Why There's No Tabletop RPG Theory

Video games get Bartle Types, we get this guy.

Theory Is Inevitable

Video games make a lot of money, and now even boardgames do. Money means colleges create majors in the thing that makes that money. Those majors require teachers who can explain not just the narrow technical skills underlying specific iterations of the thing, but the principles that broadly apply to any form of the thing. These principles will be written down. So: Theories of games are inevitable.

Tabletop RPGs like D&D don't make a lot of money but they are as essential a part of any theory or practice that covers video games and boardgames as theatre is to the much more lucrative world of film. Film theory ends up saying a lot about performance and thus theatre, likewise, a theory which can't explain tabletop RPGs is not a theory of games.

The theories that will develop to explain games will be used on tabletop games, whether you want them to be or not.

Which is good for theory, because tabletop RPGs punch a hole in the side of any attempt to keep any general idea about games clean and symmetrical. Tabletop RPGs are an important outlier: "In games, you have limited choices--oh wait no you don't", "The rules of the game can't change in the middle--oh wait yes they can". Tabletop RPGs keep theorists of play honest--if your theory can describe what they do, they can describe a lot of what games in general do.
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You aren't obligated to care about theory, but...

What does it look like when a field is described by a theory it doesn't care about?

I'm a painter for a living and have been for a long time. I feel fairly confident saying my field is full of artists making art that is then described and evaluated by theories none of these artists care about. And to be honest, it's kinnnnd of a shitshow.

The artists aren't stupid, but what they have to say is largely ignored by decisionmaking moneypeople in favor of gatekeepers who are, if not versed in theory, at least versed in the buzzwords and intellectual niches that theory creates. You essentially cannot productively discuss contemporary art in any public way because nobody even agrees on the terms of the conversation. The public is so shut out of that conversation that a person will stand right in front of a painting and say "I don't know very much about art so I don't know if it's good or not" in a way they never would with a movie or a song. The conversation is, in short, not serving anyone. 

So maybe you don't care about theories of games--but if you play, theories of games care about you. And you might live long enough that this fucks your shit up.

So, here is the question:

Where would tabletop RPG theory come from?

1. Academia

True story:

I've met a bunch of people who teach RPGs at major universities, but this one was different because I did not meet this one (who I'll call The Academic) because they liked my RPG stuff or wanted me to talk to their students.

At some point somewhere I was talking to a clique of Indie gamers--mostly diaspora from the Forge scene (the early capital-I Indie RPG site which would lead to stuff like Fate, Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World, Story Games.com, etc)--that the Academic was closely associated with, The Academic asked me to private-message them so we could have a conversation about games in private.

This conversation was over 30,000 words long and at least half were The Academic's--for comparison that's about the length of a 150-page novel. It lasted months.

Then we met up in real life, talked more, had coffee and pizza, then the Academic hugged me and said they loved me. Like platonically, but the actual word "love" was used.

Some bullet points from this conversation:

• The Academic is upset at how many people in the Indie tabletop RPG scene pretend to be theorists and to have scientific authority while not using any of the genuine tools of social science or being up on any of the theories of games that've actually been tested.
• The Academic has played with a lot of the Indie gamers and decided they were "terrible players" and decided they didn't seem to actually play games enough or pay attention when they were playing and they acted like they could talk their way into being better designers or players.
• The Academic had "very strong negative feelings about the Forge and (some of) its offshoots, particularly Story-Games. "
• When I pointed out specific shitty things that specific major Indie scenesters The Academic was associated with had said, The Academic agreed they were shitty and said, of one of them, "I see ___destroy a lot of potentially interesting conversations with people I'd like to talk to because of how [s/he] communicates" and that they were "not someone I'd invite into any conversation I wanted to stay nuanced or productive."
• The Academic admitted that they were trying to politely groom said conversation-annihilating scenester into being more useful and added that The Academic's motives for doing this were: "completely self-serving." 
• The Academic admitted they did not voice these concerns to anyone in the Indie scene because the Academic was considering writing, academically, about the Indie scene and didn't want to burn bridges.
• "You have no idea what a relief it is to say these things to someone."

The next time I saw The Academic doing anything online, they were back to palling around with-, and helping-, the same Indie gamers they'd complained to me about, endorsing the most bigoted parts of the Indie RPG drama club and saying, in public, the complete opposite of what The Academic had said in private.

The moral of this story? Well there's a lot of them, but one is that every "academic" in tabletop RPG theory is down in the same internet trenches with everyone else--mainly because without the RPG internet there's no connection between academia and the designers or games. If the RPG academics have theories genuinely separate from what you hear on the web, they're refusing to share them and so they don't matter because no designer will ever make anything based on them and no players will take them into account.

2. From Full Time RPG Designers Writing About Theory

...by which I mean Robin Laws.

Most full-time designers are always busy designing and hustling--except Robin Laws, who has time to write theory. Monte Cook, Mike Mearls, Mark Rein-Hagen--they're mostly like Fuck that. Like sometimes Kenneth Hite will talk about a theoretical thing for like 3 minutes on the podcast he has with Laws before getting back to researching the role of the Hohenzolleren family in the manufacture of Bavarian duck-hunting rifles but that's about it. His heart lieth not there.

Laws is an ok start, he accurately identifies the variety of motives for play, but he weirdly believes all tabletop RPG play is escapist and his designs kind of bear out an obsession with the idea that the point of tabletop is copying previously existing story media (GUMSHOE being an obvious example: the game's designed to "make players feel powerful" and is pretty clearly designed around making railroading and "path" adventures easier). Gotham will not last with Robin alone.

So into this mainstream professional theory vacuum have hurled the random internet rubes--that is non- and part-time designers, and oh, how we have hurled.


2. Snark

This review of Superman Vs Batman is great. It's not helpful, useful, or arguably even particularly insightful--it's just well-written. It is written in a delirious ecstasy of hate--and that's what makes it so fun.

"Batman has a motivation and – contrary to what you may have read – it’s a perfectly valid one. He hated Man of Steel. He’s watched it fourteen times and he’s just had enough of it. He’s the only person involved in the whole project, on screen and off, who actually wants to rip the power cord out of the whole franchise."

As a genre, the Ecstatic Hatewatch is not accurate or fair (Batman has not, for example, seen Man of Steel, this sentence, for example: "It’s awful but so is everything" cannot be true). The Ecstatic Hatewatch tries to get by on pure literary talent and the fact that the object of criticism is so vile that a real-world response based on loathing-borne distortion and a real-world response based on even the most nuanced take possible would have no practical difference. i.e. Whether you're reading Nixon's public record or reading Hunter S Thompson's Hatereads of Nixon, the answer is impeach the guy--thus justifying the liberties with reality the Hateread takes.

At the end you do wonder, though: I know why Thompson had to watch Nixon--why did this guy have to watch this movie? And all the other superhero movies and shows he apparently watched and hated?

The answer is so he can write this piece of extended genius snark about it. Topical snark, too--people, ironically, read that review for the same reason people went to see the movie: people already decided Superman and Batman are interesting as subjects so they went and saw Superman vs Batman and they read that piece of writing because it's about that movie everyone's talking about.

And why write it? So people will read it, and pay attention to you and then you can trade that attention for one of the many rewards, tangible and intangible, that you can trade attention for--like money.

While not all Ecstatic Hatereads are this good--it will not have escaped your attention that the RPG internet has this dynamic in motherfucking spades. For example: 7th Sea designer John Wick's recent Ecstatic Hateread of Tomb of Horrors was widely circulated and widely discussed and widely regarded (rightly or wrongly doesn't really matter) as a way to grab attention before his recent Kickstarter, and at least one participant in Something Awful's trolly RPG group has explicitly considered monetizing their Ecstatic Hateread thread, FATAL and Friends:

The snarky Hateread is thus published not to find anything out but for its own sake. Like all snark, it's not useful because its accountability is--when push comes to shove and facts get checked--to its own entertainment value rather than to the truth.

3. The Stuff That Calls Itself Theory...

Translation: "Coherent"="Good Hippie Indie Game"
"IGT"="Game By Satanic Devil Minion Others"

If you google "rpg theory" Indie RPG scenester stuff comes up--the Forge and its predecessors and spawn sprawl across the threshold of any idea of "RPG theory" like plague corpses across a doorway.

The meeting grounds for dissaffected soon-to-be Indie theorists were a product of the early internet--fans of things getting connected to other fans of things, realizing they have experiences in common, sharing for the first time, finding goals, collaborating for the first time.

A lot of the earliest web discussion about games was like the web discussion about everything else: snark--i.e. psychotics using anonymity to shit on people for liking Picard more than Kirk or Kirk more than Picard. Sites like The Forge and rec. art.whatever that came up with the Threefold Model were Circles of Seriousness partially (and only partially successfully) designed to wall off their discussions from the snark brigade.

The actual theories devised in these places aren't that important today (though the games are and whatever else you don't like about them you can say: they seem to like them), but the way these social conglomerates dealt with the theories very much is.

Ron Edwards' popular GNS theory is an object lesson, there's a lot to say about what's wrong with the GNS but let's stick with the biggest bullet wounds:

• Vincent Baker--the most successful postForge designer--has disavowed it.  He's said it was valuable for helping to develop the idea of Narrativism as a goal some players had (the idea that some people's main goal was to have a satisfyingly 3-part-dramalike in-game story emerge from the game--an idea that had eluded the authors of the earlier Threefold Model) but that's all.

• So has (lowkey) pretty much everyone else. Although people still use the lingo, every single other proponent of it (besides Ron Edwards, the guy who invented it) I've seen talk about GNS in the last decade goes "Well ok, it was wrong but it helped me personally" or just starts trolling whoever brought it up (ie: Snark).  If there's anyone who still believes it besides Ron Edwards and can answer questions about it I have never seen them anywhere on the internet (feel free to speak up in the comments if you know something I don't).

• It has no objective diagnostics or repeatibility. The theory describes 3 kinds of Creative Agendas in games-- "Gamist" "Narrativist" and "Simulationist" and Edwards claims a game could only pursue one Agenda during any given instance of play. Edwards can't describe any diagnostic that another human who wasn't Ron could use to tell which of the three Agendas play was moving toward, or how to measure if it was "only" pursuing that one agenda or whether different people were having different kinds of fun reinforced simultaneously in contravention of the theory.

• It fails the basic requirements of a scientific theory. A scientific theory should be able to describe an experiment which could disprove it--Edwards can't do that.

The failure of the tabletop RPG theory that was nearly synonymous with tabletop RPG theory to make sense, much less be a theory, is kind of a drag but in itself it's no worse than the drawbacks of Laws' ideas. The real problem is the culture that it implied and engendered, because it affects how everyone in tabletop RPGs views the word "theory".

While Laws is a professional mixing mostly with professionals--in private, at conventions, etc, staying out of the internet foam and fracas that is going to produce the generation of game designers that will eventually replace him--the Indie theorists were- and are- deep in it, and this was-, and still is-, disastrous. 

People have dumb ideas on the internet all the time. The specific and exceptional (exceptional, i.e.--not shared by any other clique of RPG designers and fans anywhere ever) problem with this dumb idea is a result of four specific characteristics of the theory:

• A) It pretends to be science.
• B) It isn't.
• C) It was popular with a relatively close-knit clique of people.
• D) These people with whom the theory is popular went on to design and critique games and become influential members of the Indie RPG scene.

There is no other idea about RPGs that shares all of these characteristics simultaneously. The ideas held by the D&D 3.5-obsessives at The Gaming Den, for instance, have maybe A and B and arguably C going for them but no hint of D. C is pretty rare in itself--the level of tight-knitness the postForge displays is pretty much unheard-of outside people all working at the same company. 

(Incidentally: the postForge Indies constantly deny being a clique or having a common culture despite the fact that a quick look at the roster for like the Metatopia con or who is Patreoning who confirms that none of the major scene designers or talkers are more than a single degree of Bacon away from any of the others and looking at the credits for their games shows most of them work together all the time. Vincent Baker--as in so many things--is an exception  to this general state of denial. He's like Yeah we know and influence each other and are conflict-averse hippies.)

It's important to note that--especially now--not all or even most of the talk of the postForge was about the theory and many people probably never believed it.  The vital part is: the quality of the discussion in the clique was so bad that for over a decade nobody in that clique ever pointed out that the theory made no sense and there's no accountability for being completely wrong. 

To do game theory, you have to do science, and to do science, when someone goes "So what's the evidence?" you can't go: "Sorry, kids came home! Nice talking to you!" "Clearly there are a lot of opinions here! Let's sink this thread for now!" "This isn't a courtroom, I don't need evidence!" "Hey I like your books, man, relax!" "Listen I like D&D, I'm not attacking D&D." or any of the other inane deflections you get every time you ask most of the major Indie theorists about the real-world basis of any of their ideas.

(When I said this culture has been disastrous I mean it--theory aside, folks from this scene have fallen for every hoax that trolling and paranoia could cook up. Mail I got from A Very Very Major Game Designer after the post 5th edition D&D harassment campaign that raged through the Indie scene: 

Basically, I keep getting 'Zak hates gays and women' and when I ask for proof, people suddenly shut the fuck up...I've had people cite the blog post you linked to, and when I pressed them to actually read it they were like, "Oh, well, I was told he said something nasty, maybe not." It's been eye opening for a few people.

...but--even more tellingly--the ones who don't fall for these hoaxes and don't buy these conspiracy theories don't call for any accountability on the part of the ones who do--and keep Patreoning and Kickstarting them.)

A good theory does not have to answer every person that challenges it (like: if someone is an MRA, nothing compels you to talk to them), but it does have to answer every question that challenges it (theory can articulate what its assumptions are), detached from the asker. Indie theory is peddled by people who use their right to not do the first thing to avoid their responsibility to do the second thing. Except Vincent Baker--but unless he's in a really good mood, he doesn't actually point out to his friends(/customers) that he actually totally disagrees with them--and to some degree he's monetized even hearing what his game ideas are, via Patreon, and will explicitly say talking theory is a form of advertisement for his stuff--so not much real public discussion can come out of it.

Also, if you don't know tabletop RPGs--isn't it weird how easy it is to point out specific names? The scene is that small.

In the end, the postForge's life as a theory factory was the victim of its own desire to produce self-supported Indie-darling designers and its success doing so. In a scene whose talkative core is 2-3000 people, the demands of selling shit are incompatible with the demands of calling people on their shit, and decent theory requires that second thing.

In other words, the postForge has all the usual problems of Commodified Dissent, especially...

4. Smarm 

But RPGs are always small--why was the Forge/post-Forge/Story Games/ Indie/Theoryhead scene particularly bad? As The Academic said "...somehow the Forge particularly bugs me because they are simultaneously disgustingly insular/ignorant and want to be treated as important and meaningful by others."

The Indies did not master anything to do with games. What they did master was a language of seriousness.

Once a language of seriousness was established to talk about bad theories of games and sometimes good ideas for actually making and distributing games, that same language spread all over the online RPG scene and was used for discussions aspiring to all kinds of seriousness:

• Activist. We're gonna set goals having to do with making games and changing the game community and we're gonna achieve them!
• Financial. We're gonna give you the straight dope on how to get your games out there!
• Creative. We're gonna take games seriously as art and push the boundaries of what the form can do!
• Intellectual. Every observation about games, no matter how unconsciously taste-based or ass-pulled is couched as if it were part of a vast project of Expanding The Design Vocabulary!
• Moral. The fact that everyone reading you agrees with your white middle-class moderate-left political preferences in every way should not stop you from reminding them what they are every day! And announcing that your super-conservative game design promotes them!
• Interpersonal. "Well I just think it's interesting that while some of us are attempting to communicate legitimate criticism, some of us are…" (passive aggression passive aggression passive aggression)

This language was about using platitudes to claim moral high ground--and it worked. Boring other gamers kept them away from anything called Theory for years--as well as all their other high-minded discussions. They just said "Well I ain't worried about theory an' issues of expression an' representatin' I'm worried about killin' orcs waaaa hoooo!" and crawled off across the low ground to have their low fun.

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Here's some theory about game-mastering from Burning Wheel designer Luke Crane:

All of the games talk about fun and fairness, enjoyment and entertainment, but then they break that cycle by granting one member of the group power over all of the other members of the group. It's classic power dynamics. Once you have roles of power and powerless, even the most reasonable and compassionate people slide into abuse. [source]

So: All game-mastering by definition always leads to abuse. An adult with a job said that.

Now--and this is in no way a joke, I mean this--the only appropriate response to this is that everyone who reads it tries to get in touch with Luke Crane's friends and they very gently ask Luke if he's feeling okay and if he might want to seek out professional help.

In case you think Luke's grown out of this, here's a more recent one:

I see this behavior of women being stripped of their ability to make decisions in every single D&D game I play. I can point to examples in five different groups all playing the same edition of the same module over a span of roughly four years. That's roughly 33 players, of different ages and backgrounds. [source]

According to this paragon of Indie-RPG design fame every single time he sits down to play D&D he watches women being abused and he's done nothing about it for years. And this is from a dude who plays D&D all the fucking time. Often followed by positively gleeful actual-play reports.

Why doesn't anyone in Luke's game group do anything about this? Haven't they heard of feminism? And why in god's name do they keep playing? If the women in our group were treated like that they'd be slitting throats.

Again: the only appropriate response to that is Luke (and possibly his whole group) go to therapy. There is no other.

But, of course, this is not the response of serious folk reading Luke. Why isn't anyone losing their shit about this urgent weird abuse situation? Because nobody takes it seriously--despite constantly performing the offices of seriousness.

Luke is showing how seriously he takes the responsibilities of DMing and everyone else is Listening To Him Share His Perspective. There is tremendous reverence for the fact that a member of the clique is speaking, but none for the content of the message. 

And the Theory here is left to be extracted from...

• Luke says the very role of game master in D&D causes abuse
• Luke says abuse is bad
• Luke says he sees women abused every time he plays D&D
• Luke says he likes D&D and its a good game and well-designed

Any attempts at clarification from Luke fail--because he and his ilk aren't really trafficking in seriousness, they're trafficking in smarm.

Thanks, Guy Trying To Explain Why His Marvel Game That Was Out When The Avengers Was The Most Popular Movie In History Completely Failed

This article by Tom Scocca on smarm is really good. It's so good, in fact, and so relevant to what has replaced genuine discussion of ideas in RPGs that I am gonna put lots of quotes from it in italics for y'all.

First of all, what's smarm?

Over time, it has become clear that anti-negativity is a worldview of its own, a particular mode of thinking and argument, no matter how evasively or vapidly it chooses to express itself. For a guiding principle of 21st century literary criticism, BuzzFeed's Fitzgerald turned to the moral and intellectual teachings of Walt Disney, in the movie Bambi: "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all."

The line is uttered by Thumper, Bambi's young bunny companion, but its attribution is more complicated than that—Thumper's mother is making him recite a rule handed down by his father, by way of admonishing her son for unkindness. It is scolding, couched as an appeal to goodness, in the name of an absent authority.

Smarm's like and unlike snark.

Snark is, roughly, flinging a jokey insult instead of a full-blown and rational critique. (Here's me being snarky.)

Smarm is, roughly, couching your side of the argument as non-argument.

Although Scocca's article contrasts the two, it goes without saying, neither snark nor smarm are rational critique. They're rhetorical techniques. Snark is both marketing and entertainment. Smarm is just marketing.

What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.

A person who snarks (about an important thing, not a bard--fuck bards) and then refuses to answer questions which would turn that snark into rational argument is just being a jerk. You might say the same of the smarmer but the smarmer has a more difficult dilemma: their original smarmy position is a refutation of the whole idea of argument.

The evasion of disputes is a defining tactic of smarm...Debate begins where the important parts of the debate have ended.

You can ask me to go from the snarky "Bards suck" to "Ok why?" and I don't have to give anything up to then answer your question.

It's harder to go from the smarmy "I am unwilling to have a fight with someone who isn't in my weight class" to "Ok, prove the contention you just made that you're smarter than whoever you're talking to and then go back to the discussion we were just having about the claim you made" because answering either would drag the answerer down into having a conversation. Since the douche had just recruited some phantom authority (some magical IQ test in the sky, one presumes, that somehow would rate him higher than me) as being opposed to it, even having a conversation would be admitting they were just now wrong.

Like every other mode, snark can sometimes be done badly or to bad purposes. 

Smarm, on the other hand, is never a force for good. A civilization that speaks in smarm is a civilization that has lost its ability to talk about purposes at all. It is a civilization that says "Don't Be Evil," rather than making sure it does not do evil.

Or, as we say around here "Don't be a dick"...while pasting over wildly divergent definitions of "dick".

For people reading this (or the ones who talk anyway) it's a reflection of a wider reality: what holds this "community" together is discussing similarities and differences on the internet. However, what holds all of humanity as of 2016 together is: a self-loathing about discussing things on the internet. 

We think of your-, my-, their- argument as a good and noble thing with a pedigree going back to classic civilization and philosophy. We think of an internet argument is some kind of desperate polyp that eats your soul.

The purpose of RPG smarm is usually to evoke the spectre of the second connotation.

Snark wants to be read as worth reading because it's So Fucking Clever and Smarm wants to be read as worth reading because The Stakes Are Impossibly High but in the end, the snarky Hatereader and the smarmy Scoldreader issue from the same process: A thing that would not normally have been consumed was consumed because someone hoped not to enjoy it but to get something out of complaining about it.

The object of the complaint--Warhammer or Exalted or Kingdom Death or first edition D&D or fourth edition D&D or LotFP or any other hated game--often together with the people who made and enjoy it--are Nixon, Trump, Hitler. They don't deserve what humans owe one another: Fact-checking, innocent-until-proven-guilty, research, evidence, paper trails, caveats, caution, care. The target is undeserving because it has been pre-judged by an authority the writer hopes will issue not from anything written in the piece that'd hold up when players are asked or when a blind taste-test is performed or when compared to sales figures or in a courtroom or in a peer-reviewed journal or even from just watching a video of people playing but from the number of plusses or re-shares or Yes. Thisses. it gets.

You can watch snark open smoothly into smarm like a blossoming hateflower as forum moderator Paul Matijevic waxes nostalgic about the douchey misogynistic Something Awful threads he participated in:

Oh thank thee, noble Potatocubed. If what you want is explanations of ideas about how games actually work, the snarky "Chill about elfgames, bro" is exactly the same kind of useless as the smarmy "A lot to think about here but let's agree to disagree, thanks for a great discussion".


4. Anonymous Reviewing Schmucks Doing Thankless Work

I love these people and we all should: they buy a new game or game thing, they sit down in front of it and read it all the way through and try hard to do what the snarky and smarmy don't: provide facts, give evidence, admit when personal bias might be in their way, do the work, tell people, respond to questions, criticize. Then they put it up on the internet, get a few hits, move on to the next one. Almost none of the people who do this well are known as game designers even on the indie level. Their work is googled constantly ("carcosa rpg review")--but their names are known only to the folks on their forums or blogs.

As relatively scrupulous as they are, theory is unlikely to come from them because, for one, many of them just don't temperamentally seem into it, but more seriously because they don't have much data to work with. A reviewer is talking about a book that they might not ever use, or one they've used once, or one they will play with for a few months, love, review well, and then notice a gaping flaw in long after. So even though there are reviewers who say useful, interesting and insightful things, it's in a limited context and isn't really tested or stretched out into theories--at least the way it's usually done.


5. "Let's Read..."s And Old Things

This is a lot like reviewing, but with one difference: the things they're looking at are old. Pull something off the shelf, decide to care, go through it--often more thoroughly and slowly than a reviewer, as there's no commercial urgency. Likewise, due to the lack of commercial urgency, the work can be even more thankless.

The Let's Reader however, does always have some data to work with--even if it isn't as various or clean as what the researcher would want. We don't know anything about how the new horror game we just read interacts with the world, but we know that Vampire: The Masquerade attracted a great many women to the hobby even though it had sexy lady pictures in it, we know a lot of people played it despite rules the designer found regrettable. Likewise, we know RIFTS was wildly popular despite....everything about RIFTS. We know Tb was less popular than Burning Wheel despite being the same in a jillion ways. We know that OD&D was, despite early skepticism, played and used. We know people really like advantage/disadvantage. We know universal tables have fallen from favor. We know DC Adventures--a generic late trad crunch disaster--was much more popular than the nearly identically packaged Marvel Heroic--a generic late Indie/postForge roll-to-see-who-talks disaster. We know Warhammer managed to be successful despite being almost D&D with different art and one cool subsystem in a market choked with things that could be described that way. We know some of the published classes in Dragon made it into the game and some didn't. We can now read these things and their claims and at least start to judge them in terms of whether they did what they set out to do or whether they did a better thing or a worse thing.

Jon Peterson's look at early D&D--Playing At The World--shows how this approach can sometimes sprout into theory. In between tracking down where all the stuff in D&D appeared there, it meanders into why various things in RPG history happened.

Here's Jon summarizing his discovery of the first "edition war":

The difference can be attributed to the opposing philosophies of board wargames and miniature wargames. Miniature wargaming was more artisanal, less prefabricated; more demanding, less commercially viable. To the avid miniature wargamer, board gaming must have appeared crude, aesthetically dull and confining in the rigidity of its rules; to the unrepentant board wargamer, miniature gaming looked expensive, labor-intensive and contentious in its latitude toward system. Not all players want to have to design a game in order to play it, but for creative gamers, miniature wargames inspired new heights of craftsmanship and sophistication. 

It looks like advocates of focus, clarity, reliability and (a resulting) popularizability have been divided from advocates of flexibility, customizability and eccentricity since literally before the hobby started.

He also uncovers some data on the familiar-to-videogame-theorists issue of whether addictivity is good in games:

A second pioneer recognized that Gygax and Arneson had created “a new order of game,” one so addictive that another early commentator fears “it’s worse than heroin.”

What makes these observations of theoretical importance is that we all have the data provided by the intervening years to analyze at least parts of these claims.

Likewise the interview with David Wesely--author of the first Braunsteins way in the prehistory of RPGs--has more real theory in it than all these other Theory From The Closet interviews put together, because we know how this story turned out.

Obviously the Old School blogs do a lot of this because they require, by definition, people reading old stuff, but the culture's skepticism about the whole idea of theory means even when it produces genuinely interesting theory, it often pretends it hasn't. Which is ironic because the mere requirement of talking about games that've been tried out on millions of people rather than eight white beardstaches at a con means the OSR has actually done a fuckton of theory. It's just called "advice" instead.


Ok so the point is

There's no rule that says you have to throw down with your A-game or fuck off but until some people are willing to do that, ideas among moneypeople about what tabletop RPGs do will be slowly colonized by echoes of whatever somebody's saying Skyrim did to their lab monkeys. Plus the usual circular bullshit everyone is used to. The dreaded Online Argument is the level that the theory of games is at and only you can do anything about it.

So you can listen to that for the next 15 years and whatever it does to games, or you can start developing some ways to reward signal and discourage noise. Even when the noise likes the same game you do.

If you don't vote, you can't complain later.

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