Comments on: RPGs and Art That Challenges

By: Galen

Galen — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:45:20 +0000

Oh God – This reminds me of that crappy “Dealy Plaza: Battle for the Grassy Knoll” project I thought up that had Aliens, Mafioso, Elvis, Vatican Assasains, Neo-Nazis, Soviets, Freemasons, etc as playable factions fighting in a king-of-the-hill type fashion to get their guy on the knoll.

By: Rob Donoghue

Rob Donoghue — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 19:30:40 +0000

This leads me to wonder whether the game or the play is more properly the work of art. False dichotomy, I know, since the answer is “both” (much like a script and the play performed from it) but it illuminates the question for me because I’m uncertain what the proportions are. Banal games have produced artistic play, and artistic games have produced banal play, and I’m not sure if there’s really any causal relation between those things.

See, I think a lot of designers agree with this thesis, but there are reasons other than cowardice for doing something other than putting sophisticated issues front and center. A number of them want to provide the tools for making art without trying to slant the table, so to speak.

To take an example, Shock is a game I don’t enjoy playing too much, but I fully acknowledge that it is built on a rock solid premise of using story elements to explore real issues. It even provides help and guidelines for doing something more than trekking up those issue, but ultimately it’s on the playgroup’s head to make something of it or not.

To my mind, Shock is doing its bit in pursuit of art, but it’s doing it in a very different way than it would if it were a more setting-heavy game that addressed powerful ideas in its fiction.

None of this contradicts the underlying point, and in fact I feel it needs to be expanded. Much of what you are talking about is setting or background material, but the stuff with real teeth also engages the mechanic. Old Mage didn’t just make assertions about modernity, it put is money where its mouth was and had the rules back up this idea.

All of which is to say, I think there are a number of different (often complementary) ways to try to approach the art, and that’s a good thing.

-Rob D.

By: JDCorley

JDCorley — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:14:23 +0000

I was about to mention the ridiculously libertoonian ideas not just of Transhuman Space, but Traveller too. I don’t think there aren’t ideas advanced in RPGs. They’re just authoritarian or libertarian or just plain old right-wing.

By: admin

admin — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 12:38:17 +0000

A light touch has demonstrably been shown to be easy to dodge. Transhuman Space remains a libertarian shill, and fandom pretty much slot the Blessed Isle into a generic fantasy empire template even though the allegory it’s supposed to be was originally written right into outlines. There’s more to it than including easter eggs for fellow travellers.

By: heron61

heron61 — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 11:44:30 +0000

I’ve seen two ways to accomplish this sort of thing – the quiet way and the loud one. I almost always choose the first – a brief mention in the Blessed Isle book for Exalted that the Dynansts provide free medical care to all of their mortal subjects simply because doing so is far more efficient than the alternative, or including successful union organizers amidst the rampant libertarianism of GURPS: THS. I enjoy doing this, and I like seeing it. Then there are games that do this sort of thing loudly – oWOD, especially Werewolf & Mage are the obvious examples. While I liked oMage a great deal, the line between challenging art and bombastic pronouncements can occasionally be far too thin – I found much of oWerewolf on the wrong side of this line, and I agreed with many of the positions espoused.

In short, I see making such statements and challenges the focus of a (or in fact of any art) risks ending up with propaganda rather than art or entertainment. I prefer a light touch with such things, but I also definitely like having them there.

By: satyre

satyre — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 03:07:24 +0000

Wow. Hella post.

How do you raise the bar if you don’t push limits?

It’s past time for designers to stop being scared of petulant advocates of ‘the one true way’ of play. Here’s the rub – someone will be offended no matter what you do. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to gain something positive from the feedback.

Creating something outside the norm takes courage – the alternative is cowardice, committee design and complacency. Between speaking courageously and alienating the majority of your audience is a wide continuum of engaging and provoking play.

Worrying about how people hack your creation leads to paralysing inaction – they’ll monkey regardless of moral or ethical lines. There’s a world of difference between the dreadfully provocative and provocatively dreadful though.

Instead focus on making something so damn compelling people have to engage with it. Easy? Hell no. Rewarding? Let’s see…

By: magicbox

magicbox — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 20:35:49 +0000

I’d say that one of the fundamental reason why game designers get nervous dealing with what can loosely be described as moral issues within their games is because they’re used to the dynamic of a group that is made up of maybe two people that are friends with a bunch of other people who don’t know each other at all, who just e-mailed or called someone because they wanted to game. We have a dynamic in our group of old friends who’ve been gaming together for years, so we have more leeway in playing up issues like torture, religion, and philosophical arguments that our characters should have with one another. I can see how people who barely know each other would be nervous dealing with those issues, so I’m sure the designers try not to push their GMs and players in that direction too much.
But I agree that it’s odd that designers are shying away from it from a demographic perspective. Most gamers are an aging populace (not quite as aging as farmers, but I digress) and most adult gamers want to play in adult games with adult issues addressed in them.