Over at Jim Henley’s Livejournal I made an offhand comment that many games under the “indie” banner are designed to be played by people who meet at conventions, primarily know each other online or have similar remote, vaguely suspicious relationships. “Traditional” games assume a stronger good-faith bond. I also implied that designing games to support a snippy hobby-before-handshakes attitude is screwed up.
Jim took me very seriously and came back with a very detailed rebuttal (each word goes to a different segment of the response). I really appreciate that, so this post follows his with some thoughts about friendship in RPGs, why I emphasize it and what it’s doing to design and culture. I brought up how the decline of friendship might influence RPGs before, and linking to it is a good way to refresh the idea and remind everyone that this is a real social problem, not an off the cuff supposition.
Naturally, veteran readers may wonder where I get off telling anybody about friendship, given the fact that I don’t play well with their pretend-happy communities and just insulted them in this sentence. Here’s what I think:
- Just because you trade big emotional notes with people over the internet doesn’t mean you’re making friends with them.
- Online communities like to model themselves on performance communities (both crave attention over intimacy) but tabletop RPGs aren’t about performing for a third party.
- While low trust groups have always been part of roleplaying, the past decade marks this being considered the best we can aspire to, instead of something to be overcome with practice.
- Friendship rot is pretty embarrassing to status-conscious gamers and geeky folks in general, and the most embarrassed react by attacking the whole project of friendship. These are the guys that quote that Geek Fallacies article all the time. They need procedural rules because they can’t hack an ethos of compassionate friendship.
(I don’t think Jim necessarily fits the bill in all ways, or maybe even any of them. If I named names, he wouldn’t be on the list. This is a general observation.)
People frequently think a relationship is friendship when in my view, it isn’t. So what am I talking about? What are the characteristics of friendship?
A friend is an end, not a means.
This is the granddaddy and heart of “indie” gaming’s failure. Its ethics are corrupt from design up, and destructive to real friendships. It assumes that relationships mutual, egoistic exploitation are the rule, and that the goal of any system is to efficiently regulate selfishness.
True friendship requires you to think of any systems, customs and tools as ways to please your friends first. Even your character exists to further that friendship, not drive an ego trip. Even if you believe that all actions are ultimately selfish, this principle remains true because in that case, a friend is someone for whom you find selfish satisfaction in their enjoyment. They are very nearly one and the same.
Friends trust each other.
This too-obvious point never seems to stick. Players don’t trust GMs, RPG theory types don’t trust game designers and people post complains to RPG boards because they don’t trust their groups to handle an issue. (Yeah, posting behind your group’s back means you fail the trust test in a pretty basic way.)
If your relationships are like this you’ll need systems that are more than toys to play with (and ignore or tweak when the spirit moves you). They have to carry the creative process because your group can’t function without them.
At one point, Jim talks about what Capes “promises” him that GURPS doesn’t. That’s the problem: Games don’t promise. People promise. Friends make promises you can trust. They’re the basis; rules are toys that provide interesting output.
(Naturally, somebody’s going to call this “system doesn’t matter” rhetoric. It isn’t. Toys matter.)
Friends place emotional bonds over ritual relationships.
That brings me to my next point. Friendship thrives in liminal moments where no one has a particularly well-defined obligation, but come through nonetheless. Nobody tells you to pass your friend the spotlight, but you do it because you want her to be happy. Telling that joke might damage focus, but it’s fun, and you want your friends to have fun.
Recent RPG designs target these undefined moments, incorporate them into formal rules of play – the RPG ritual, in other words – and steals them from the dominion of ad hoc judgments based on mutual trust. And no wonder: Without the primacy of an emotional connection, you’ll see these interstices as threats. You’ll bitch about Rule Zero all day along.
A friend sets the example for new relationships.
If you don’t have a selfless, trusting informal relationship with the people you game with they aren’t your friends – not really. You may swear friendship up and down, but your claim lacks substance. And if your self-defined friendships lack these qualities, what about the people you meet online or at conventions? If anything, it’ll be worse. That’s why in my experience, the “indie” table is one of the unhappiest at the con.
I often surprise people by being so affable in face to face interactions, and when I run games at conventions (something I’m generally reluctant to do, by the way – when it happens, it’s to support relationships I value) people usually leave satisfied.
I associate gaming with some great friendships, so my first reflex is to assume that the potential for more of the same exists with anyone I play with. I don’t worry about them being “little bitches” (to refer to Jim’s comment about actors and improve) because it’s not acting – the performance to the third party isn’t adding its unique pressures. Tabletop play is about intimate experiences. It thrives on compassion. It needs friendship, or good faith in friendship to come.
You know, this would be a much more useful discussion if you named games and quoted rules, because as it is, I really have no idea what you’re talking about, although I have some quesses.
“You know, this would be a much more useful discussion if you named games and quoted rules, because as it is, I really have no idea what you’re talking about, although I have some quesses.”
I’m trying to curtail the drama.
I can understand that, but my experience is that without specifics, people will usually define their terms differently (sometimes subtly, sometimes not), and then talk past each other. Communication is hard enough even with specifics — sometimes I don’t think human beings are very good at it.
Malcolm,
Interesting thoughts. You’ve hit on something that’s bothered me about a lot of indie theory but in a way I don’t get. That said, and I realize this isn’t the point of this point, party of the reason toys matter is as a system of compromise. My friends and I might have similar, and generally compatible, goals in our game. That doesn’t mean, however, we’re in perfect alignment. This is normal in the sense that friends have disagreements and systems that moderate those disagreements can be helpful.
A second area where friendship and trust can’t be assumed is in forming new groups. My early history had both playing at adult RPG clubs and joining groups via the proverbial game store ads. Today I’ve done it via clubs and internet ads. In either case you aren’t gaming with friends but potential friends. While the wisdom that no gaming is better than bad gaming will lead us to stay with groups that are mostly friends the process of getting there is non-friendship absolute gaming.
Finally, my statement “stay with groups that are mostly friends” does mean we’re going to be in some groups where the entirety of the friendship is game based. While that implies two things that fit your model, we should at least have context valid trust and because we do have friends present we should please them by not pissing on the non-friends, having the system support trust in that model isn’t unreasonable to hope for (but might be to require). The other paths seem to head for one of the “geek fallacies”.
What I do see in both the geek fallacies (which you seem not to lake) and the ideas that game systems have to deal with lack of trust is the breakdown of manners. If a friend invites me to their game I may not be friends with others in that game and may never be their friends. That said, good manners should enable us to game with four other people only three of whom are friends and the fourth is someone we can engage in good faith.
A second area where friendship and trust can’t be assumed is in forming new groups.
If anything, this is where a show of trust, at least, is the most vital.
I do agree that people can get really hot under the collar about their toys, but nobody pretends that it’s a toy’s responsibility to create a compromise. Hiding behind a game or formal system to handle your socialization is just so screwed up. People should take personal responsibility for these things. When we do accept formal strictures, this should be to amuse or challenge us, not to create a functional relationship in the first place.
I my view, “No gaming is better than bad gaming” has evolved into “No gaming is better than any gaming with compromise, a learning curve or anything that might be challenging.”
I’m with Peter.
Are you referring to rules that try way too hard to be exact/specific and outlaw any “common sense dictates” scenarios? Or rules that don’t leave room for real-world personal relationships to shape/customize? Or something different?
Maybe I’m coming into this debate too late and missed some earlier information. I think good designers will have to “efficiently regulate selfishness” in games, not because they assume all players are artless power-gamers, but because there is joy in working around limitations/obstacles. Though, I must confess that in the past I have been forced to tweak a game to almost unplayability just because 4 out of 5 players in the group were incessant power-gamers who only wanted to screw with each other and squabble.
But even friends squabble. In fact, friends squabble over toys more than strangers, or so many years of teaching has taught me.
I would mostly agree with you, though, if I catch the right vibe or drift from the piece. Good to bring up.
So I’ve been working on this game for a bit, temporarily titled “Dharma and Defiance.” Its about (among other things) people in ancient India who get into fucked up situations because of the caste structures that enforce rules on their lives.
When you play the game if you don’t break the rules your characters will all end up fucked. Every time. There is no way to have even a single character not fuck everything in their lives up every time.
So you have to step outside the rules if you want anything good to happen to anyone, ever. (I won’t say “break the rules” as the game tells you that you can do it, so its something of a “rule zero” situation.) Thing is, once you go for the happy ending the only way to get it it to have everyone (more or less) agree to it — often at the cost of something they want for their own character.
I leave how this ties into your post as a logical exercise for your capable brain.
I think that’s pretty cool. I designed the Game of Immortals with a similar idea. If you fall behind it gets more and more in your interest to sabotage play procedures. Cooperation itself is retooled into something very aggressive and a bit mean, and I hope this makes outside-of-game headspace something of a relief where you kind of shake heads and chuckle at being such jerks. But the Game is not designed to make people be nice to each other.
I’m talking about my game because I haven’t seen yours. In yours, there’s a narrative space outside of formal rules. I like that and like thinking along those lines, especially since I think it pushes people to contribute from a genuine space in their heads.
You’ll have to send me an outline or something.
Your previous post on the subject was rot – although the decline of friendship and its impact on gaming would be a very interesting topic, maybe for someone else.
This post, by contrast, is very insightful and right on target about a lot of things, but it seems a bit “duh!” to me. All it really proves is that hobby-friends are not always real-friends, which is true of playing basketball with a group in the park, jogging in fun runs, scrapbooking at the local art store, golfing in the local bracket, playing chess at the local tournament, or playing cards at lunch at work, with absolutely nothing about roleplaying gaming and far less than nothing about indie roleplaying gaming that is unique in this respect. Yes, I have “gaming friends” who are not “real friends”. So what? I mean really, so what? (And “indie”? Isn’t that a commercial arrangement that tells us nothing about the content of the game anyway?) Does that have implications for the rules of the games we play? Does it have implications for, say, the rules of chess or basketball?
You got me to ask the question but I have no clue what you think the answer is except I think you’ve decided that With Great Power responds to the existence of acquaintances one way and Mutants & Masterminds responds to it another, and I can’t make any sense out of that supposed distinction at all given what I know about the two games.
that’s disingenuous. Malcolm’s stating that With Great Power comes bundled with assumptions about power dynamics, I’d assume M&M does too, but either way the general drift of theory is towards a stark, strange theater of trust/mistrust.
Okay, I thought that’s what I said, maybe I misunderstood, but I still don’t see it. Like, I have my With Great Power book in front of me and I don’t see it. Is there a particular page number I should be looking at?
I’m saying neither. I’m saying that we can’t talk about games “promising” us anything. When a toy promises us something, parents know that this is marketing, not the content of the toy. We should be boosting each other.
Certainly you’re not talking about marketing when you say “Recent RPG designs target these undefined moments, incorporate them into formal rules of play – the RPG ritual, in other words – and steals them from the dominion of ad hoc judgments based on mutual trust. And no wonder…” right? You said “designs” there and that’s what got me interested. I mean, please shoot me if I ever show an interest in marketing, the lowest of all human pursuits, but I was interested in what you had to say there because my examination of recent designs showed me nothing of the kind. Now you abandon the contention like a tiny baby bird left outside its nest? The weasels of the internet are closing in to murder it, it cries out for you!
I’m not abandoning a thing. It’s possible to talk about both an attitude and the game designs that encode it.
“I mean, please shoot me if I ever show an interest in marketing, the lowest of all human pursuits”
You would already be dead.
Okay, cool, so for the third time, can you give me an example of a design that “encodes” this friendless attitude into “indie” games? Like I say, I own a bunch of them, I’m trying to identify what the hell you’re talking about, and I don’t see it. Or at least, I don’t see these games as taking a fundamentally different posture from other roleplaying games.
Universalis and GURPS, two generic universal game engines, one “indie”, the other not (or so I’m told.) Both to me seem to assume that you’ve got some people interested in engaging the material, and they might be friends or they might not. Universalis has a much more collaborative world building process, but I don’t think that says anything or fails to say anything about friendship or the lack thereof. I mean, I guess it assumes you’ve cool enough with each other to talk about the game and GURPS technically doesn’t, but it seems a nitpick.
With Great Power and Mutants & Masterminds, two comic book superhero games, one “indie” the other not (again, so I’m told.) Neither to me seems to have a different approach to friendship at the table, or the lack of it.
In A Wicked Age and Conan d20, two sword-and-sorcery games, one “indie”, the other not (same caveat). I can maybe see the tiniest sliver of a nod towards social-level stuff in IAWA because it’s designed to be largely PvP. But is a PvP game inherently anti-friendship? Maybe. I don’t know. That’s what I’m asking!
Fiasco and Paranoia, two one-thing-after-another violent comedy games with some PvP elements, one “indie”, the other not (blah blah blah.) Why is one dismissive of friendship or anti-friendship or whatever you want to call it and the other not?
In short, I have no clue what in these games you’re looking at to reach the conclusion you reach, or even if we’re talking about the same games. Help me out here!
Competition can be friendly when the rules are treated as toys. IaWA might not be like this itself, but the cultural endeavour of participating in the game at all seems to strongly correlate with not being able to hack being decent to each other in other contexts. But don’t mind me here — I’m just going by what people say and do casually, as opposed to whatever they can dredge from a text to defend themselves.
Anyway:
Encoding Through Systems
Games have rules that replace common applications of good will with a procedure. So instead of trusting when somebody says their character wouldn’t really to the thing she jokes about, you have BW’s Instincts. Compels from games that use them have similar problems in the way they replace trusting to the portrayal. Rules that say what the GM may *not* do are usually of this type, since they assume the GM is an asshole instead of a helper.
Encoding Through Scope
Of course, it’s even easier to simply narrow the game’s scope to such an extent that procedures can be obeyed passively, such as with The Mountain Witch and Three Sixteen. If the game only makes it possible to play one story, that’s a game, designed on the assumption that its players kind of suck and need to be railroaded — because a narrow game is basically railroading with better rhetoric.
Encoding Through Custom
The Social Contract Awesome Principle Whatever. Rules designed to enforce rigid social norms and kill dynamic drift, because that’s dangerous. Read Chris Chinn’s blog. He’s all over gaming without trust.
“the cultural endeavour of participating in (IAWA) at all seems to strongly correlate with not being able to hack being decent to each other in other contexts. But don’t mind me here — I’m just going by what people say and do casually, as opposed to whatever they can dredge from a text to defend themselves.”
Um…so IAWA sounded interesting, I liked the idea of the random situation generator since I always liked random monster tables, I bought it and played it a bunch with my (gaming) friends. I had no idea it was because I couldn’t hack being decent to people in other contexts, I thought I just liked random tables! Cool, cool. I’m a vile monstar with no real friends. Anyway, on to your other examples.
Encoding Through Systems. You use the example of BW’s Instincts and say that it shows a lack of trust in the player’s portrayal of the character. I agree with you! Many times in other games, I’ve said “But my character would always have his gun on him, even in a high society party” and been shot down by a GM or made to roll dice, blah blah blah, and gotten grouchy that the group didn’t trust my statement about my character. Instincts say “you HAVE to trust what I say about my character in this particular area, important to me”. But I don’t think that shows BW is meant to be played with people who aren’t real friends who always trust each other. I think it just recognizes the reality of the existence of acquaintances and the reality of different ideas of the fiction. I mean, I’ve played with a lot of groups and even a lot of “real friends” and a lot of other factors other than trust can cause conflicts over character portrayal. BW puts stuff about character portrayal in the rules to try to avoid these conflicts. I don’t think that says anything about the type of friends it expects you to be playing with, or to have.
And when you say that rules about “what the GM may not do” assume the GM is an asshole instead of a helper that just flat ignores everything we know about creativity – it thrives with boundaries. Look at Spycraft’s Mastermind budget system. That is a fun, fun, fun system that is all about limiting what the GM may do. It doesn’t assume the GM is an asshole, it assumes that as creative director of the fiction the GM will benefit from interesting limitations. In fact, I can’t think of an “indie” game that puts a lot of limitation on what a GM may or may not do. The ones that have GMs (and don’t distribute that responsibility) seem to treat the GM the same way as in other games.
Encoding Through Scope. I can’t figure out how I differentiate between a game that’s super focused because people want a super focused game, say, Your Favorite Module, and a super focused game that’s super focused because it hates friendship and wants you to have no friends. So help me out here.
Encoding Through Custom. Thanks for the blog recommendation. But I still have no idea what you’re talking about here.
Dude, pointing your finger at indie games here with nary a whisper about organized play (RPGA etc.) is like deliberately missing the barn to take a shot at the chickens.
That said, do you feel the same way about boardgames?
-Rob D.
You’re right, and I did talk about org play but ended up cutting it for space. But org play isn’t the point of rpg play and can be safely ignored.
I don’t feel that way about boardgames — or yams or bicycles. That’s how different I think the boardgame experience is.
Distrust can be a setting feature too. The World of Darkness has a bunch of distrust based conventions. I will defintely cover that soon.
I think you’ve got your communities mixed up. I look at rpg.net and see lots of discussions on how GMs can keep players (munchkins etc.) in check, how to make sure players play their paladins “properly”, how to balance characters, bitching about game “exploits” or “broken” systems, and so on. Then I look at Story Games and see threads on how to make other players awesome, “I will not abandon you” style (highly trust-based) play, and other approaches that earn indie gamers the “hippie gamers” label.
In any case, at the end of the day, trying to make sweeping stereotype judgments on a community as vastly diverse as indie gaming is not just patently naive, it’s utterly useless at best.
“Awesome” is bullshit. Awesome is adherence to the story events, theme and tone defined in the game with a side order of egoism. I have nothing but contempt for the “Awesome.”
On the other hand, bitching and personality clashes are part of creative growth. When you avoid them, you avoid play with integrity. You’re stuck with things that are shallow — or if you prefer, “Awesome.”
You said:
“If you don’t have a selfless, trusting informal relationship with the people you game with they aren’t your friends.”
My point wasn’t to discuss what awesome means. Whatever it means–clearly we’re concerned with trusting each other and having selfless fun with each other (i.e., making the other person awesome = selfless play).
If you cite that making people teh Awesome is selfless, its definition matters. I’m saying that definition is all about forcing adherence to a contrived vision via social tools and a culture that encourages passive-aggressive manipulation.
Actually, Capes doesn’t “promise” me shit.
I admire a lot about the design, and I know people that have enjoyed Capes play an awful lot, but I hated playing it and would not do so again, excepting extraordinary circumstances. Like, if it would save the life of a single child or get a dear friend laid. I’m using “promise” in that response in the sense it gets used in criticism and marketing (like, . . . ): the expectations set up; the use a thing suggests for itself. All that passage of that post says is, “If you read GURPS Supers, you’ll get all kinds of ideas about playing it. If you read Capes, you’ll get a much narrower set of them.”
Okay, then I think we’re in agreement there — but I do think the idea of “promises” represents a mental habit to be guarded against.
I don’t think there’s necessarily any innate problem with the idea of designing a role-playing game for short-burst play with non-trusted individuals, but I do think that design ethos is much better suited to creating the kind of experience you get playing Puerto Rico with some people you’ve never met than to creating ethically and symbologically deep explorations of nuanced concepts.
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