Hi Mark, Chris, Cristoph, Willem, and Jake. Thanks for posting! Sorry for taking a while to get back to you.

First, some short responses. Cristoph and Willem, I owe you both a long response.

Mark W:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s totally ordinary to want external affirmation, and I wasn’t saying that “ordinary people” (whatever that means) don’t. I was just talking about two things:
1) Geeks, role-playing geeks specifically, and how the desire for external validation gets into a horrible explosive car crash with ineffability.
2) How external validation isn’t actually the core of coolness.

None of this is to say anything about non-geeky people (at all, really), or what they want or need.

(This is tangential, and not directly a response to you, just musing inspired by your response {and also a response that I deleted.}) There’s an interesting phenom going on here, actually. Whenever I talk about “geeks do thing X” people assume that I’m also saying “non-geeks don’t do thing X.” Which doesn’t follow (and, with the things I normally talk about, doesn’t follow in dramatic-as-hell ways.)

I think that says something about how geeks (particularly role-playing geeks) see themselves. Geeks are not people from a Gulliver’s Travels backwards land, that do everything the reverse of how ordinary people would do it.

Geek is not the opposite of human.

Chris:
Yeah, absolutely, about the isolated play networks. One thing I’ve noticed (and totally done before myself) is that a lot of people want to get huge numbers of people in their games, and end up with eight, nine, or ten person games that are rather unwieldy, awkward, and often contain large amounts of boring downtime.

The rest of it: I’m not totally sure. I think that dropping the socially clingy behavior would help, yes, but that’s a rather unrealistic goal (large scale social change is hard), and I’m not sure whether or not it’s tied to the wargaming cruft (as a lot of satisfying games of late embrace the wargaming roots of RPGs: and are no less successful for it.)

Jake:
Hi Jake! Welcome to the blogodrome.

I think that the point you raise is pretty important: because you’d had an approximate experience, you were in a much better position to understand what happened to me, emotionally, in the earlier Drifter’s Escape game. Approximating experiences is totally something I should write about.

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?

I was not able to attend this year, which made me sad, because this was the first year I was doing support / being a mentor rather than pushing my own stuff. Still, appropriate that I wasn’t there in person.

Congratulations to Tony, Elizabeth, Shreyas, Andy, Ewen, and Anna. You all rock. I hope your games sell better than mine.

A game text that is hand-written, probably in a composition book. Contains both setting and rules.

You have the right to make your own copy (by hand, natch) of the game only after:
1) You have played the game with someone who owns the book.
2) You have added something to the book.

You can make a copy for someone else:
1) If you have your own copy of the game.
2) If, as part of the giving, you play it with them.
3) You add something into the game text specifically regarding your relationship.

Hi Arturo: Thanks for posting!
Hi Moreno: Thank you for your story!

Arturo:
You have very good points about Polaris. I have a quibble about the color, I think that for some people it is unapproachable and compelling at the same time, if that makes sense. Like “wow, this is great, but I have no idea what to do with it.”

Which is basically the same problem that you’re talking about.

But, ultimately, Polaris is a success story in terms of what I was talking about in my previous post. I talk about Polaris’s problems because, well, it’s my game. But some games (like apparently Nine Worlds, since Matt talks a lot about his problems with marketing that game) almost entirely fail to make the hardcore -> non-hardcore jump. So I want to take a look at what helps a game make that jump. Polaris does, but it takes a fair chunk of start-up time (averaging about a year and a half on the shelf before it moves into action). Other games simply do not. Why is that? What’s the difference between the games, the texts, how they’re marketed, and so on? Can we predict what games will make this offline leap, and what games won’t?

Moreno:
Note that I was pretty careful to define my terms in the first post. The RPG hardcore is defined by their internet participation. No matter how into RPGs someone is, they’re not hardcore if they’re not involved in the internet in some way, according to my definition. Basically, I’m naming the group. You may not like the name, though. Feel free to suggest another.

Also, yes, compulsive buyers really do exist, at least within the “forge/indie” community (actually, since the first post, I’ve met more than I thought existed: I’m going to revise my estimate up to 50-70). Often for their own reasons (if I had a decent salary, I might well be in this category, simply because, for design purposes, I like to be to able to go to my shelf and go “huh, how did Ron handle this problem in Trollbabe, vs. how did Michael handle it in With Great Power…” without necessarily playing the games.) There’s one fellow I know of who even buys a copy of every fantasy heartbreaker, just to see how they work.

When I talk about designing games for the RPG hardcore, it’s with the recognition that it’s a diverse group of people with diverse interests. Really what I mean is “designing games for a sub-section of the RPG hardcore.” Dogs in the Vineyard speaks to the subsection of the RPG hardcore that knows that there’s a way to get really awesome GMing, but doesn’t quite get the techniques to get there. Polaris speaks to the section that has read The King of Elfland’s Daughter and wonders why D&D isn’t like that.

Panty Explosion is an excellent example! Let’s talk about that. My thought, and this is very off the cuff, is that Panty Explosion is about the only role-playing game to come out of the indie scene that successfully marketed to the non-hard-core directly, which is to say people who have no interest in the standard slew of RPG gaming websites, and don’t get any news or information through them. It did this by reaching the role-players who are active online in other places: anime fansites. I think that Maid RPG may be the second game to pull this off, with a similar audience. Bliss Stage might, if it had proper art (which has been elusive.)

But the secondary (and tertiary and so on) sales that I’m talking about here: I’m curious whether or not Panty Explosion gets them (and, likewise, whether Maid will). Jake told me at some point that he’s convinced that no one plays the game (which is a damned shame, as it’s a good game), they just buy it for the title and the novelty, in which case there’d be very few secondary sales in the way that the big successes of the indie game scene have found.

Thank you for your story about Polaris, and for playing it! I agree with everything you say. If I ever do a second edition of the book, those things (among others) will change.

Hi Moreno:

You wrote:
What happened to the backlog of posts you wrote about some times ago, that you needed only to push “send” to post?

They are on topics that I don’t feel like discussing at present. In many cases, they are resolved.

And that’s it for today.

Well, actually, no. I think it segues nicely into another point: comments aren’t a great way to get a quick response to a question. Response here is naturally slow. Better to e-mail me: taogames@gmail.com

Thanks to Vincent Baker.

* Vin Diesel does not actually say this†.

† That I know of.

(I’m in “quick hits” mode for a bit, so posts will be short, but hopefully nonetheless daily.)

So, here’s a new rule.

Read the entirety of a post before responding. No exceptions. Do not be like Guy and Tommi and respond defensively without a critical second reading.

In enforcement terms I’m going to reserve the right to delete comments that are both substanceless and clearly demonstrate that the commenter did not read the post in question. I see this as a service to the commenter: this way, you don’t look like an idiot before God and everyone until the end of time. It is also a service to those that do not comment, because they won’t feel like they have to respond to the dumbness if they want to respond at all.

Deleted comments will be retained privately: if you want a copy of your writing (to post in another place, say), just e-mail me at taogames@gmail.com

This policy is effective now, but not retroactively.

(Will get back to marketing tomorrow. Today has been too busy. Also, working on an intractable rules problem for this very blog. So a short post, about something that I want to talk about but don’t have a lot to say about.)

Elizabeth Shoemaker is trying a (as far as I know) new thing with It’s Complicated. She’s releasing a PDF specifically for screen use, along with a Java application to facilitate play of the game over the internet, called the Online Play Edition.

I don’t do a lot of online play, but I know a lot of people who do. I’ll be very interested to see how this product is received, and what people do with it.

(Thank you, Moreno, Arturo, and Chris. Moreno and Arturo, I’ll respond to you tomorrow.)

Chris’s comment yesterday merits it’s own post:
I’ve been thinking more and more about this. I realized, I play that role as the hardcore guy who bridges to the non-hardcore. Right now, I play mostly with folks who either haven’t played rpgs in 10 or more years, or never played at all.

Odds are good, I’ll have more thoughts on this, later (like, weeks/months later) and I’ll keep you updated on it.

Hi Chris! This is a vocabulary note, to start off, Technically, I think you actually bridge into group 5 (everyone else) rather than group 4. I think that we should take your list as canonical in terms of reaching non-roleplayers, with the exception that I think your third point could vary (if your friends were board-game-players rather than writers, it would make sense to play a game with some strategy present, like, say, carry.)

So let’s take a look. What do we need to make a game a success, marketwise?

1-3) All of Chris’s three things.
4) Appeals to the ~%10 of the RPG hardcore who are willing to play games with their non-gamer friends in a non-creepy manner (i.e. not “one of us” or “recruiting” just “let’s play a game together.”)
5) Makes you want to play the game again.
6) Discrete enough skill-set that you can play the game again, if you have the text.
7) Easy enough to find and buy. (this can be as simple as “not google invisible.”)

I think that 5-7 is really important, and often overlooked. The key here (and this is something that Polaris does well, in the non-hard-core RPG playing market) is that if your game is fun to play, and makes you want to play it again, but doesn’t require to same people every time, that means people will buy games so that they can play it with new people, who will in turn buy games so they can play it with their own set of new people. Starting this sort of chain reaction is really key in maintain both sales and market presence.

Does anyone else have a response to Chris, or want to expand on his ideas?