Impetus
I was talking on the phone with Joe MacDonald about what he wanted out of role-playing games, and why I thought that was all wrong. I’m not going to put words into Joe’s mouth, because I think he’s talking about something subtly different that I don’t totally grasp, but I will talk about trends I’ve observed in role-playing games.
Background
Every role-playing group save one that I’ve been involved with (and this includes the indie games scene) has been fixated on the goal of making role-playing somehow “cooler,” more “accessible,” more “legitimate,” or accessible to a wider audience. This manifests as one of more of the following:
1) Lots of talk about how role-playing games can be art. (As differentiated from talking about how they are art.)
2) Lots of talk about introducing audiences into role-playing games.
3) A fascination of improvisational theater, as if their techniques were applicable (universally, natch) to role-playing games.
4) Lots of talk about how to make role-playing games into a “normal hobby,” with a fixation of “cleansing” the games of “geeky” elements. (A lot of talk about playing Real People in Real Situations.)
5) A fascination with GM fiat, playing without rules or playing with very “light” rules which are ignored.
Every one of these groups has consistently failed at every one of these things.
You can probably gather from my tone that I think that these things are all complete and utter crap. In case it’s unclear: I think that these things are all complete and utter crap.
There’s a tangent here about how a lot of this comes down to needing external validation for your art, and that if you need external validation for your art your art frankly probably isn’t very good, but that’s not the point I want to make.
So I don’t think that the failures of my past play-groups are necessarily because of their own failures. I simply believe that role-playing games are, at a fundamental and structural level, inherently resistant to any attempt to make them externally palatable, for three reasons:
1) Role-playing is creative, and thus difficult. Many aspects can be made easier, but the fundamental difficulty of the creative act remains.
2) Role-playing is social and collaborative, and therefore: resistant to too much artifice in its construction, and also taking the place of other, easier social activity.
3) Role-playing contains at its heart an ineffable shared experience which not only cannot be transmitted to any external party (anyone who was not a player of the game), but resists dissection amongst co-participants in the game.
It’s the last item that I want to talk about.
Definition of Ineffability
What is ineffability? The Oxford American dictionary gives “too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words.” Reading literally from Latin, it means “unspeakable,” which is in more common usage. I’ve chosen to use “ineffable” because it has a positive connotation — it is used to describe heaven and even God — whereas “unspeakable” is usually used to describe specifically negative things, like demons.
Viewed properly, all art has an element on ineffability to it. When you are engaged with it, the emotional experience of a piece of artwork is impossible to put clearly into words. Critics make a life’s work out of trying to, but even then they fall short, and only succeed when they create a secondary work of art, which really just pushes the “problem” further away.
This ineffability is what attracts us to art: the ineffable part of the experience is the most intense, the most moving, and the most personal.
The “personal” bit is key. While we can maintain the fiction that two people listening to the same piece of music have the same ineffable experience of it, we’re not really certain of that in any serious way: there’s no way to communicate it.
And this is the interesting thing about role-playing games, to me. Because in role-playing, the act of creation is shared co-equally in time and attention with the act of experiencing the art (contrary to a lot of romantic beliefs about artists, the composition of most art is not particularly the same thing as the experience of it.) This allows, in my experience, for a shared understanding of the core ineffability of the art.
To be clear, I’m not saying that this is some rarified feature of extremely talented or well-designed gaming. I’m saying that this happens every single time you play a role-playing game, period, regardless of outcome, fictional, system, or quality of experience.
To talk a little about this in my personal experience, the strongest example I can draw on is a Drifter’s Escape game I played in Shanghai. A runaway has come back to town to blackmail her father, who runs the town as the sheriff and impregnated her mother through rape, for drug money. The drifter has put two and two together and realizes that the sheriff is planning to have his hatchetman kill his daughter, and is trying to tell the girl. The girl is afraid of the drifter. He’s banging on the door of her cheap motel, and finally kicks it in. It smashes her nose in and sends her sprawling across the floor.
The violence was not particularly gruesome for this group, nor the content. But at that moment, there was some shared understanding between all of us playing. If there had been an outsider watching, I think it would have seemed very boring. We did not act, we didn’t emote as the characters, we didn’t personify the characters in any way. There was a slight hush as the power came over us, and I said “okay, let’s keep playing” because I knew that we were all thinking “do we keep playing?”
Trying to describe it in the aftermath is comparatively boring. It would not be a satisfying short story, nor would it be of any quality as improvisational theater. Talking about it with others in our play-group who weren’t present, we fumbled for words, coming up short (as I just did, again), as if we were recalling something through the thick haze of a black-out night.
I pick this moment as a stand-out, and also because the Drifter’s Escape is written to both maximize this ineffable shared experience and rely on it, mechanically. It’s not necessarily always intense, or positive. The defining characteristic is that it is an experience, which is seemingly shared, but resists description even amongst those that share it, and especially to those outside.
Nerds and Legitimacy
Nerds as a culture, I think, have particular concepts of legitimacy that are… well … very rooted in the mores of adolescence. To be polite about it.
Particularly, the idea of legitimacy based largely or entirely on outside approval: someone who is not a nerd must think that this thing is cool, worthwhile, interesting, in other words, legitimate. Those from within the group are not capable of giving this sort of legitimacy, in this view, in fact, liking it may be negative (there’s a very twisted sort of self-defeating logic in that.) The way I’ve seen this expressed in the indie games world is through some sort of abstract “hot girl at a party,” which is an excellent sort of sleight-of-hand, making you think that it’s about sex and flirting, but then you have to think about how many hot girls there are at role-playing games, playing them, and you realize it’s actually still about external validation.
Combine this with, first, the ineffable quality of role-playing games I’ve talked about above, and second, the somewhat clingy way that the hard core role-playing community declares anyone who actually plays a game to be “one of us” eternally and forever, and you have a recipe for nose-dive, or at least someone telling you about their boring, boring character for hours on end. The reason it’s boring is because the exciting part, the ineffable experience of the art of it, is lost to you. You weren’t there. You weren’t doing it with the group
External validation is just never going to come.
Internal Validation
I keep screaming at yelling at role-playing nerds about how stupid they are to harbor social inferiority complexes. The culture war between jocks and nerds was settled, 15 years ago, and the nerds won handily. Nerds are cool. Nerds have been cool for over a decade: my entire adult life. But role-players remain, internally, behind, waiting for that external validation to finally show up and tell them, it’s okay.
Here’s the bad news for us: That external validation is never going to come, not in a million years, for the reasons outlined above.
Here’s the good news for us: Actually, being cool isn’t about external validation, and hasn’t been about external validation since 8th grade. Being cool is about internal validation, which is your own ability to say “what I do is worthwhile and good and fantastic, and a way better use of my time than any other schmuck uses theirs.” Not to say that, or to run around talking about your superiority (that just smacks of desperation for external validation) but knowing it, and not giving a fuck about the rest of things.
There’s probably a lot more to say around ineffability, but the original impetus for this was to talk about the impossibility of external validation for roleplaying games, which I think I’ve covered. Questions?
