Author: James Bardin (---.umsmed.edu)
Date: 12-03-2004 00:38
What can I say? The devil’s always in the details…
“Seriously enough to consider them a useful form of political expression, enough to be worried about the political content of the games they play.”
If a role-playing game suddenly becomes a form of political expression, then who gets to be in control of that expression? What if one or more of the players disagrees with that expression; are they to be penalized or ostracized from the game?
Forgive a poor, stupid American, but what you’re talking about is turning something fun into nothing more than yet another way for some politician or activist to get on a soap box and rant and rave about some issue, which they often have almost no real understanding of, or any desire to view objectively. The game turns less into a free-form experience, and more into just a form of acting from a script.
The example given of having Isrealis and Palestinians role-play one another’s cultures is altogether different. It espouses no political expression; it simply has two different cultures explore one another within the context of the game being played. If it is not for or against either one, and both are free to interpret the experience on their own (as with most LARPs), then the game itself is pure of political expression.
But, hey, what do I know? Americans only invented the concept of the role-playing game, so we must not be nearly as smart as the rest of the world…
“Someone summed up the strategy like this: The American guests of honor are there to keep the con goers happy. The Nordic guest of honor is the one who's job is to talk to the outsiders and make Ropecon and roleplaying in general seem like the new from of art expression it is in the eyes of the media.”
My, my. Over here, we needn’t play such silly games with the media. Gamers are a pretty widespread these days, so there’s no need for the special treatment. We have plenty of gaming conventions, even LARP-centric ones, with all the advertising one can get for the money available for it. We don’t have to lie and make the games into something more palatable to the public.
Heck, role-playing is a business over here, something I’m sure you’re well aware of, as you seem so highly well-read on American affairs. We've got companies training our troops for dealing with the Iraqi people, as well as teaching all sorts of law enforcement agencies how to deal with various situations. I know, because some of that is happening right down here in my little, poor state; some live-action role-players were chosen to portray Iraqi citizens, and were taught by some Iraqi immigrants on the details of the culture.
I’m sure this is all second-hand news to you, but I thought I’d put it out there for the less educated among us.
“She's also the first female guest of honor in the history of Ropecon. Come on, America! Surely there's an accomplished woman somewhere in the roleplaying industry in the U.S.! Preferably someone other than Margaret Weis.”
Let’s look at the guest list for DragonCon this year in Atlanta, GA, and see what female gaming guests we had:
Katharine Anderson-Davila: editor-in-chief of WomenGamers.com.
Elonka Dunin: Executive Producer and GM of Online Community for Simutronics Corp.; bio indicates she has done and does work on the coding of the games the company owns (many seem to be RPGs).
Laura Curtis Hickman: apparently helped hubby Tracy create the original game designs in Dragonlance, and she and hubby created the original Ravenloft adventure (also, appears to have introduced Tracy to D&D originally)
Mur Lafferty: freelance writer who worked on Warcraft and Everquest RPGs, and Mage and Exalted from White Wolf.
Lindsay Woodcock: freelancer who worked on White Wolf stuff, and active LARPer.
Past years had Anne Brown (various D&D items), Jackie Cassada (LARP), Julia Coombs (electronic gaming), Ellie Haguel (WOTC honcho and gamer), Jennifer Hartshorn (whole lot of tabletop games, and the LARP Shattered Isles, along with some work on old MET The Camarilla), Traci Parker (involved in MMORPG, including EverQuest), Nicky Rea (Changeling stuff and some LARP), Kathleen Ryan (more White Wolf stuff), Maryann Siembieda (major figure in the Palladium gaming company), Lisa Stevens (has worked on Ars Magica and Vampire, worked for Lion Rampant, White Wolf, and WOTC, has written gaming articles), Cynthia Summers (yes, more White Wolf stuff), and Rachelle Udelle (sigh, more White Wolf).
That doesn’t count the women who produced TV shows and movies, who wrote books, or who created some form of art; that list would exhaust me a bit much.
That also says nothing of the vast amount of women in gaming who probably just don’t bother with being public, because they aren’t elitist pricks. Two of the three General Managers of the LARP I played until recently were women; the only man to hold the post was ousted not a month or two into his career. Women also have a hand in running lots of other parts of not only that game, but many others.
Juhana, I agree that I don’t know much about the gaming scene in your part of the world. But it is laughably obvious that you have absolutely zero idea what you are even talking about, and that you aren’t even going to try. Have you even been to this country’s cons or LARPs? Which ones? How many times? If you have, you sure went to a crappy event, it seems, but I won’t hold that against you. No, I’d only hold it against you if you were simply ignorant of something you spoke of with the implied authority you have in publishing this article.
“With Kovalic, the situation's pretty much the same, except that he also turned out to be pretty entertaining. Certainly more entertaining than any of his work I have ever seen. This is pretty annoying.”
Maybe you just don’t get it, because he’s writing for a different audience. Or maybe you’re just so high up in your Ivory Tower of Gaming, you can’t possibly understand what he’s writing about. Perhaps you might try associating with some of us filthy commoners once in a while, and you’d understand something about those you constantly insult and belittle.
“We talked with Wujcik some more at the Monday afterparty, and another interesting point was that he had not made Amber diceless because of some theoretical principle, but because it fit the original work the game was based on, Zelaszny's books. Because nothing in those books happens by chance, chance should have no role in the game either. Hence, no dice. Of course, he didn't actually say this in the book, causing a lot of roleplayers to misunderstand the point.”
The problem with Amber isn’t the system. No game system, in and of itself, is necessarily incapable of being used. What matters are only two things: the person(s) running the game, and the players involved with it.
I sat down to Amber once upon a time, and it sucked. Not because of the system, per se, but because the person running it wasn’t very good. Amber is almost totally role-playing, while action and adventure take a back seat. It’s a great game for politics and intrigue, and a crappy one when anyone wants something “active” (in a loose sense) to do.
While I might retool the core system a bit, I never missed the point. But it appeals only to a certain percentage of gamers, which might not be enough to make it last. Consider MET: for a while, everyone loved going to the games (for debatable reasons, but that’s another long argument). Then, when folks stopped going, it kinda fell apart. My own little poor state here in the U.S. was actually home to a sizable MET game, but internal politics and the waning popularity of the “gothic-punk” style whittled it down to nothing fast.
Maybe Amber was just before it’s time. Maybe now is a good time to push it again. God, you act like you only get one chance to make a game succeed, and when it flops, it’s over. How silly. WOTC and White Wolf are back on the attack, and doing well. One should never give up on a game, if they can possibly introduce it to a new generation of gamers.
“Not partcularly unusual, though, since sadly explaining the design principles of a game in the game itself is something that's rarely done. It's something I'd like to see in every roleplaying book.”
Strangely enough, wargaming is doing it somewhat. Games Workshop (who make Warhammer 40K) had a section in the back of their 3rd edition book that explained the concepts of certain rules, and why they did or didn’t make sense strategically. A few other games are starting to follow suit; WOTC has frequent chats with game developers, who often explain the why’s and wherefore’s of a given product. The average gamer may not agree, but having some communication from them on why they are doing things is better than nothing.
“One of the things I really despise at roleplaying events is the military fans, the people who feel necessary to dress in army uniform and wave big, fake but very authentic guns about.”
On this one instance, I can agree. This moronic behavior is, gladly, absent from pretty much ever y con I’ve been to. Sure, you get a small squad of Stormtroopers, or Mobile Infantry, or Colonial Marines. But they’re just hanging out, showing off their devotion to some show or other, and generally being friendly with folks.
Trying that silly military shit over here will likely get a firm but gentle request from convention staff to knock it off. If that doesn’t work, the real police can always give them first-hand instruction on removing a target from a building.
“People have been hammering away at this stuff for twenty years now, and the argument's still essentially about the same stuff.”
Right here is your problem, man. You guys keep going round and round and round about this stuff. Why?
Over here, we don’t theorize about role-playing and look down our noses at one another because we all don’t “get it”. Role-playing isn’t about any one thing, true, but you act like gaming just for the sake of number-crunching or ego-stroking is trite and meaningless. Well, maybe to you it is, because THAT’S NOT WHAT YOU’RE INTO.
You make ignorant blanket statements about gaming, but the truth is, you guys are still just a step behind over there. We’ve been through our elitist phase over here already; MET came and went like a fad. It was an eye-opener, but did LARP die afterwards? Hell, no!
We’ve got every kind of LARP under the sun now. Boffer weapon games styled after the LOTR movies; games set in the Cthulu mythos; a few MET games still going; and even stranger stuff than that out and about. You guys are still going on about how role-playing can be this, that, and the other; we’ve focused on making the experience so streamlined in live-action, that your disbelief erodes within minutes of a weekend game. If we are behind anywhere, it is in embracing certain technologies (mostly for the boffer weapon games; some of the European games have phenomenal makeup, F/X, and special latex-based weapons that I would die to have over here). But otherwise, when I see you writing about something, all I can think is “been there, played that”.
Also, you constantly, over and over and over and over, try to inject meaning or significance to a role-playing experience. But that’s totally subjective; each gamer has to decide, individually and on their own, what meaning, if any, the game has to them. You think of role-playing as art. Okay, that’s cool. I can see that angle. But that’s not all it is, either, and it’s willfully moronic to insist otherwise. Sometimes a cigar is, believe it or not, still just a cigar.
The bottom line is, if this is all so repetitive, why are you still going on about it? Heck, you present yourself as a rather intelligent, energetic sort of guy. Go start a game, man! You complain and complain and complain, yet I’m not seeing much activity. I think maybe you’re just all talk (not very educated talk at that) and that’s it’s easier to complain from the comfort and safety of your warm armchair, rather than actually going out and fixing whatever problems there are in the gaming scene as you see it.
“There's been some discussion over the idea of inviting Gary Gygax as a guest of honor in the future. He's the first, after all, and it'd be nice to see him while he's still alive. On the other hand, he hasn't exactly moved with the times.”
If that last sentence doesn’t show your ignorance of what you speak of more than anything, I don’t know what does. Do you even know the story about how he first started role-playing?
He was involved with this big boardgame at the time (Junta, I think?), where all the players were leaders of various kinds (guerilla leaders, generals, dictators, etc.). The idea was that you all tried to carve out a domain in some place or another, fend off other players who might attack you, expand your territory, and so forth.
It was, at some point, decided that the players would be given a set time to make deals with one another and such, schemes and plans that they would use to subjugate the other players. I do not recall the specifics, but I believe that at the end of each round, the players had a few minutes to leave the board for a while and conduct “business” (i.e. maybe go have a smoke outside, and make arrangements).
And there, my friend, was the birth of the role-playing game. Not some stupid little experiment on some silly theory or hypothesis. Just some guys who said, “Hey, I have an idea on something fun to do with this game…” Other than the rules for the military part of the game (building stuff, moving troops, etc.), there was nothing constraining the other players from lying, bribing, or doing anything else in order to win.
D&D was developed out of that: a mixture of tactical/strategic boardgame, and acting out a persona. But the basis was just good ol’ free-style role-playing, and some rules for running a nation/army.
Yet you sit there, in your chair, and smugly talk of how advanced you and your cohorts are. Fah, you’re as old-hat as the first edition of “Chainmail”! You’re still pandering about art and theories, while the rest of us are actually making things happen.
What credentials do you have, you who sit in judgement of others, like some over-blown movie critic who turns his nose down at something that turns out to be a cult classic? What games have your created and run? Have you actually done anything, experienced anything, that gives even the lightest weight to any single thing you have said? Because you obviously have shown a total lack of knowledge of what’s going on over here in the states, I question that you know anything about anything.
Of course, I can almost guess that the answer to all this could be cut-and-pasted from earlier conversations. I do not doubt that you will only reinforce my own theory: that you talk about things you know nothing of, because online, credibility and logic need not apply, so long as you say something loud enough and long enough to make others think it is true.
You know what, though? I’ve just hit on an idea. Maybe you should be the guest of honor at some convention over here. You could head up a panel on “gaming theory” (or what-the-hell-ever it is the “elite” call it now), and maybe we could sit you next to Gary Gygax and Mark Rein Hagen. Heck, I mean, you like to hold Americans in such low regard over there, maybe you can enjoy the fruit of your superiority over here, eh? I’m sure that some convention could be enticed to pay for a plane ticket, a room, and a few meals for you to enlighten us all with your insight.
Then again, perhaps not. I’m sure that armchair would be far warmer than the reception you’d get for your snide little comments about American gamers over here…
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