Peer Mode

Definition: Peer mode supplements game rules and essential customs with goals and standards drawn from an imagined community (real or not) — so much so that the relationship with the community can overshadow play.

Examples:

• The “golden rule” appears at this stage.
• Gamers post to social websites asking what the “consensus” is about a game.
• “Actual Play” becomes a ritual to legitimize a game or play style, even to the point where its representations of play are inaccurate.
• A game group develops censorship and conduct codes and discusses “triggers” of upset, often in elaborate or ritualized detail.
• Vampire: The Masquerade clanbooks lay out how you ought to play members of each vampire clan.

Details: Peer mode’s a real problem nowadays because it’s deeply tied to the Web. Before the internet, communicating outside of your group was a high-latency affair; you waited a month, quarter or year between inputs from outside your group — plenty of time to explore playcraft autonomously. Peer mode existed before the internet, however; close players are peers too.

Peer mode is where you start formulating what constitutes good or proper gaming beyond self-centred interests, but not within a larger theoretical architecture.  You and your peers muddle along, driven by whatever influences you bring into the game in a non-systemic fashion. You think of good gaming not in terms of artistic goals, but answers to questions. In fact, this mode can encourage a shallow anti-structural stance because your peers areeverything. “Just don’t be a dick,” is a common peer mode sentiment. This is an answer begging for elaboration, which it only gets in haphazard tactical positions: spot answers to questions, confusion and challenges.

(Lots of RPG theories are really peer mode tools. It’s a set of vague words used to develop tactical responses. Peer mode is also the primary mode used by marketers.)

If you say the internet expands your real time peer group, you’d be simplifying it; it really represents an alternate peer group that overlaps with people you really game with. This is occasionally useful, often disastrous, and can even represent a type of play related to, but not the same as, conventional game play. What we’re witnessing is a whole set of performances for the online peer group that don’t necessarily lead to better TRPG play. We now often mediate the interests of multiple imagined communities: peer groups we visualize as having certain tastes and responses that we want to appease. 

On a more positive note, peer play represents the first stage of normative play morality. While we never totally outgrow other modes, adopting peer mode represents the kind of maturity you expect from older teenagers and later. Valuing others’ opinions is essential to peer mode. Ironically, stepping up to peer mode away from the “wars” of other modes mean that we start thinking less of individuals, and more of “good” power blocs and what might impress them.

The best thing about peer mode is that this is where we start to think about breaking the rules for the sake of the group, but it isn’t essential to do so.

Here’s what peer mode groups need:

• Referents: As peers concentrate on smooth interpersonal relationships, their need for specific objects to provide context only increases. They need to agree about things, not just about being agreeable. One of the easiest examples to look at is Mind’s Eye Theatre games, where details about combat and power use actually increase in importance despite the fact that it’s supposed to be a social game. This happens because fairness is important to most peer groups, and that value needs a firm context to express itself in. On the other hand, peer mode promises freedom from rules, because they’re a means to an end in the people, not the game. Nevertheless, groups need specifics to use as props in performances where they demonstrate how much they want to make peer play work. Groups in this mode often talk shit about game systems because they need systems to be “broken;” those provide an opportunity to demonstrate peer loyalty by “fixing” them.
• Tactical Consensus: Peer mode relies on bringing people together to consider what they want on a case by case basis. These are not conscious aesthetic positions, but they can be organized enough to work with broad hypothetical scenarios. Make yourself understood by grabbing a referent, assign it some significance, utter a rallying cry and appeal to your peers. You need to fix a combat system, maintain discipline in Clan Ventrue, or promote your favourite system. You might ape an overarching justification for why you have these tastes, but at this stage it’s a ruse; you really want agreement.

Next time: Fundamentalist Mode.

Definition: The egoistic play mode uses both explicit game rules (usually a technical text) and customs of play (passed on orally or through non-technical text) to fix player roles and manipulate relative status between players.

Examples:

• All games which assign the GM a miscellaneous authority
• D&D’s fighters are expected to be among the primary close combatants in an action scene. When the fighter’s player accepts this role and performs well, the group approves. If the player has her fighter cower or she makes a serious tactical error, she’ll lose status in the group.
• A game group falls into a pattern where one player is the leader, one is the jester, and another quietly serves a support role across multiple stories.
• Aeternal Legends provides a system where system-defined expert characters get “first crack” at a task in order to keep non-experts with extroverted players from talking over the expert’s player.

Details: In egoistic play, the stakes are social status and role assignment. Subjection, which retaliatory mode thrust us into to make us feel pain and pleasure when game systems operate, turns into the target of play. Social status is what tells us how much we can quantitatively influence activity at the table; role assignment determines what type of influence we are permitted to have.

Social status and role assignment are closely linked, to the point where some roles automatically grant a status advantage. The GM is the easiest example to cite, because so many games give GMs sweeping powers. One of the classic mistakes made by other theories is to assume the conventional GM is just a degree of status, and get obsessed with the role as a power locus that needs to be controlled or broken up. But there are low status GMs and high status players, too.

In egoistic mode, roles tend to be fixed to particular players; the traditional player/character or person/player isn’t really up and running, so players tend to stick to roles in the group after a period where they negotiate (argue, stare meaningfully, write dreary basis of unity statements) for the choicest pickings in the set of roles everyone recognizes, consciously or not. This fixedness actually intensifies competition. People holding advantageous roles (party leader, “the chosen one,” GM) struggle to hold the advantage, while low-status players negotiate for power or subvert the significance of their roles, other roles, or all roles.

To make this work, game groups move from retaliatory mode initiation to instrumentalization: the process of making the player not just a subject to be administered by the direct application of texts, but as a tool for the regulation of power between participants — but this can’t happen until the group figures out two things.

• Role Definition: It’s easy to identify the GM, but harder to figure out what the other roles are — you might slip into one without even knowing. The game’s text, gaming traditions and broader cultural borrowings all determine the cast of roles. For example, D&D’s character classes influence the roles that pop up in the game. But in Toy Dogma, the “fighter” is not a role — the “guy who plays the fighter” is.
• Status Signs: Culture and game also determine which signs represent status. Signs like talking over other players or getting more “spotlight time” are performances that assert the will and right to power over the game. (This is why extra attention and success even situations that are supposed to be handled with mechanistic systems seem to go together — or haven’t you noticed that the popular guy wins more?)

Again, these are related. Your role determines which sorts of status performances you’re permitted.

None of the above should be considered to be inherently positive. In fact, griefing is a powerful “status performance.” So is nitpicking.

5.3 next. That’s the Peer Mode.

Man, this is going to take a while. I’m going to root through some other theory to get there, too — more work! So I’ll start with the first stage:

Retaliatory Mode

Definition: A retaliatory play mode drives player actions and attitudes with punishments and rewards directly (or nearly directly) administered through explicit rules — typically those supplied in the game’s text.

Examples:

• A  player portraying an adventurer easily slays an orc. This irritates the GM responsible for the encounter. The GM introduces a demon that kills the adventurer’s player.
• A GMing advice section tells you to punish characters (damage them, belittle them, etc.) when players behave in some “difficult” fashion. These consequences are determined prior to any naturalistic effect that might arise from the game’s story. A dragon could get you at any time, but this dragon did because the GM is angry, not because the Fictionian Wastelands features roaming dragons.
• Mind’s Eye Theatre features a player-run Status Trait economy that leaders use to punish unpopular characters, and reward popular ones.
• If your character turns to the Dark Side in the original (West End Games) Star Wars RPG, you hand your character over to the GM, losing the ability to play him — just as if he had died.
• Exalted awards “stunt dice” for interesting descriptions of actions.

Details: Direct rewards and punishments are explicitly built into game texts or play practices, or attached through a very strong implication of what a player ought to desire, and what he or she ought to dislike. For example, a D&D player in this mode views hit point loss (and character death) as punishment and XP as a reward.

This contrasts with a primarily indirect reward or punishment where (for example) a player receives praise when her character gets damaged doing something entertaining.

It should be noted (thank you Lee Short — see the comments) that in this mode, punishments are usually more prominent than rewards, even if the text or group doesn’t come right out and say so. Consider D&D, where the reward system has grown relatively weaker (balanced adventures represent a “treadmill” so levels and items primarily allow characters to keep pace) while punishments (hit point loss, penalizing conditions) are the most common game effects. (I should note that punishments are also more “balanced” because the game is designed to specifically act as a check on retaliatory GMs.)

Lots of upsetting experiences grow out of retaliatory mode play, but it also lays a dangerously compelling foundation for play and design. Its lack of ambiguity makes it easy to link behaviour to rules and traditions — as long as players understand their roles as the subjects of these tactics. Retaliatory mode sucks, but it’s easy to design for.

It’s seductive. You might end up assuming that’s just how games are without a boss or boss-text to control things.

Retaliatory mode lays bare a basic truth:  With or without supporting texts, the game group makes players believe its rules and traditions constitute meaningful rewards and punishments, and that people identify with the constructed person/position they act upon.

Many of these customs aren’t explicitly taught because people often grasp them reflexively. (Some aren’t explicitly taught because even though they’re bizarre, the group is too insular to know that such-and-such-a-thing is weird, but that’s hard to spin theory about) Examples:

• “I am my character.”
• “The GM is emotionally invested in the game world.”
• “The more social influence one has in the world, the better.”

The retaliatory mode introduces a twofold play initiation that gamers carry through sessions, perhaps even into games that are supposed to be very different from the ones they were initiated into. (We’ll go through different initiations throughout out lives. I think some key initiations especially affect how we play ever after — our first, the ones we associate with making new friends, those related to life stages, sex and other Big Things). It also transfers to other modes — it’s a core part of adopting a TRPG.

Play initiation at this stage includes:

• Discipline: Texts and oral traditions enforce ideas about what pain and pleasure mean during the game. One game measures success (pleasure) as triumph over a monster, and failure (pain) as being eaten, beaten or driven away. Another links pleasure to the ability to make a desired story event occur.
• Subjection: The group forces players to identify with the target of discipline. Retaliatory play fails when you do not identify with the character, or identify a narrative you’re building with part of your personal story. If you are not your character, you cannot feel the character’s pain or pleasure; retaliatory play in a game with player characters has little power over you. (This does not require “immersion,” by the way. The type of investment is flexible, as long as it is facilitates discipline.)

That’s it for now. 5.2 will explore the Egoistic Mode.

• In TRPGs, participants communicate using rules and customs to establish details about related fictional narratives that are not yet defined.

. . . but there’s one more thing: our guard against absurd arguments about some impossible tabula rasa:

• In TRPGs, participants communicate using rules and customs to establish details about related fictional narratives that are not entirely defined.

We need guidance right from the beginning, though these bits (genres, mission statements, core stories) are subject to interpretation. Bad game theory promotes these initial definitions into a kind of church; follow the doctrine or fuck off. Play is obedience is play.

But this wasn’t always what we meant by play. What happened? It would be too easy to get into sappy talk about child’s play. Child’s play can be vicious; kids haven’t learned who has status, when to speak and when to shut up. They can be casually cruel. It’s the land of Lawrence Kohlberg’s first two stages of moral development, and a bit of his third.

(Note that this little trip of mine is not dogmatic Kohlberg. He ain’t perfect — Carol Gilligan’s critique is the best known. He’s too focused on formal polities as moral instruments. His framework is interesting, and I’m warping it as I go.)

Kohlberg also talks about “higher” post-conventional morality and here discusses a concept whose name will excite certain gamers: the social contract. The notable thing about social contracts as Kohlberg defines them is that they have little to do with the failed RPG theory of social contracts. Focused on “being on the same page,” rigid sets of expectations, and reward/punishment systems, dead-theory mechanisms prod players through a stage one (moral choices from fear of punishment) to restricted stage four (code-driven — Christian Fundamentalism is an example) framework. Highly defined notions of genre and convention (“back to the dungeon,” or a “Golden Age” implying an inescapable historical process) have the same purpose, through it’s rendered less formally.

The term “social contract” is poisoned; we have to use something else. Fortunately, Kohlberg’s notion of the social contract also marks a point where we can look to his critics and pull back from an overly academic, political context (Kohlberg tends to identify “higher morality” with sheer scale, and with formal institutions that carry Big Moral Plans out — the problems are easy to see) and into a style of interpersonal relationships that recognizes:

1. We possess different interests, and that diversity usually tolerable, if not intrinsically valuable. (If everybody was the same, we’d get bored.)
2. We also possess common rational interests that can often be inferred from early-stage development. (Avoid pain, seek pleasure, play that utilitarian banjo.)

The natural conclusion is that we must fairly negotiate the role of our differences in various contexts. This unites our differences and our common self-interests into a single process. This fairness does not, however, require a fixed set of rules to “get on the same page” or any of that bullshit.

Kohlberg discusses a “prior to society” perspective, but this is a bit grandiose. Certainly, we must return to primordial, progressive honesty as best we can to evaluate the most fulfilling way to play from moment to moment, and  ideally, this region of our thinking comes before we apply rules and customs, but we’ll always get a little “dirty” with other concerns — we are never in a pure place.

We’re starting to create a process, answer a question from last time: What kind of communication takes place?

Negotiation. Constant negotiation. Simple and complicated negotiation. Negotiation where each party believes something different happened but it still works out.

Second question: How do participants use rules and customs while communicating?

The answers depend on our moral commitment to the game. Let’s come up with some stages:

1. Retaliatory (“You killed the Big Bad? ROCKS FALL, EVERYONE DIES,” or “Escalation.”)
2. Egoistic (“Look at me! Look at the GMPC!” or “Bringing the Awesome.”)
3. Peer Pressure (“This is how you play a proper Tremere,” or “I will never abandon you.”)
4. Fundamentalist (“System Does Matter” and D20-supremacist dogma)
5. Interpersonal (“How do you feel? How do you want to feel?” This mature mode of gaming is our realistic goal. Negotiation with a respect for difference.)

Beyond this, I could posit a Transpersonal Stage moral commitment, where social good and high level artistic achievements take centre stage, but Kohlberg’s already-shaky structure loses its grounding.

But what about those kids? A moment ago I looked down on idealized childhood roleplaying, but in the West (and maybe elsewhere) we’ve got life stages where we bounce around: adolescence where we roam around the first three stages as we try to find a place in the power structure, and early adulthood, where, conventional identities in hand, we appear to fall back into an antisocial low stage when we’re really arguing with cultural norms — and as often as not, that argument is a good idea.

Coincidentally, these life stages — these “Fuck the Law” eras — are also where most gaming takes place. That’s what some dated market research says, anyway.

Basically, we do most of our TRP gaming during volatile periods where we might be at our worst, but which also have the potential to liberate us from being boring, obsessed with social conventions and base reward/punishment cycles. When we’ve been hurt by this it’s easy to get stuck fixing things with rules — that’s how society, with its naturally low opinion of the us (the mob), already regulates our behaviour.

Toy Dogma is more optimistic. It craves the dangerous realm of play because post-fundamentalist play demands we listen to each other now, and not just during design or setup. It’s hard to listen when rules tell you to shut up, how to speak or what to say. We know we’ll bounce around different levels of commitment. Games help us; they don’t rule us. We play with them like toys.

Tabletop roleplaying game theory used to concentrate on finding ways to describe the hobby and find connections with other types of art and culture. For about a decade, this form of inquiry has largely been suppressed partly as a matter of deliberate intent and partly as a side effect of basic changes in how the Internet functions for people. Dead tree publications, Usenet and the static web were the primary vectors for serious (though only pseudo-academic – academic work on RPGs was and remains a disappointing pretence indulged by partisan hacks) discussion. The rise of simple forum interfaces and blogging essentially erased this legacy.

That’s why most of the people who will read this will probably not by familiar with any form of TRPG theory that existed before 2000, except where it was ripped off without clear acknowledgement (as it has been many times).

Modern TRPG theory is primarily designed to create false tautologies. These are the signs:

• It relies on terminology that’s been invented whole cloth instead of evolved from cousin media.

(Engagement with other media theory and politically engaged discourse can reveal problems. Talking about a theory from within its invented language makes it difficult to find flaws.)

• Its primary discourse is based on marketing, rather than the substance of the medium/pastime.

(Most TRPG theory groups closely align discussions with how games ought to be designed with how they ought to be sold. Theory discussions are preoccupied on how to make games appealing to perceived market segments, and spam is usually permitted and traded.)

• Its communities value statements of faith, conversion and belonging.

(Typical narratives of belonging include dissatisfaction with play, and “Actual Play” stories about converting to a community’s favoured practices.)

• It is especially attractive to people who have been unsuccessful roleplayers.

(There are many instances of more active participants in communities admitting that they don’t play TRPGs anymore. This is sometimes difficult to trace – for example, a few years ago former Forge poster Jack Spencer Jr. admitted that he had not played any RPG in a long, long time, then erased every trace of having made that statement. Beyond that, the basic story people tell about getting involved in theory is that they were part of some failed experience. Naturally, this experience is almost never reported to be that person’s fault.)

I’m not interested in inventing false tautologies to ease disappointments in my own gaming. I greatly enjoy my gaming and count myself a “naturally” successful gamer. I want to know where my enjoyment comes from – that’s the first question in this investigation.

To find the answer we’ll need to find ways of talking about TRPGs that connect to other fields. We’ll also need to find new ways of talking about fundamental concepts. Some popular language is superficially useful, but contains assumptions liable to take us the wrong way.

What needs to go?

Ideas Disconnected from Other Types of Culture: TRPG thinking avoids connections with other bodies of critical theory and practice. For example, Forge theory uses a simple concept called “stance” even though mainstream literary criticism from Frye onward provides examples of multi-levelled engagement with texts.

Ideas Validated Through Marketing: By “marketing” I’m not just talking about the kind of things gamers readily identify. Now that the majority of commercial TRPG activity rests within long-tail offerings, conversational marketing occurs at all levels. Most RPG theory work is explicitly connected to what theorists are selling you, and of course have linked communities. So in lieu of arguments and partial commitments (like the game, hate the theory) discussions are now enmeshed in circular, interlocking modes of persuasion (to be in the community you need to commit to the game, to commit to the game you need to believe in the theory, to believe in the theory you need to commit to the community

Ideas That Disguise Individuality: By “individuality” I mean the basic assumption that every player’s involvement is dynamic and unique. It’s incredibly destructive to our understanding of games to suppress this with contrived social contracts, hard-coded stances and other tools designed to delete the fact of individuality from the discussion.

Finding our way back will help us identify the patterns of success that arise naturally instead of through indoctrination. I feel that this is absolutely vital for innovation and artistic growth.

So it becomes time to talk about what TRPGs are all about. We have some rules to keep us honest now, so we have to get basic, say things like:

• In TRPGs, participants communicate.

Then:

• In TRPGs, participants communicate about fictional narratives.

. . . and we can even take it to:

• In TRPGs, participants communicate to establish details about fictional narratives that are not yet defined.

Even “fictional” might be stretching it! I can see an RPG-like process being used to build a more coherent account of real events. I don’t think this has ever been done. See what insights you can get from returning to the source? Note that I also said “narratives.” We have rules now. We can’t just invent a shared story box into which we throw our ideas because we’re not allowed to disguise individuality. That includes individual accounts of the fiction. We accept these differences as a basic fact, not a problem to be suppressed.

Maybe we can say:

• In TRPGs, participants communicate to establish details about related fictional narratives that are not yet defined.

And finally, let’s get really bold with:

• In TRPGs, participants communicate using rules and customs to establish details about related fictional narratives that are not yet defined.

Now it’s time to cautiously build. We have a basic statement of what people to in TRPGs. This statement inspires questions that in turn inform the answer to the first question I posed at the beginning of the series: What do naturally successful gamers do?

I want to know:

• What kind of communication takes place?
• How do participants use rules and customs while communicating?
• What relationship exists between participants’ narratives?

I’ll get to these next time.

I love TRPGs. I think I’ve been looking at them as a field where performance matters for about 20 years (I don’t count vague ideas that I should be “better,” or you should be “better,” or pretending that something about being a teenager over 20 years ago is about the game). I had some success applying theatre theory and craft (theatre was a hobby of mine) but I couldn’t help but notice a stopping point where I couldn’t credit anything I could identify from consciously acquired skills. Meanwhile, my play and GMing instincts improved, and it led me to the primordial question: How are we doing these cool things? or:

1) What do naturally successful gamers do?

(Part of the answer will always be “Friendship.” I’ve got good friends and have had the luxury of years to grow with some — as many as 13 continuous years in the case of one player — but I rarely go without that spirit even with groups I’ll never see again. I might tie this. I might not.)

While I explored the answer I started freelancing and working on games of my own. I observed players, wrote down interactions and processes do inform my work and general ideas about TRPGs. Now I think I’ve thrown together a good way to express what I’m talking about.

Again with the Toys.

To answer question #1, I needed to address :

2) What do TRPGs do as an art that is is distinctive?

and I needed the Toy concept to express it properly.

Toy suggests Play but Play does not always lead to Toy. You play games, play sports, play a part, play the fool. You might be in a play. A toy is something designed for creative engagement, though it can also be a verb describing frivolous action. Toy is what I use to centre TRPG play in what makes it interesting. I want you to see a TRPG as a type of toy and not like its dull-ass cousin, the board game. I want you to associate it with childhood not because I want you to indulge in childish things, but to play and make TRPGs that work like this:

Primordial, Progressive Honesty In Relationships: This was a tough one to label. “Primordial” refers to conditions that feature minimal manipulation by game or GM fiat. “Progressive,” means that from primordial conditions, we explore friendships. “Honesty” means we recognize player/character, GM/world, and story/person divides as artificial at all times, and subject to intersections.

(Primordial does not mean a sterile, neutral starting point. That can’t happen. Honesty helps us recognize that.)

Toys come into it because we can view this type of play as similar to how children (and adults, since humans go for neoteny) use toys to establish relationships. This article touches on it. We progressively integrate the flow of our play with others until we become interdependent. We make a chimera. This process is not in of itself a proper bargaining point or type of currency in the game — or if it is, this isn’t something the game sets out to legislate.

Discovering Narratives, Not Designing Them: If you want to write a story or pen a play, just get it done. Games can do them well — for games. Compared to actual stories . . . yeah. Sorry.

Stories are artificial. Most of what people believe is universal is a result of deeply ingrained cultural biases. I’m not just talking about Hamlet in Africa style issues, but the idea of rising action, climax, denouement — all fake! We stick old stories in the frames of our biases to create the appearance of universality, but they don’t quite fit. The Iliad is about the rage of Achilles largely because we have tailored its standard telling to fit, for example (its boundaries are fluid, and we know little of its original context in the Epic Cycle). Stepping back from cultural works, personal stories are artificial in the way they assign the impression of theme and pacing to certain stretches of our lives. The actual passage of events is raw data at a steady beat and our immediate reactions melded into experience.

Even when we recall a story we’ve been told, we can only do it by telling another story. We make fiction out of fiction. Instead, TRPGs should provide common experiences, and we should have a riot fighting over what they mean, and loving differences in perception. Game is for feeling and doing. Story is the lie you’re compelled to tell after the fact.

So:

Play is Experience: Not banal experience, but the experience of the world, of being in the fiction. This is not “immersion” (though it can be) or about fidelity to the world, but about a sense that it is happening in an unstylized fashion even when style has been strongly coded into other areas. In this, I found some inspiration in Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida – in his assertion that what the (pre-digitally malleable) photograph is a representation that dissolves into what it represents, creating a third type of semiotic object distinct from handmade representational art like painting or the thing itself.

TRPGs create unreal experiences that are stubbornly real, authentic fakes. That’s another Toy feature. Playing with a Toy creates a window into an authentic realm. In childhood, toys prepare us for survival, work and socialization by acting as this gateway. TRPGs are similar, except that they provide tutelage in experiences that will never happen, and are forever in danger of falling away to reveal our naked wills because they are fiction, because they are what we made.

And believe it or not, we can get better at it.

This was not (and probably still isn’t) a big problem for young gamers who are genuinely inspired by the hobby, but let’s be honest: There aren’t as many kids coming in and grasping at words for their discoveries. Those kids were valuable for more than just the hobby-as-dynasty; they entered adulthood with the idea that roleplaying games were successful by default. The fundamental question was, “How are we doing these cool things?”

Compare to the present, where culturally closed communities treat play like a minefield, and the only safe place a retreat into emulating other media. They want TRPGs to be like popular short fiction or theatre (or at least, they way they imagine them to be). Since the easiest way to emulate these forms is by actually writing a short story or putting on a play, cargo-cult emulation through an RPG always rings hollow.

Now it’s easy to retreat into nostalgia as well, and even though it seems like I’m setting that up, you need to understand that emergence into “adulthood” as a thinking gamer was never an easy process because TRPGs have qualities that are so unlike other creative outlets. It’s difficult for gamers to even see that they’re creating art. None of the usual signs and rituals guide the way; there’s not much money and less prestige in it. You can see why, searching for something to help navigate this unknown territory, we tend to hold onto the familiar: traditional story arcs, corporate branding, clichés and genre. Nobody’s immune. You can use these things as tools to investigate what you’re doing or build a shallow foundation for some functional gaming. You’ll play through the same basic story arc or go back to the dungeon again — and again, and again.

Trapped by the gross semiotics of the situation, gamers frame lowered ambitions as success — as applied theory. They age. Fewer kids come in asking, “How are we doing these cool things?” Tired veterans police discourse, taking control right down to the meaning of individual words, and the basic narrative of what gaming is changes to a failure mode.

Over the past decade, the default assumption of what happens at TRPG play has changed from confused success to elaborate hierarchies of how you might fuck up. And it is just so easy to say that one limited conception of roleplaying is the only way out, especially if it appeals to nostalgia (like D&D revival movements) or bourgeois insecurity about artistic legitimacy (like the indie movement). None of these movements have revived interest in TRPGs or even demonstrably improved play beyond the level of unfalsifiable anecdotes.

Is this a problem? The dominant voice might be a stunted, whiny one, but despite what that whiners say, TRPGs are easy to enjoy. Should we just leave them to the slow “Meh” of long tail-enabled denial, banal dungeons and shitty novel-building engines?

I don’t think so. I think it’s a better idea to return to “How are we doing these cool things?” and add, “What are these cool things?” and “What good are these cool things?”

In other words, I want to ask three questions:

1. What do naturally successful gamers do?
2. What do TRPGs do as an art that is is distinctive?
3. Are RPGs moral? (That is, are their moral consequences to playing them beyond sessions about moral issues?)

I’ve been thinking about these questions a lot. I don’t have sympathies for any popular house. Story game types, OSR adherents, toolkit wonks — I don’t care for any of them and I don’t care about building some kind of competing “house.” But I will gather ideas and spit them out. And I have. I think I have partial answers to each of these questions, and for me, they all grow from one metaphor I have found increasingly useful.

We’re talking about toys.

What people assume versus where it’s coming from probably explains why folks get so surprised that I’m enthusiastic and positive in person. I like to make friends and play enthusiastically. Even though I hate, my love is powerful: the soil in which the poison, fibrous hate-vines grow. Why is it that I do everything you think is bad, say nasty things and still have more fun playing RPGs than you? Why is my buddy Steve, who we all mocked mean-spiritedly for getting a cursed ring in D&D still around, and why does he play better than the shmoe who’ll be sitting across from you? Because I’m a conscious hater. My hateration is finely honed. You should hate like I do. What makes my evil so strong?

Quality Hate is Hate as in Seafood, not Hate as in the Klan

I hate most things the way I hate seafood. It’s not going to kill me. It is not a threat to civilization. I don’t like the taste and if you must shove it in my face I might barf. Lots of people think you must choose between anaemic ”dislike,” as you might have for the Australian Shriraz that, while acceptable, is just not the same as your fave Australian Shiraz, or being a totally evil bastard who suddenly wants to buy det cord, fertilizer and some fascist books that are so terrible I’m not even going to name them.

There is a class of aversions in the world which engage the emotions but are not battles for the heart and soul of civilization. You shouldn’t frame everything as if it’s as serious as social justice. This is not making an excuse for kyriarchy manifest in hobby scenes, which is serious. Race in WotC art direction is a big fight even if the arena is small. I’m saying that it’s stupid to feel the situation is quite so critical when arguing the merits and mistakes of 4th Edition. This smaller thing is the pond in which you splash your super-chlorinated  hate-water. Do not be a dork by treating every expression of ire like it’s President Palin O’Beck’s Tea Party Party coming at you.

Quality Hate is Specific

I don’t say that something’s a piece of shit — at least not in isolation. In fact, very few things are globally terrible. Whenever I hate on something I target specific elements. There are some godawful things about The Burning Wheel like Let it Ride but that doesn’t damn the whole thing. Lesser minds confuse this with some wide ranging condemnation of the game, which is really quite good once you get past the fandom and vapid marketing.

(By the way, BW scenesters, Ifound that old thread where you gathered a posse to fight me. That’s pretty funny.)

This explains why I like most RPGs despite being a hater, and other folks hate most RPGs despite pretending to be nice. They have no consciousness of their hate, so they don’t check themselves. They just kind of cast vague broadsides with fake-ass smiles in place. That’s why I can have fun with pretty much any game and so many of you cannot. My hate, being defined, is quite limited. Vague hate runs on forever and chokes everything.

Listen: I went to a convention and played Fiasco and probably had more fun than you, the Fiasco-lover who won’t shut the fuck up about it, ever will. Look at the para above. That’s why.

Quality Hate Saves Ad Hominems for Jokes and Retribution in Kind

I don’t like saying bad things about people. I don’t do it that often and when I do, it’s usually a joke or a response to someone who’s become an insulting pain. This is often because he or she believes disliking someone’s creative output is the same as disliking them. This mistake issues from dorks like John Tarnowski and creators who drink too much of their own Kool-Aid. Crybabies.

Leaving them aside (and one should) it’s not cool to hate on people. It’s supercool to hate on works and entire scenes (Christian Fundamentalism or “Old School” D&D fandom, for example) but leave individuals out of it (If you think you are your scene, get over yourself!). Once again, refusing to acknowledge and refine your hate just makes it stronger. It’ll stick to more of your mental cast of thousands. Ron Edwards’ “brain damage” essay is one of those rare works in gaming that can make you a worse gamer if you read it with defences down, but I assume he’s a good guy. I’m not going to say stupid shit about his lifestyle or job, like some have. I’ve erred from time to time here, but I generally try to stick to this ethic.

Quality Hate Destroys Illusions

Hey, I think that American quasi-anime-manhua cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender is awesome, even if it does look like a bunch of guys grabbed Exalted and asked themselves how to write out the masturbation and nipple rings (making it an ideal WotC setting!). One of my favourite bits is when Toph, an earthbender (moves rocks around with magic kung fu) tells Aang, an airbender (moves air around with kung fu and is a sop for the collective Western messiah complex) explains that earthbending (moving earth with magic kung fu) isn’t about any tricky-trick novelty way to get around something, but demands a head on confrontation.

Like hate.

Hate is strong medicine.  When you think of hating on something you have to question yourself. Can I back that shit up? You need to make an argument, perfect your stance. If you do, the content of your vitriol cannot be absorbed or deflected with patronizing Columboing. I’ve seen a lot of good criticism wither because it was so nice it could be absorbed and neutralized. Everybody shakes hands, ignores each other and learns nothing.

Let’s get back to “brain damage.” It’s hateful in a good way. I don’t think many people understand that Ron Edwards is making a coherent argument here because they’re in it for the drama, one way or another. I absolutely disagree with his conclusions (the idea that narrative structure as defined by sub-undergraduate English is the proper endpoint of a neural Darwinist pruning process has lots of funny self-owning outcomes, like implying that like tolerating homosexuals is also “brain damage” because that’s a Fancy Modern Fashion too. Also, the Iliad mostly resembles Vampire instead of anything he likes, so LOL.) but (as you can see by the huuuge aside in there and here!) it’s thought provoking for anything with the gonads to rise to the challenge.  It added something good to the critical world.

Quality Hate is Self-Hate

Ooooh! Self-hate! Nooo! Self-esteem triggers are like fucking Kryptonite for anybody born after 1965. Relax. It’s okay to hate yourself.

Sort of.

See everything I wrote earlier? Apply it to your own gaming, writing and designing. If you have bigger problems than a stalled creative process, seek help for them. Limit the scope of your self-criticism to the most coherent items. Do not view things you don’t like about yourself as essential markers of your identity. Be direct.

And remember what I said about love? Found it in an overarching love. I’m a Gamer Hater because I love gaming, and there’s no Goddamn contradiction.

So I was running a supers game. It was okay, but not great. I didn’t like it. I loved worldbuilding with my friends, talking about alt history and fiddling with systems, but I didn’t feel like actually running the game.

I ditched it!

I used to think that any roadblock in a creative effort deserved double the effort. I’d push and experiment and play hard until a breakthrough. But as I’ve matured I’ve learned to tell the difference between something where cool stuff is just around the bend, and one where you’ll recover mediocre play. If that happens repeatedly through the same campaign (or story, whatever) it’s not serving its purpose. Move on. Put it in the trunk. Change medium. Don’t hate your work but don’t go fucking that cactus all day long either.

In the case of the supers game, I collaborated with the group on the setting. It ended up as gritty, low key setting that drifted somewhere between Watchmen and Aberrant. I thought it was pretty cool, but I’m really more into Grant Morrison’s psychedelic remixes. I realized that as much as I wanted to explore this world I didn’t really want to curate it. So I’m turning

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.