Here’s a question that’s occurred to me quite a lot over the past couple of weeks, since Gen Con. I offer it up without much preamble, save for this: Whether you’re hacking a tightly focused game like Apocalypse World or devising a campaign for something broader, like Dungeons & Dragons, you’re almost always moving around a game’s central axis. Maybe you’re in a tight orbit. Maybe you’re drifting away. But at some distance from that gravitational center, you presumably break free and enter either the void between games or the gravity well of some other shining touchstone. So:
If it takes more than 15 minutes or one page of text to “summarize” the points of deviance, then you have reached escape velocity. (Note that the specific rules, e.g., an alternate magic system, might run longer than that. But, you should be able to say, “D&D 4e with the psionics rules from 1e added in and all non-human races are actually aliens from other realities.”)
Strictly speaking, the answer to this is that it can’t be answered by any particular fixed point in the transformation, but by:
1) Whether a community feels it has reached this tipping point.
2) Whether an small play group feels the same.
3) The ability and will to reconcile differences in perspective on games as played versus game as culture label (“real D&D”) at both levels, and between levels.
4) Noticeable shifting of one’s operations and creative goals on some deeper than superficial level.
At one extreme end we have games that obviously are different RPGs to the vast majority of participants, and where opinions that, say Vampire is the same as D&D are considered to be fringe, and on the other we have OSR bleating about half a dozen versions of D&D and their cousins, or the WotC’s marketing-driven attempt to deeply split AD&D1 and 2.
Now you may get a game that tries to enforce parameters about what it is and isn’t, like AD&D1 as portrayed in Gary Gygax’s old columns, or Apocalype World. These have as much standing as the community and groups let them have. Sometimes designers want that authority. Sometimes they want it without wanting to admit it, so they say that their authority is embedded in the game.
There are good and bad reasons to seek this authority over what a game “really” is. Moral considerations matter. For example, I know of at least one case where Mage: The Ascension’s Technocracy stuff was used to fuel the violent, fascist fantasies of a religious bigot. Dogs in the Vineyard was used to run the Waffen SS. It’s okay to say that this level of douchebaggery isn’t part of the game. It’s not as good an idea to say that a GMing style you personally don’t like “disqualifies” a game.
Re Lugh, from one of my STs: “How big does the font have to be?”
@Joe – Minimum 10 point, preferably a sans serif font. Though, if you use Comic Sans, you are automatically disqualified.
@Malcolm – Each of your four points are just focused examples of “it’s different when it’s different.” Or, more specifically, when majority rule agrees it’s different. While technically correct, it does nothing to narrow down where the tipping point is.
While technically correct, it does nothing to narrow down where the tipping point is.
My criteria assume the intervention of human beings able to develop a rudimentary theory of mind.
I was presuming that Will was asking for precisely that theory. Or, at least, some way to outline the shape of it.
As a starting point, is the tipping point defined by house rules? By GM or player technique? By setting divergence? By something else, effable or ineffable?
Is it a true tipping point? That is, can a given session wander well away from the core game, but then come right back the next session? Or does introducing a crashed spaceship into D&D forever push the campaign setting away from the core?
While my original answer was arbitrarily precise, I think it captures the essence. If you spend more time explaining how your game is different from the core than your audience cares to listen, you’ve probably crossed the line. Similarly, if you are having a discussion with other players/GMs of the core game, and you have to preface every statement with “In my game…”, you’ve probably crossed the line.
It’s not a great definition. But, I think it’s a marker to try and find the great definition.
@Lugh: He’s giving a sociological definition, which is fair because what a certain game is known as, or whether two people mean the same thing when they use a certain symbol, are sociological phenomena. Really, your answer is a subset of his answer, one that doesn’t catch all the nuances that his does. You’re both getting at the same idea, though.
Also, “theory of mind” simply means the ability to understand that another creature’s knowledge and awareness differs from your own (that is, that they have an internal state and it isn’t the same as yours).
There’s probably several axes of deviation. I think it’s fair to say that even if you are using more-or-less the same rules, if you are playing a game with them that is not the game intended, you are also not really playing the game.
For example, a friend of mine in law school played a game of D&D that was all courtly politics and courtroom drama, and despite using the rules as written in the books and not having 15-minutes or more of house rules, they never engaged with a large proportion of the systems (like the entire combat mechanic), nor were they having anything resembling “classic” D&D adventures. At that point, I think it’s debatable as to whether what they were playing was _actually_ D&D.
When it becomes Calvinball.
As soon as you open the book for the first time, the title on the front is only a crude, pathetic approximation of what is actually happening.
I agree with JDCorley with my whole brain.
My answer is more or less going to fall into line with Amy J. Devitt’s work on rhetoric and genre theory. So I could give a very long winded answer, or I could just point to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre_studies) and say,
“A game is not a freestanding entity in and of itself. It is not a Platonic principle with an absolute form. What is and is not inside a game is a connective and interactive process of meaning formation (and its attendant power dynamics) among those with stake in the definition of the game.”
Or, maybe more concretely:
1) When enough people say that it is a new game
AND
2) When things those people say actually matter
AND
3) When a weight of consensus forms around 1 and 2.
…
Shrugs.
That’s me though. I think trying to form an objective definition about an inherently subjective situation is the road that leads to asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. How we categorize things sometimes has roots in real life facts (like, say, biological classifications) — but when we’re categorizing ideas into idealogical boxes, chances are that the process is more about “us” and “them” and “right/wrong” and “who gets paid and who gets laid” as it is about the actual facts of the situation.
I am in love with you, Brand Robins, whoever you are. You are the winner of this comment thread.
There’s really a very simple answer here: Can someone else who knows the system your game started with watch your group play the game and recognize the system? Then you’re still playing “that game”. If they can’t, you’re somewhere else.
I suspect that this answer could be preceded by “Shorter Brand Robins:” though.
I disagree with Jeff. Brand, I think your answer makes perfect sense except for one thing: it attempts to make this question go away instead of engaging with it directly.
That is, with a specific campaign, the weight of consensus should be a manageable, discussable thing. Is the weight of consensus the understanding or agreement of the participating players? Does that change when I decide to open my game up to the public via Obsidian Portal or AP threads and a hundred other people weigh in? What happens when a group that thinks of itself as playing D&D with house rules finds out that fifty outside people agree that they are no longer actually playing D&D at all? What sort of sessions or instances of play might cause a group to decide that they are no longer playing D&D but, instead, something Other?
Put another way, I am not looking for an objective definition. I am posing the question to provoke various subjective answers to interact.
Have you ever had the experience where you realized a campaign had entered the fuzzy boundary between one game some other territory? Have you set out to start a campaign in one easily agreed-upon game-turf and then migrated play out to some other region? Have you ever had the weight of consensus shift in mid-campaign? Tell us about that.
No, I have never had an experience where a campaign entered a fuzzy boundary between a game and another territory, as soon as I start playing the game for the first time, it is its own territory permanently and there is nothing any consensus can do about it. Two groups can’t play the same game of D&D – it cannot happen, it is impossible, reflecting on it for even a few seconds reveals this. There is only one respect in which any D&D games can be said to be identical, and that is the blinkered, diseased commercial way of figuring out which credit card purchased what item. The question you ask is nonsensical and is based on an assumption that is wrong – the assumption that it is in any way meaningful to classify a highly improvisational, individual, idiosyncratic activity by the dead, insensate, unchanging, uniform starting point of the written material. The first time you do anything in a RPG, nothing, nothing will ever get you back to that written material. I doubt many even try.
Will,
I’m not trying to make it go away. I’m trying to point out that its a political question. If you want to talk about the specifics of politics in specific situations — awesome! I’m very interested in that. I’m just not interested in the “what is a game in some absolute sense” discussion. That I would like to go away because I feel that it obfuscates the reality of the situation.
So, in real life… here’ how it works for me. I’ve never had that happen in a group. I play the game I’m playing with the people I’m playing with. It’s “our game” from the moment we start playing. I honestly cannot remember at time in the last decade where we’ve stopped to worry if “our game” is “still Vampire” or not.
The only time I’ve had that come up is when talking about a game I’m playing with people who are not playing the game. When I talk about the “Exalted” game I used to play with other people who play Exalted… sure, sometimes there we’ve had places where the differences in the material of the game has lead one of us or another to say “shit, that isn’t what I thought you were saying when you said you were playing Exalted.”
But, even in those cases, none of them have ever lead me to go home and say, “Hey guys, our game isn’t Exalted anymore. Lets call it HippyShake instead, because clearly we don’t have the ability to call it an Exalted game anymore and still be intellectually honest.”
Why? Because what guys on, say, the White Wolf forums or RPG.net think about our game doesn’t make a bit of difference when we’re playing our game with each other. There is no “what they think matters” even if all of them agree that we’re not playing Exalted anymore. They aren’t there, so fuck em.
Where it does matter is when I go to the White Wolf forums, or RPG.net, or whatever, to talk about Exalted. At that point if I go about saying, “Exalted has an awesome system, I love how you punch people in the face to resolve conflicts…” well, I’m probably not meaningfully contributing to the conversation. In that case the group consensus (“Exalted is a game where you resolve conflicts by rolling 10 sided dice….”) matters. I’m talking with a group for whom the definition of the game has a certain weight and meaning, and trying to include my definition when it is actively counter to that is going to cause friction and not lead to much in the way of good communication.
So when I’m running “Exalted” with In a Wicked Age mechanics, am I playing Exalted? If I’m talking with my own group.. sure, why not? The politics of communication don’t stop us from saying that, and saying that doesn’t cause any disruption. When I say it on the White Wolf forums, it may be problematic, because that is not what others will think I am saying, and my instance on still calling it Exalted is, in fact, a political power play.
I can also see where this matters for groups who use published books as a locus for communication among members of the group. Like, when you say, “We’re going to start a new Exalted game” and mean “this game in the book with this key set of assumptions and setting potential.” And then when someone else is all like “why isn’t this game gritty” you answer “because its Exalted.” Meaning, of course, “we have this consensus about what the game is supposed to be, backed up by the book, so get with the program.”
My group, however, doesn’t really do that. Most of the time we joint-create so much of the setting and theme of our games that using the books as external references isn’t helpful to us.
So once again, we call it Exalted, because to us when speaking to us, it is. What we call it when we talk to others? Depends on who we’re talking to, doesn’t it?
Will, I think the answer comes from asking what we’re going to get out of being in a category. These things might be:
1) It lets us talk about it online with folks and get things into a basic context. I say we’re playing Vampire and can talk to Vampire fans. I say we’re playing a high fantasy hack of Vampire with 4 clans and that also lays things out. In this case it really depends on whether we’ll get anything useful out of the interaction. In many cases, the answer is “no,” so you get all those groups who play an nth generation evolution of one game that doesn’t look much like its origin and who just don’t care to talk about it.
2) It serves as a shorthand for some kind of mission statement for the game. When I say it’s Vampire, or high fantasy blood godlings or whatever people grab some expectations from the cultural metatext and bring that to their play and outlook. Sometimes this is useful. Sometimes it’s confusing because people have differing associations with a given set of buzzwords. Sometimes the difference is useful and creates a context for shaking up play while maintaining continuity, so that my Vampire game can shift from Fire It Up mofos to coldblooded immortals because they’re both “Vampire,” and include ways to get from one to the other.
We have a map/territory divide here. It’s too easy to say it’s all about the Realness of the territory because it’s dishonest; we have internal maps, ways of knowing beyond the immediate experience of play. But you can’t let that take over or your description/map will be stifling and inauthentic.
There is a very big, destructive trend to try to erase the intriguing relationship between play experiences and cultural conventions. This is a prime example of a medium altering our values because let’s face it, so much of this is about Internet exhibitionism, and that is about creating and enforcing enough uniformity to have conversations at a distance. Certainly, there are questions of power at work. We have some designs imposing that map as the only way to navigate our behaviour through the game even when we see alternatives emerge, for no pressing reason other than the designer’s satisfaction. Before that you had examples like LARP networks, where taking command of the “right” way to interpret Vampire gave you social sway. Then we go right back to Gygax and AD&D1, where he promoted uniformity of experience to drive a play network and sell the game. It is telling that in *all* of these situations people resist joining, and in all of them true believers will insist that refuseniks are doing it wrong and might be shitty gamers. They have a point if the difference is in some way perverse or non-compassionate, but not if it simply requires more openmindedness.
So to end the digression but bring its points back, we can find classifications and community enforcement of them useful, but we must remember that they exist to serve us, and they must exist in a context of communication beyond laying down what we’re playing, and what constitutes not playing that. Deciding what we’re playing is a shorthand summary of a process between friends and a cultural tool, but not our anchor, stricture or anything else of the sort. Human relationships come first.
Will,
It occurs to me I was wrong about the idea that I haven’t had to worry about this much in play in the last decade. I did, the three or four times I played at a con.
When I roll up to a table at a con to play with strangers (or semi-friends from the net), then the question of “is this really Exalted” can matter. If I show up to play Exalted and end up playing a game where 80% of the story is about scrounging food and fighting infection then I may have some sharp words to say about how “this is no longer Exalted.”
This, notably, is one of the reasons why I quickly moved away from playing at cons.
Can there be practical orientation without a value judgment? We frequently define the relative territory of a campaign (“It’s Vampire set in 1757 American Colonies except Humanity physically transforms your character into a man-bat and Disciplines are temporary powers gained by having charged Vitae in your system from human, animal, and vampire vessels.”) based on the best-guess presumption of a typical reading of an RPG’s default mode, don’t we? Does the concept of “vanilla Vampire” have useful meaning or not?
I’m not necessarily concerned about worry or anxiety within a group over a notion of proper or designer-mandated play, though that certainly might be a factor for some groups trying to decide how to communicate their campaign’s orientation to an outsider. I’m interested in hearing how multiple readers engage with the notion.
If every game is its own isolated and unconnected experience, separate and unconnected with, for example, landmark texts, how can we ever discuss our relative experiences? Is the notion that landmarks are moveable completely undermining? Can I not say that a campaign is on a fuzzy borderland between Vampire and Spycraft and be roughly understood? Or is that nonsense?
Will,
Landmark texts are useful, and some comparison of games is always useful.
Its just that its always useful in a greater context. You always are going to end up in a place where what you’re saying is going to be dependent upon who you are saying it to and why.
So when I sit down with my group to start a new game, do we say “Do you guys want to play Vampire or Spycraft?” Yes, of course. And does it have value? Yes, of course. Its acting as a short form of a certain initial set of expectations for what we’re looking for in a game.
It’s a whole different conversation when I talk to you back in 2006 when you’re the Vampire developer and I tell you about my Vampire game set on Mars in 3032 in which Vampires are daywalking ghosts, and you say “That isn’t Vampire.”
Which makes me look back to the initial post and where we are now. There seems to me to be a very large difference between the questions “when is having landmark texts and common points of reference useful” and “when are you no longer playing the game you purport to be playing.”
One is asking “how do we talk about this to be useful in different contexts” and the other is “how do we fit things into categories.”
I mean, I don’t want to get all Wittgenstein (again)… but part of what makes the idea of landmark texts and the use of common references useful is the very fact that they are not locked down, carved in stone, or controlled. There is no magical moment where a game in play stops being a game, but at the same time there are times in talking about a game where we can say “this and not that.”
(And, Brand, rereading it, I was more dismissive-sounding than I meant to be. I used the phrase “make the question go away” in the manner of Stephen King’s On Writing, but it was lazy of me. Sorry if I offended.)
Will,
No, its cool. I’m not offended, I’m happy. My initial post very much was a starting point, not an ending one. So that you called me to not be a pisser by stopping there is totally cool.
Oh, and since I’m a terrible fucking name dropper, I went and looked up the Wiki article for the Wit. argument I was referencing above. It sayeth:
“One general characteristic of games that Wittgenstein considers in detail is the way in which they consist in following rules. Rules constitute a family, rather than a class that can be explicitly defined.[14] As a consequence, it is not possible to provide a definitive account of what it is to follow a rule. Indeed, he argues that any course of action can be made out to accord with some particular rule, and that therefore a rule cannot be used to explain an action.[15] Rather, that one is following a rule or not is to be decided by looking to see if the actions conform to the expectations in the particular form of life in which one is involved. Following a rule is a social activity.”
Curiously to me, Brand, I see the original question as being intentionally nebulous. Is it asking, “How do we fit things into categories?” (which implies that we should) or is it asking “When has a campaign broken out of a category?” (which implies that categories are porous or otherwise escapable). And if this raises the question of the value or function of those categories, then I’m happy.
But I used space (big and nebulous) and orbits (relative and breakable) as a metaphor on purpose. I suppose it doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped.
(I read some Wittgenstein when I was formulating my Games As Art post back when, in fact, including that quote. It’s part of where I’m coming from when I formulate this sort of question. Thanks for bringing it to the forefront here.)
Will,
I may just have missed the intent. I do that sometimes, alas.
So… hmm. The problem is I honestly can’t see a good way to answer the initial questions without getting more data. Am I categorizing the game for myself in my mind? Am I talking to member of my group about the game? Am I trying to get a copyright on my Vampyre: The Gleaming RPG and arguing that its a different thing than Vampire to a court?
I dunno, maybe I’m just dense on this one.
But, a story occurs to me about how calling something a different name did result in a change in my group!
Back when “Story Games” was a hot new term and My Life With Master and Dogs in the Vineyard were the new hottness, my group started messing about with this story games thing.
We tried a couple of games, and one player often had a lot of problems getting into the notably different flow of the games. It wasn’t terrible, but it was suboptimal.
So one day, before we play My Life With Master, I do a very twee thing. Instead of saying, “Lets play a roleplaying game” I say, “Hey, this is My Life With Master, it’s a Story Game. Kinda like a roleplaying game, but you don’t focus on your character, you focus on the story!”
(God, how obnoxious it sounds.)
You’d think this probably just made everyone make gagging noises at me, and then follow up by playing the same way they always did. And most of the group did. But the guy who’d been having problems all of a sudden was in the flow and going.
Afterwards he said, “I like this game more than the other. They were all trying to be roleplaying game. This is something different, and that made it easy to play.”
So, in that case, calling the game something different actually helped this player see the game as something different and have more fun with it.
And yes, since then, we sometimes will have someone say “are we playing this like a roleplaying game or a story game” as one of those “how do we categorize this game before we start playing” questions.
“Does the concept of “vanilla Vampire” have useful meaning or not?”
Not. Glad to help.
So when someone uses a phrase like “vanilla [Apocalypse World],” as I just read on Twitter, that person thinks he’s communicating but in fact he is not?
He is not communicating with JD.
He may be communicating with me.
He probably is communicating with Seth.
(This all assumes that anything on Twitter can actually be classed as communication, of course.)
He is not communicating with JD.
He may be communicating with me.
He probably is communicating with Seth.
This made me laugh. Because, yeah, “vanilla Apocalypse World” does communicate to me. Then I laughed some more after I thought about it for a bit. Because, see, vanilla Apocalypse World assumes customizing through custom moves and the like. So, my game of Apocalypse World could have several custom moves that fit within the rules of the game but make my “vanilla” Apocalypse World quite different from your “vanilla” Apocalypse World.
But, even with that, I still find that the term is helpful. Though, at this point, I’m finding that I’m reaching the boundaries of what I can easily communicate in a blog comment without taking more time than I currently have.
Also, for the watching audience, Brand and I have been having this very conversation over several fora for a few years now. So we’re old adversaries well met on the field of…conversation? Or something like that. I’m not even sure that “adversary” is really correct. It’s always a pleasure talking with Brand, even when we don’t quite agree.
So when someone uses a phrase like “vanilla [Apocalypse World],” … that person thinks he’s communicating but in fact he is not?
Correct again! Don’t hold back, you’ve absolutely got it. I think for games where inputs are restricted to a finite, unchanging list, like, say, Monopoly, you could say “vanilla Monopoly” and have it mean something. RPGs just aren’t like that.
“So, yeah, based on Apocalypse World, but Apocalypse World no longer? Fuck yeah.” —Apocalypse World, p. 278
That’s the whole intro to the “Not Even Apocalypse World” section of the “Advanced Fuckery” chapter of Apocalypse World. It implies a boundary between what is and is not Apocalypse World. That is, it implies that there is a point at which Apocalypse World is a useful descriptor and a point at which that descriptor is no longer accurate.
When is something “Apocalypse World no longer,” then? The above quote implies that there’s a point as which something can be both based on Apocalypse World and within the bounds of the Apocalypse World identity. It implies an event horizon somewhere between the play based on the previous chapters and the material that follows the section header.
(I use this particular example because AW has come up in this thread, and because it’s part of what sparked the question originally, and because I just reread this section.)
The designer’s opinion on the boundaries of the game is just like anyone else’s. Maybe a little bit less perceptive than most – the designer, after all, is too close to the game to see it from any kind of distance or in any kind of context. Ignore all designer pronouncements on where their game ends, they don’t know.