practices," because usually, instead of discussing best practices to run a type of game, you end up with theory about what a game ought to be.
D. So is all RPG Theory useless?
No, of course not! Obviously, it's fun for people to discuss. And helpful for some people to make their own experiences better. But when it comes to systemic looks at real RPG theory, I think that some of the following might be helpful:
1. Role-playing Game Studies. This is an academic work, but is interesting and has the majority of chapters available to the public on-line.
2. The Elusive Shift. Jon Peterson's book. Available at amazon and others.
3. Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001–2012. William J. White. Available at amazon and others (expensive).
4. Designers & Dragons. Shannon Applecline. (I think some of this has been superseded by newer material from Peterson, but sill good). Available with a free TSR section of 100 pages at evilhat.
5. Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. Pat Harrigan. Available at amazon and others.
6. Great roundup of web-based resources at Black & Green Games.
7. Playground Worlds. Some ideas, with a strong emphasis from the Nordic community, available on-line.
These are just starting points. Some of the resources are older, some are newer. They treat the subject of RPGs seriously. If this is something interesting to you, and if you enjoy it, I recommend looking into these resources. While many of the debates in RPG theory are just refinements of the ones we have seen since the 70s, an increasing approach to looking at the systems in an academic manner is fascinating.
....or, you can just grab your pizza, your beer, and your d20 and have some fun!
