Your host Ian McRae, alias FM, explores video and sometimes tabletop gaming as an art form and celebrates the things that make us love our controllers and dice.
The main column will be posted once a week, with other content posted whenever.
I dabble in tabletop game design sometimes, too. It's an RPG heavily inspired by Armored Core.
Aeon Genesis deserves more love for all the great work they've brought us. Go visit them, won't you?
Another update for the burgeoning tabletop system, where players become mercenaries known as Mages in a future era of change and conflict. Using customized mecha known as Armored Personnel Units, they fight using a battle system where speed is life, and Initiative is a resource - the battle order is never the same as mechs duke it out for position! Skill is paramount, but luck is always a factor.
If you’re all interested in the subject matter, give it a try! Adding some inspirations/related content to the tags.
Playing by the Rules
Roleplaying is a curious hobby, in that it has different goals depending on who you ask and when you ask them. If you asked, say, someone who picked up tabletop gaming in the past few years - let’s say by about 2005 or so, and possibly after some freeform roleplaying in an MMO or other video game - tabletop RPGs are a collaborative storytelling activity and fun battle system. If you ask someone who started gaming before that, well…the answer becomes a bit more complicated.
See, pen and paper roleplaying games are still games, in that they have defined rulesets and states of play. However, where video games are limited by the programmer and machine, unable to deviate from their rulesets, tabletop games essentially have no limits whatsoever but the players’ and Game Master’s1 patience and creativity. Thus, everyone involved could be playing a different game from the one everyone else thinks they’re supposed to be playing.
As you might expect, this can be problematic.
Advert for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons on the Intellivision.
Modern Love
Ultima IV is one of the classics of the RPG genre. Considered the first great entry in what once was the greatest RPG series in gaming, long before Japan showed up with its Dragon Warriors and Final Fantasies to show us how it’s done, Ultima IV pioneered gaming’s first true morality system, in which completion of the game required one to follow the Virtues, a series of moral axioms, becoming the Avatar thereof and bringing hope to the land of Britannia.
This is what we can all agree on. Unfortunately, there’s a dark secret to this classic game: it’s basically unplayable.
Of course, try to tell that to certain people, and they’ll call you illiterate. They’ll claim that modern gamers are spoiled by their quest compasses, their voice acting, their tutorials. They’ll claim that we cruelly dismiss a true classic for our hollow, hedonistic pleasures, with no difficulty or effort involved in the enjoyment.
This is, of course, completely false. Yet at the same time, it’s also true. But the fact that there’s truth to it isn’t, in fact, a harbinger for the end of intelligence in gamers or anything like that. It’s perfectly natural.
This week, I’m going to explain why a game can both be a classic and unplayable. More importantly, though, I’m going to explain why it’s okay for things to be that way.
You Can’t Escape, You Know
“The Enrichment Center reminds you that the Weighted Companion Cube will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak. In the event that the Weighted Companion Cube does speak, the Enrichment Center urges you to disregard its advice.”
GLaDOS, Portal
Let’s talk about agency.
The agency of the player is the key component of all interactive entertainment. However, agency is naturally a limited thing in video games. Since a computer program is, by its nature, deterministic, it can only allow and respond to a limited number of actions, assuming no outside device or program interferes. A game is further limited by the assets the programmer inserts into the program and intends to be seen.
The earliest games had extremely limited agency. Pong had the agency of moving the paddle either up or down - an amazing two whole directions! However, the desire for increased agency was quickly discovered, mostly in early mainframe RPGs. Since then, the trend has been toward more and more agency, be it agency of mechanics (ie, the gameplay) or agency of narrative. Usually, the level of agency is set early on, and the expectation is followed through the entire game, the contract between player and designer.
But what happens when agency is denied? And what does this increased agency mean for players?
(Warning: Spoilers for Final Fantasy VII, L.A. Noire, and Portal after the jump.)
That Dreaded Question
Let’s just get this one out of the way.
A great man once said, “I don’t think I’ve ever read a definition for art that wasn’t stupid.” As expected, this is a question which occupies a certain kind of person a great deal, be it for their own justification of love or hate of a given medium or expression…or, very rarely, an actual legitimate attempt at defining the undefinable.
So, in defending ‘games as art’, I must, inevitably, confront this very question in some manner or another. This, despite lacking the qualifications to do so, let alone the interest.
Basically, what I’m saying is: buckle up.
I’m pretty sure that everyone, no matter what side of the edition war they’re on, knows this is an idea doomed to failure…except the Coastal Wizards, for some reason.
Exciting news for anyone who isn’t sick of edition wars! (I like 4e best, myself, but I play 3.5/Pathfinder as well.) This strikes me as kind of a bad idea, but we’ll see how the game turns out.
Someone named Rolibar made an insightful comment, which I’ll reproduce here.
Dungeons and Dragons is a product that is a real head scratcher for Hasbro.
Dungeons and Dragons just doesn’t fit the Hasbro sales model, a product that uses pencil paper and imagination was always a tough model for a business model. The fact that the brand name is so widely recognized in popular culture only makes the product more frustrating for Hasbro. The logic that “Rome wasn’t built in a day” just didn’t fit the Hasbro toy model of mass printed fire and forget games and toys, and the Holy Grail status of Dungeons and Dragons inside WOTC just didn’t neatly fit a balance sheet, and as Pokemon sales trailed off they started looking at the whole WOTC product portfolio.
As a practical example I can remember in 2001 when the Psionic Handbooks came out and all 50,0000 copies of the first printing sold out at the distribution level. Anthony Valtera who was a Business Manager for the D&D brand was thrilled, only to have a Hasbro executive ask why in the world we even made a product that only had a run of 50,000 copies. Now this was early in the Hasbro/WOTC merger, but it gave an idea of the disconnect on the product line. Hasbro couldn’t get a handle on how such a big name brand could generate such little revenue and demand such a large development team.
I can’t even begin to describe the level of tension between WOTC and Hasbro in late 2000 and early 2001 when Hasbro sold the electonic rights to D&D (Peter Adkinson resigned) which was seen as undermining WOTC’s ability to revive the brand. Of course there was Peter at Gen Con running demos at Gen Con 2001 for Dungeons and Dragons out of sheer love of the game. That sort of put it all in persepective, those grew up with D&D would love it forever. I guess the point is that while most of gamers might not like the churning of editions, it’s just business.
It’s been nearly a decade since I was at WOTC, and I had nothing to do with the gaming development, however I can say that the development team always asked first, is this good for our players, not will this increase sales. It’s a tough act to balance passion and profits!
The Art of Nothing
John Cage’s infamous 4’33” is a musical composition in which no instruments are played. Specifically, it instructs the musician playing the piece to never play a single note. Cage’s intention in composing this piece was not to create music that was silent, but to create a musical piece that consisted exclusively of all the sounds being heard while the piece was being ‘played’. In essence, Cage intended it to be music in which neither the composer nor the artist had any influence on the ‘performance’.
Some would argue that this distinction is academic, pedantic, or, to use more colorful terms, retarded. That, I think, is for people with art degrees and actual credentials to decide, but let us, for the sake of argument at the very least, accept Cage’s original interpretation.
