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What I want you to do first is remember this: it all starts with a lie.

It’s a clever lie, but a lie nonetheless. I thought someone would pick up on it. Someone did, but not enough to justify the lie. I thought I was being clever. Too clever for my own good, it turns out. Someone noticed. One person. At least, they were the only person who let me know they noticed.

Where’s the lie? That’s a secret. Maybe, if you’re a faithful reader and true, I’ll let you know at the end. In the meantime, let’s take a walk, you and me. Trust me, there’s a destination, but we have to make a few stops along the way.

This sort of writing - melodramatic, overcompensatorily macho, relentlessly and unironically self-aggrandizing - fills John Wick's Play Dirty to its brim. Along with the chest-thumping 'Check out my badass nigh-omnipotent NPC' stuff, Wick's prose is the biggest obstacle to readers of this book. An ungenerous reader might say it's the work of a guy going through a rough period in his life, acting out a macho fantasy and pretending it's an aesthetic theory.

Wick would presumably say that the huff'n'puff is a deliberate stylistic choice meant to embody the same extraordinary emotional dynamics he's describing in his play reports - the dramatic continuity and harrowing immersion that are the ultimate goals of Wick's 'Dirty' GM style (or were, back when he wrote his 'Episode Zero' in the 1990's).

Maybe, if you're a faithful reader and true, I'll tell you what I think later. In the meantime...

...I'll translate the book to histrionics-free language, and we'll pretend it was meant as a ludic-aesthetic theory all along. Yay?

First: Should you read the book?

Yeah, sure! It's breezy, the play reports are mostly enjoyable, the personality (voice) on display is annoying in an occasionally entertaining way, and the insights into dramatic structure and player immersion in RPGs are invaluable. As an artifact of RPG history - specifically the 'narrativist' strain that's arguably the biggest idea in RPGs since Chainmail - it's informative and enlightening. And it lays out the foundations of an argument for the aesthetic and experiential value of roleplaying games, aimed at nongamers. That's a hell of a thing, even if it's partly by accident...

I've given the book a 3 style/4 substance rating, but it really is stylish - the style is just a pain in the ass. The substance is mostly excellent, except when it degenerates into mere style.

What's the secret mentioned at the outset?

Here's an anecdote from the book, concerning Wick's BBEG, 'Carter':

For six weeks running, one of the characters was in jail. Every four-hour session, he’d sit at the corner of the table — in jail — and watch as his friends struggled to maintain their lives. (“What do you do this turn, Roger?” “I imagine the look on Carter’s face when I rip off his ears.”)

Six weeks.

But he didn’t give up. Even though he had a life sentence and no chance of parole and no chance his buddies would get him out of the most advanced prison ever designed for meta-humans, he stuck it out. (“What do you do this turn, Roger?” “I imagine the look on Carter’s face when I make earrings out of his...” “Okay, Roger. I get the point.”)

But break him out, they did. In one of the most exciting sessions in any of my games. And when he got out, he looked at me and said, “I’m still here.”

I smiled. “Yes. Yes you are.”

He mimicked the motion of putting his cowl over his head and whispered, “And Carter is %$#ed.”

[...]

That very moment, I was proud. Proud like a papa. Nineteen months of screwing players every way I could. Nineteen months of pushing them beyond the limits of their bodies, their patience, their dignity and their resolve. Nineteen months of giving them pain that no point configuration could protect them from.

Nineteen months were about to pay off.

This bit of play report is the point of Play Dirty. If you read it and say, 'The GM is a sociopath, the player's a fool. Unfun gaming sucks,' then the book will irritate you. If you can imagine what that moment - 'I'm still here' - felt like, you're at an advantage, and you may well enjoy the book despite its presentation.

The secret, damn you!

What did I just say to you, chuckles? Go back and reread the anecdote.

...

Aaaaaaaaand for those who enjoy didacticism...

The opening essay ('Episode Zero') purports to be about using disadvantages against PCs - being a 'Dirty GM,' stretching the limits of fairness to keep players on their toes. As Wick puts it:

This article is designed to show Game Masters how to use a character’s Disadvantages, Powers and Resources against him.

Utterly boring and banal, were this the case. In fact the article and (most of the) book are about raising a game's emotional stakes by taking seriously its narrative dimensions and - crucially - matching the real-world player experience to the in-game character experience. Play Dirty links RPGs to theatre, literature, and (in a roundabout way) psychotherapy with its emphasis on emotional progression and reality-testing.

Some of the book's key advice, paraphrased and bent slightly:

If you've ever written a screenplay, you know that Act Two (of three) is the killer writing challenge. Beginnings and endings are relatively easy, but the mere life (continuance) inbetween is where most scripts run aground. (As Joss Whedon or somebody maybe once put it, Act Three problems are usually Act Two problems in disguise.) Play Dirty is about embracing Act Two: letting the PCs touch bottom so that (barely) coming out on top at the end of Act Three means something.

Which is to say, a monotonic approach to inevitable victory is childish bullshit. Hey, I should put that on a t-shirt.

Note that all that advice applies to, say, writing novels as well as designing RPG campaigns.

The controversy

Play Dirty feels like a time capsule, now. World of Darkness players will relate to it instantly; it evokes that strain of RPG mood and practice. D&D types might have a harder time getting into the intensely 'Narrativist' mindset it calls for.

Yet the biggest RPG going, D&D 4e - roundly criticized as a glorified miniatures combat game - is designed precisely to generate this up-down-up dramatic structure in the context of each individual encounter/scene. Wick's 'Dirty GM' power fantasies might still seem tacky, but in this golden age of small-scale genre-specific story games (from Fiasco to Mutant City Blues to Mouse Guard) it seems his ideas about immersion, narrative arcs, and moral-ludic content have won at least some hobby-wide arguments. The psychology (or even narratology) of Play Dirty might be coarse, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.

What makes the book challenging and controversial is its secret mission: Wick is trying to sneak story-game emotional spectra into power-fantasy gaming (the stats-driven universe of games like Champions, GURPS, D&D, etc.). A lot of gamers wish to maintain the connection between tabletop 'roleplaying' and its roots in emotionally-shallow, risk-free wargaming - because this enables them to maintain the orderly pseudo-societies that are, for many, the attractive fantasy of RPGs in general. As Robin Laws puts it in one of his 'See Page XX' columns:

I don't think I'm exactly going out on a limb when I say that we are a glorious geek tribe, and that, as a whole, we tend more to certain personality quirks than others. Further, I submit that we contain more than our fair share of people for whom the split between thought and feeling is particularly fraught. Many of us are to one degree or another uncomfortable in standard social situations. The entire roleplaying form can be seen as an alternate mode of socialization in which the boundaries of interaction are mathematically codified - and plus, you get super-powers.

It is therefore the ultimate form of entertainment for smart people who distrust emotion and have boundary issues.

Wick is aware of the problem and wants to help, he's just a dick about it:

The fact of the matter is this: everyone in the group either wins or loses. If everyone is having a wonderful time, we all win. If one player decides that he wants to have fun in spite of everyone else, he’s selfish. If he feels he needs to show off his character design skills in such a way that messes with other players’ enjoyment, he’s acting like a twelve year old jerk with serious confidence issues.

Granted, he’s also your high school buddy Bob. And that makes things all too complicated. I hear so many people saying, “Gaming is a social activity.” Then why the hell are so many gamers lacking in any kind of social skills? Maybe its because gaming has always about blind acceptance. So many of us came to gaming because we were “outsiders” of one kind or another.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn. And that doesn’t mean we can’t grow.

Fact is, a lot of hardcore gamers make their homes near the business end of the autism spectrum, and Wick's 'dirty' play style is all about rupturing the comfortable power fantasies that lure emotionally-closeted players to the table in the first place. His main test case is a Champions game for Christ's sake! No wonder readers were uncomfortable with his Pyramid articles - and no wonder they spent so much energy complaining about surface issues, whether he's playing 'correctly' or 'fairly,' rather that stretching to meet him halfway on his suggestions about possible new natures for tabletop roleplay.

That said, Wick isn't exactly helping himself with the posturing:

Essentially, all players want their characters to be John McClane. You know, the guy Bruce Willis plays in the Die Hard films. They want to be knocked down, punched out, bloody, battered and beaten.

But (and this is an important “but”, folks), every time they get knocked down, they want to be able to get back up.

That’s right. Just like the Chumbawumba song.

Being Irish, it just comes to me naturally.

So do sentimentality, posturing, disingenuous 'self-deprecation,' hand-wavy generalization, and a tendency to belabor 'war stories' about good times around the beer bottle. (Maybe they all come from the same place?) Wick does go on about 'death. Final. Permanent. Death' without any readily-discernible sense of the silly irony of talking this way about a superhero roleplaying game; he's so high on his own GMing fumes it's a wonder he doesn't simply float away from his keyboard. He really does say things like this:

And the game master/storyteller/ dungeon master is the Dragon. He’s Grendel. He’s the Whale. Yes, he is God to our Jonah. (“Did you slay Leviathan? I did.”) And why does he send us pain? (Dangerously invoking Ellison.) Because pain is what pushes us. We don’t grow without pain. We don’t evolve without pain. We don’t learn without pain. If nobody ever knocked us down, we wouldn’t know the bliss of getting back up.

And he evidently doesn't make any distinction between players quitting his game out of (endlessly various) frustration and, say, characters being 'quitters.' (Same article, page 37 in the PDF.)

That last either indicates an absolutely contemptible view of other human beings, or else is 'merely' a hugely embarrassing mistake for a professional game designer/writer to make. That he made it in the middle of a long stretch of unemployment (and, if I read right, a failing marriage?) makes it somewhat forgivable. But it reads quite poorly in light of the hoary stereotypes about gamers and their trouble with the blurry fantasy/reality line - stereotypes that Wick himself explicitly addresses in the book!

Which brings us back to the question of whether the puffed-up dudebro vibe of the book is intentional - mimicking at the level of form and style the book's implied argumentative content - or just actual puffery. It's not a terribly important question in the grand scheme of things, but the answer you come up with will surely affect (as it is affected by) your reading of Wick's articles. The advice in the book is commonsensical and convincing; the examples given are inspiring; the prose sorta matches the subject; it's all in creepy/awkward fun. Yet Wick's good advice has to cut through his style, in places, to reach its readers - and that's never a good thing.

So here's my advice (I know you've been waiting): read the book, laugh at the stories, take most of the advice to heart, throw out any inkling you might have that 'gaming the system' is anything other than juvenile boundary-testing, salt the whole thing with a healthy dose of 'sociopathic GMing is only a means to an end and not morally upstanding or interesting in itself,' and then go off and do what every single page of Play Dirty is ultimately trying to get you to do, which is...

...raise the emotional and intellectual stakes of your roleplaying experiences beyond the lowest-common-denominator expectations of this benighted industry and hobby.

There. That wasn't so hard, was it?

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