Tag Archives: theory

Systems of Control

Posted on by dconstructions
2

I always like it when people write a manifesto, and I found a good one recently, but before I talk about it I want to talk about this other post of the author. That’s Jay Dragon of Wanderhome fame.

In the linked post, Dragon argues that rules are inherently a cage. That we (and Dragon here blends player and character, confusingly) want to do certain things but the rules say we cannot. I agree. We can, for example, put the playing cards in any order we want and declare ourselves the winner of Klondike/patience. It is the restrictions that stop us from doing so that makes the game work, and playing a game is voluntarily putting barriers between what we want (all the cards in order) and how to get it (we’re not allowed to just sort them). We welcome the barriers to make the conflict that drives the game.

But Dragon’s next example is the avatar-stance of D&D: my character wants to climb a wall, but the rules won’t let me. And in her manifesto, he talks more about how this conflict drives his expressionist design philosophy. The good thing about all this is it is clear and well described, which means I can see clearly where we differ on things, and thus get better discourse. So I’m not trying to call Dragon out as being wrong. But I also think that I (and not everyone) plays RPGs this way.

I don’t know if my character wants to climb a wall. They might, but I’m not always working from this avatar stance. What’s more, I don’t see the roll and rules as getting in my way. The WALL is in my way. And that’s just as meaningful as the rules about the wall. And the presence of the wall in the first place is of course a kind of rule. In make-believe we can climb a wall if we want. But we can also just not put the wall there in the first place.

I might go further to suggest that there’s an adversarial approach inherent to this argument: that rules exist to stop us and prevent us and restrict us. Of course rules present some sort of control, but just because something is adversarial does not mean it is oppositional. My partner is a lawyer and she is frustrated that every game about the law ever made puts the players against each other. She says that although the law is adversarial, it is inherently cooperative. Each party has goals but their actual goal is to reach the best compromise everyone can live with.

A better example is in improv, where you learn how to introduce conflict without blocking. If someone has a gun you can’t just say “your gun has blanks”. That’s a block, it shuts an idea down. But “my god, that’s my wife’s gun!” is conflict without a block. It takes some control “away” from the gun-holder, but it doesn’t stop things dead. Good RPG rules work like this. They “oppose” actions in a way that creates story, not opposes it. If there is a wall in my way, who put it there? Presumably the GM, because it was an offer to create an excellent scene. The rules then are not blocking you from your goal, but saying “what’s this scene about? Is it about your amazing wall-climbing skills, or is it about how your character can’t get past this obstacle and has to confront that failure?”. In essence, you’re not even measuring success or failure, but because RPGs are story-machines running on wargaming code, we constantly think of it as judging if we are allowed to do a thing.

Ron Edwards did more to destroy RPG design theory than any human ever. He took a working theory that pre-existed (GNS) and turned it into a cudgel to beat people and a cult. He also said many times that popular games of the day caused actual brain damage, something people who dealt with brain damage found pretty fucking insulting, and with good reason. The glimmer of truth in that claim, however, was that if all you know is D&D and its descendants, you will end up seeing RPG design as a thing where the rules grant your permission to do what you want. And if you start from that place, you naturally end up thinking rules are bad. Since forever, a lot of people have believed that rules inherently by their very definition get in the way of the activity of roleplaying, and are at best a necessary evil. At its more extreme ends, this leads to people arguing that if you reward players for doing things, you’ve made a mistake, which is absolute nonsense. (That post also brings up Skinner boxes, as usual not understanding that Skinner is about gentleness)

Dragon definitely thinks rules are the enemy. She suggests that we should in fact be so desperate to go against the rules that we should wish, to some extent, to break those rules. In fact, she design games around this principle. The example given is one where the rules reward you for spending time with your family, and you are supposed to, in play, get so annoyed by this you will want to break the rules.

This reminds me a bit of Experimental Theatre techniques. Some of these included running into the audience and stepping out of “acting” to pick fights or shout at audience members, to try to get them to break away from their sense of “I’m watching this man shout at me” and into “this man is actually shouting at me”. But this technique often runs into the problem that was shown in the episode of Community where Annie puts Abed in an experiment where he is told to wait and the experiment is designed to make people get angry and break that rule – to basically trick people to go against the rules. Abed (who is autistic coded) does not break the rule, and there’s a tendency for autistic people to do this. This isn’t because we’re hidebound: it’s because the world is often so confusing we follow rules as a way to survive. Likewise, Experimental Theatre stopped doing this stuff because a lot of people followed the rules and just kept “watching the play”. Similarly, I’ve had bad GMs and escape room designers set up situations inside the game where A) it isn’t real, because it’s a game and B) the game rewards anti-social or taboo behaviour and then go HAHA! WE TRICKED YOU! You’ve done the morally questionable thing, so you are a monster! Power Kill was very much like this. In it, you play a regular RPG and then it is revealed that acting as the game tells you to act you have done something terrible in a completely different context.

Scientific ethics 101: don’t violate informed consent

(I tried to play Papers Please and the game said “do this to get points” and I said “no”, but I didn’t feel like I learned anything. Partly because I just didn’t like the mechanics but also because I know that systems of control exist. I had the same reaction to The Stanley Parable: I was already aware of how video game design sculpts behaviour so it was not shocking to me to have the game break the fourth wall and tell me they do.)

The game Dragon describes goes even further than Power Kill though: it says “This game rewards you for being pro-social, that should creep you out!” which is…a very specific line of thought. I wonder how many gamers actually had this experience in play. I have a feeling that it only works for players who think rules are bad – the ones with the “brain damage” built in.

Don’t get me wrong: I think violating consent, when used well, can be amazing. I’ve written before about the genius of great art in how it makes us complicit. But you’re not going to make me break the rules just by saying “these rules reward you for doing a thing”. I’m assuming the rules exist for a reason, and I am following them until I stop having fun. Now that may happen if I’m doing anti-social things in the setting of the game, yes. This is not really a great revelation, however. Nobody has ever made a game called Molest The Little Child where you get 1000 points for each molestation; nobody has ever played that game to get points, regardless of the explanation. Most people would go against the rules if faced with that game, and play to lose.

I also think Dragon knows all this, and is more curious than accusatory. She wants to put people in a maze and see if they knock down the walls to get the cheese, but it’s ok if they don’t. Yet she does end that blog with a heavy judgement against the mouse who fails to knock down the walls. She also concludes by saying that the best way to play is to strain as hard as possible against the rules and this includes safety rules. As in, when you set up lines and veils you should go as hard as possible up to the edges of those because that, to Dragon, is both necessary and the most fun.

In 2015, the porn star James Deen was accused of several accounts of rape and sexual assault by many women in the industry (Massive Trigger Warnings On That Link!). Deen was a frequent performer in BDSM scenes which involve simulated lack of consent. Deen would allegedly use the “No” lists of his fellow performers as guidelines to find their limits and push beyond them, and used the filming of “rough” sex as a cover and excuse for his violence, partly because the presence of safe words and rules protected him. If such rules existed in the framework, then of course he couldn’t have broken those rules.

I’m not saying that people who want to push safety rules as hard as they possible can are actually hurting people. But we know that safety rules are broken in RPGs all the time. And if you think all rules are made to be tested, pushed, wrestled with and even broken, if you build a cage to watch the rat throw itself against the walls, how am I ever going to be safe? Or more generally, how am I ever sure I’ll have fun? Especially if I am neurodiverse and rely on the rules as a core of my whole participation? And then eventually: why would I ever follow your rules to begin with?

I teach my game students that game design can be thought of as a very caring, nurturing artform, where we use our empathy all the time, to put ourselves in the mind of the player and use our tools of game design to control them, but with the intent of giving them a good time. They consent to give us that control with the implicit understanding that if they play the game under the control of our systems, they will have fun. If you violate that relationship, don’t expect me to come back for more.

No PC is an island

Posted on by dconstructions
2

This is a very, very long but excellently written thesis on Robinson Crusoe as the Master Narrative of the white Protestant ethic of exploration and enslavement and how, through the book’s popularity that meme infects all modern culture to keep perpetuating that story throughout history.

The racist and environmenallty exploitative elements of Crusoe are fairly obvious (and the article takes a long time to tell us them again). What caught my eye is the emphasis on Crusoe as the Man Alone. Crusoe is, like Defoe, too Protestant for his time and he finds in the island a blank slate where he can recreate not the world he left behind but his perfect idealised version of it, where all of nature submits to his will. He plunders all the treasure of his lost ship, becoming instantly wealthy, and he uses that to master his domain. What beasts he cannot train he kills with his fire-stick. Eventually, he gathers a follower and builds a great tower. And when he does return to civilisation, he does so as a legend, a great lost hero.

Sound like any PCs you know?

In fact, it sounds like the archetypal D&D campaign.

The idea of the wandering orphans is a cliche in our hobby and one we’ve wisely grown to be aversive towards. But while we dismiss it with one hand we tend to keep hold of it with the other, yes I wrote a backstory but mostly the game is about us wandering through modules, making the natural world dead and taking its stuff. I’m not going to dance about how orc-killing is a stand in for how racist we all are because it’s not that simple and that saw is tired because it’s not that simple and its been overdramatised. The orc-killing is really just another part of subduing the landscape, of the Great White Man turning the wild island of Crusoe into something he controls. That became Taming the Old West, and American fantasy has always drawn directly from that well (as indeed is much of the superhero mythos).

The man alone bringing his order to the wild (in D&D and Warhammer, Chaos, in Gotham, the mad of Arkham, in Exalted, the Wyld etc etc etc) but also outside society (not Dragonblooded, not an NPC class, not a cop) is great for telling stories, especially action/adventure stories.  Have Gun, Will Travel, as Paladin’s card read, is all you need for a story to happen. It allows you to move your characters any and have anything happen to them.  And there’s nothing wrong with that at all. It doesn’t have to have racist or imperial overtones just because it came from those origins, and it doesn’t stop those stories from being awesome.

But the article compares this to the hero of ancient, oral stories. Said stories were almost always told in the third person, by the sidekick survivor, and they were told to the community, and thus very often were deeply about the community or a community. Yes, Gilgamesh went on his journey far across the land but Enkidu is there pretty much as an equal. Crusoe is regarded by many as the first real novel, and it is striking for doing what almost no other writers had done before, which was being told in the first person. A story about an individual, told to an individual, and that allows Crusoe to present the world as he sees it. Which is kind of like handing a setting to the players and letting them mould it into what they want.

Yes, as you level in D&D you get a fortress and followers but you don’t build a community, you create one in your image. And yes, Vampires live in societies of other vampires, but their goal is to kick the old guys out and run it their way. Teenage rebellion writ large.

(As an aside, the really clever thing about Vincent Baker’s Dogs in the Vinyard is it satirised this idea of total world control. Dogs stressed over and over again that whatever the Dogs believed was true was the absolute truth in the setting. So if they decided jaywalking was a killing defence, then your character would sleep easy. The quesiton was would you. )

The point is, we often lose community in our rpgs, and our PCs. Although we must, by virtue of the PC group tell ensemble stories, games almost always begin by you shaping who you are – a lone character written by a lone player whose interior monologue is, really, for a lone player.And in that, we run the risk of locking ourselves away from aspects of reality which have powerful themes and great storytelling possibilities.

Yes, you can build communities in games but we almost always build it around ourselves, which rarely is a true society. Consider Ars Magica’s Covenant system which while developing an internal society also creates a society that is in many key ways at odds with the world outside it. It is a haven of PC definition upon the world. Perhaps one of the few games that really understands that who we are depends on who we are among is Best Friends, where your stats, IIRC, depend on how the other players view you. On another angle, I once pitched a game based on 19th century Australian convicts re-integrating with society, so instead of starting out a family man and then picking up a gun, you would slowly put down your gun, get a job, build a house and start a family. In a sense, slowly subsuming your original character’s identity into the GM’s world, rather than making it your own, the absolute opposite of teenage fantasy.

Boring? Too close to real life? Hardly relevant complaints in a world where we have RPGs about first dates and falling over. Too railroady? Yes, but that’s life for you. I’m sure Tony Robbins believes we can write our own adventure script for a great many of us – and a great many great heroes  in many great stories – events are more about sinking into the world as it is, not making it anew. Turning your character into just another NPC, because really, in the end, we’re all NPCs in somebody else’s game, right?

Something to think about, anyway.