From Dungeon Kitsch to Dungeon Camp

I was going to do some writing -- about some people's resistance to my identification of gaming aesthetics as kitsch, about how it might be more productive to think of it in terms of the warmer category of "camp." With a huge warning sign that here, we are not talking about an aesthetic mode meant to bridge the gap between masculine and feminine, but rather, between the wonder of the child and the consciousness of the adult.

Then I went to re-read Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on Camp" and discovered that most of the things I wanted to say, she had said, and all I had to do was change "Camp" to "Gaming" and a few other words (in blue). These aphorisms out of her list of 58 are perfect. The others are too tied to specific examples, to a view of camp based in gender and sexuality, or to camp as aesthetics rather than gaming as experience, to make them work.

1. To start very generally: Gaming is a certain mode of simulation. It is one way of imagining adventure within the world. That way, the way of Gaming, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of adversity, of stylization of "awesomeness".

2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Gaming sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized -- or at least apolitical.

3. Not only is there a Gaming vision, a Gaming way of looking at things. Gaming is as well a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons. There are "gamerly" movies, furniture, popular songs, novels, people, buildings. . . . This distinction is important. True, the Gaming eye has the power to transform experience. But not everything can be seen as Gaming. It's not all in the eye of the beholder.

4. Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Gaming:

MacGyver
Aurora monster models

The Transformers
Conan the Barbarian (stories, comics, film)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Kurosawa's films

6. There is a sense in which it is correct to say: "It's too good to be Gaming." Or "too important," not marginal enough. (More on this later.) Thus, the personality and many of the works of Iain M. Banks are Gamerly, but not those of Margaret Atwood. Many examples of Gaming are things which, from a "serious" point of view, are either bad art or kitsch. Not all, though. Not only is Gaming not necessarily bad art, but some art which can be approached as Gaming (example: the major films of Guillermo Del Toro) merits the most serious admiration and study.

8. Gaming is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the "off," of things-being-what-they-are-not. The best example is in dungeons, the most typical and fully developed Gaming style. Dungeons, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of skulls, the living room which is really a habitation of disguised monsters.

10. Gaming sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp" (worth 500 gp); not a woman, but a "woman" (2nd Level, Thief). To perceive Gaming in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.

16. Thus, the Gaming sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.

18. One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Gaming. Pure Gaming is always naive. Gaming which knows itself to be Gaming is usually less satisfying.

19. The pure examples of Gaming are unintentional; they are dead serious. The Dungeon designer who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. He is saying, in all earnestness: Voilà! the Orient! Genuine gaming -- for instance, the encounters devised for the TSR modules of the late seventies -- does not mean to be funny. Gaming "humor"-- say, the Order of the Stick -- does.

23. In naïve, or pure, Gaming, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Gaming. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.

24. When something is just bad (rather than Awesome), it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish. ("It's too much," "It's too fantastic," "It's not to be believed," are standard phrases of Gaming enthusiasm.)

29. The reason a movie like On the Beach, books like Winesburg, Ohio and For Whom the Bell Tolls are bad to the point of being laughable, but not bad to the point of being enjoyable, is that they are too dogged and pretentious. They lack fantasy. There is Gaming in such bad movies as The Prodigal and Samson and Delilah, the series of Italian color spectacles featuring the super-hero Maciste, numerous Japanese science fiction films (Rodan, The Mysterians, The H-Man) because, in their relative unpretentiousness and vulgarity, they are more extreme and irresponsible in their fantasy - and therefore touching and quite enjoyable.

31. This is why so many of the objects prized by Gaming taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment -- or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Gaming sensibility. . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.

41. The whole point of Gaming is to dethrone the serious. Gaming is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Gaming involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

44. Gaming proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy. If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

49. It is a feat, of course. A feat goaded on, in the last analysis, by the threat of boredom. The relation between boredom and Gamer taste cannot be overestimated. Gamer taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence.

53. Nevertheless, even though adolescents have been its vanguard, Gamer taste is much more than adolescent taste. Obviously, its metaphor of life as theater is peculiarly suited as a justification and projection of a certain aspect of the situation of adolescents. (The Gamer insistence on not being "serious," on playing, also connects with the adolescent's desire to remain youthful.) Yet one feels that if adolescents hadn't more or less invented Gaming, someone else would. (To be precise, middle-aged men did.)

55. Gaming taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment. Gaming is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it's not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Gaming taste doesn't propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn't sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.

56. Gaming taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "player character." . . . Gaming taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as "a game," they're enjoying it. Gaming is a tender feeling.

57. Gaming taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles. The absence of this love is the reason why such kitsch items as Dark Dungeons (the tract) and The Big Bang Theory aren't Gaming.

58. The ultimate Gaming statement: it's good because it's awesome. . . Of course, one can't always say that. Only under certain conditions, those which I've tried to sketch in these notes.

Dungeon Kitsch

I am going to argue that much of the aesthetic of adventure gaming has evolved toward a form of kitsch.

That sounds pretty harsh. I don't mean it to be, exactly. So to start digging out of this rhetorical hole, what is kitsch? And is there a nicer term for it?

Religious kitsch

Well, first, I have picked out the first three meaningful photographs of "kitsch" that Google Images sees fit to provide, as anchor for the discussion.

Tretchikoff's Chinese Girl

Wikipedia opines: "a low-brow style of mass-produced art or design using popular or cultural icons." Oxford Dictionaries have it, "Art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way." But those are not quite adequate definitions, for me. They judge, but don't illuminate.

1950's-style kitsch wunderkammer

As it turns out, 20th century visual art critics had a lot to say about kitsch. Writing for the University of Chicago, Whitney Rugg sums up: "Kitsch tends to mimic the effects produced by real sensory experiences ... presenting highly charged imagery, language, or music that triggers an automatic, and therefore unreflective, emotional reaction." 

And further... "Milan Kundera calls this key quality of kitsch the 'second tear:' 'Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see the children running in the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running in the grass! It is the second tear which makes kitsch kitsch.'"

That's more like it. It's about the kitsch aesthetic, not about the kitsch object itself, which can be described as a mass-produced object that simulates opulence or sentiment through the easiest means. In the kitsch aesthetic, there are no defining features, because it necessarily piggybacks on an already achieved mode of culture, as Clement Greenberg remarked in 1939. There is not just kitsch, but cuteness kitsch, nostalgia kitsch, classical-music kitsch, military heroism kitsch, and so on. 

Religious kitsch uses excessive realism to depict what should be more stylized (see the Mary plaques, above), but modernity kitsch uses excessive stylization to wink and elbow-nudge its way into the future (see the 50's Populuxe furniture, above.) The Chinese Girl makes most sense as kitsch of the avant-garde; a magazine-art depiction given a banal exoticized subject and an unusual color choice that passes for sophistication.  

So, building on Kundera's definition, let's call a kitsch approach this: one that seeks to arouse the feelings most normal for its subject matter, by multiple straightforward and obvious means. 

It's this overloading that gives the echo effect, the second tear, the feeling that you are not only seeing something awesome or magnificent or sad, but you are sure that anyone else like you who sees this would also feel that way, pushing you outward into the comfort of conformity rather than inward into the doubts of introspection. It's also this overloading that gives rise to the ironic enjoyment -- climbing down from sophistication to a simpler palate, understanding why it's manipulative and in the same moment refusing to reject it entirely because it is so raw and vivid.

Now, here's that less judgmental name for kitsch -- overload -- although I may not always want to abandon the judgment entirely. And to my eye, Dungeon Overload, if you will, can be defined by its reaching for three A's: Antiquity, Awesomeness and Adversity. But that is a topic to continue next time.

Beyond Generation Wars

"The problem with this new generation is that they grew up on computer games that hand everything to them. They don't have the gumption for old-school play!"

This is a common enough sentiment, but I had to question it recently after reading this article by David Wong. Granted, he admits to "pushing 40," but most of the computer games he mentions are hits from the past 10 years. And some of his criteria for a great moment in computer game play seem lifted straight from the Old School roleplaying ethos. Such as:

• "When you feel truly powerful for the first time:" Means that you have to spend some time paying your dues, hiding and skulking and killing rats with a stick. Power is earned, not granted from the start.
• "The first time you see an awe-inspiring enemy." Means that you have to face things you're not sure you'll survive.
• "The first time you see the universe running without you." Right on. To continue: "Here's a quick way to separate good fantasy stories from bad: The good ones leave you feeling like the universe continues whether or not the camera is there to see it." 

These are all ideas behind old-school naturalism: the world is not composed of carefully measured, player-centric combats and artificial puzzles. You are let into a world where things can overpower you, where there are problems not puzzles, and you have to use all your guile, stealth and good judgment to survive. The computer gaming examples Wong gives here would also make great experiences in tabletop gaming - for example, running from the dragon only to have it fight the giant.

But here's my suspicion: there hasn't really been a change with the generations. Maybe there's less tolerance for pointless grinding at the tabletop because of the ready availability of electronic timewasters. But running a naturalistic world always has taken insight and a certain amount of grit when faced with the players' desire to win. Steering clear of pointless reward and pointless sadism as a DM - and of the self-consciousness that you might be indulging in one or the other - has never been easy. It's also not easy as a player to stick with such a campaign, even though it ultimately brings deep rewards.

You can see from the fulminations of Gygax in the AD&D books that many of his contemporaries ran overly easy "Monty Haul" campaigns. Dice fudging is openly discussed. Clearly, not all old-time players had the Old School mentality. And evidently, a minority of roleplayers today embrace it.

This way has never been mass-market - which is why Mike Mearls feels the need to surround his old-school advice in D&D Next with a slew of padded safety mechanisms. That's OK; those of us who care know how to unbolt the training wheels.

D&D Next: Two Worlds of Gaming

Slowly through conversations with players I'm getting a feeling for what happened in gaming around 1980 and around 1995, and how the legacies of those watersheds affect people's reactions to game innovations now.

Neither of these dates is exact, but they each represent a middle point of a process of change. There are plenty of intentional throwbacks after, some unintentional look-forwards before. But in general, games have evolved (devolved?) toward:

I have to roll a 6 to get out? What?

Low death, low frustration. Before 1980 or thereabouts frustration was an acceptable part of a game's modeling of life. This was just as true for computer games, as board games, as role-playing. OD&D's 1 hit point characters = Nethack's play-until-character-death = Dungeonquest's brutal, random death at every corner. "Stay in jail" mechanics were OK in board games back then, too (Source of the Nile, Mystic Wood...).

The AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide removed much of death's sting through a "death's door" rule covering survival from zero and negative hit points (not at all evident in the earlier Player's Handbook). Save-or-die poison took longer to go, being finally purged for good in 3rd Edition. Computer games have shown a similar exorcism of frustration, moving from no saving of game state, to save points, to continual saving. State-of-the art design today for many casual games even gives progress for failed attempts, so that eventually the game will be defeated. Time is the commodity here, as always, but the message is "you didn't succeed" not "you failed."

"Activate Mrs. White's Rolling Pin Flurry!"

Character powers for all. This broadly refers to things a character can do distinct from other characters, but more specifically combat moves that can be customized. The move toward this feature in 3rd and 4th editions usually gets blamed on computer gaming, but plenty of computer games in the 1980's and 90's used the standard D&D paradigm, where classes without spells only get to bash, shoot and hack using the standard combat procedure.

The origin of feats and the like in tabletop gaming can probably be traced to the prevalence of special character moves in fighting console games, and to increasing modularity and customization in the gaming world under the influence of collectible card games.

On to the present day.

D&D Next, as much as it draws from the old school, also has strong representation from these two concerns in the system. It's obvious that hit points are numerous, the margin of safety for low-level characters is great, and healing remains as available as in 4th edition. It's also obvious that classes, races, and "paths" each come with an addition to a suite of powers that can leave a 3rd level character looking at 3-5 different combat traits and moves.

And now my confession: My campaign players expect these features to some extent, steeped as they are in MMOs. And so on both counts I have gone about half the way that D&D Next appears to have done. I used a "death & dismemberment" system at 0 hit points or below that is scary, but in practice merciful. Save or die poison is a bridge we haven't had to cross, but I'm inclined to offer multiple saves on poison (one to be seriously incapacitated and one to die.) Meanwhile, class powers and fighting feats in my game are running about half the count of D&D Next, but still give enough of a sense of things to do.

To put it shortly: In order to compete with my homebrew, D&D 5th Edition is going to have to give me the option to cut down on the bones it throws to millennium-era gaming, and let me run a game at my desired level of "old world charm and new world convenience."

The Epic Fantasy Wargame: Survivals

Not only did the hex-and-counter game suffer a sharp decline in the 1980's, but the medium was not that well suited to depicting a fantasy epic. There's a limit to how much information a counter or map hex can hold, and most of these games creaked under the weight of a mass of special rules that had to be constantly looked up.

There is also a kind of first-kiss syndrome that paints a halo around these old games. I think a lot of the positive feelings old-schoolers associate with them are residue from anticipating how cool it might be to try them, as well as a much less critical outlook when actually played. Not by coincidence, gaming companies in the 70's and 80's also seemingly chose to produce games largely on how cool they sounded. They had a naive (by today's standards) outlook on usability, play balance, elegance, replay value, and other factors that have come to gamers' awareness in the Internet decades. Again and again in comments on BGG - and in some comments on previous posts here - we hear that the rules are incomplete and baffling, the gameplay either simplistic and obvious or swingy and random.

The Fantastic Through Obscurity

Discussion on how to keep the fantastic in adventure gaming continues, with a renewed desire and specific tips. My further thoughts ...

In information security, the phrase "security through obscurity" is used to disparage the hope that vulnerabilities can be protected by keeping them secret. In their early stages of development, many game forms achieve a sense of wonder through obscurity. Magic: The Gathering, for example, initially provided this sense of wonder through opening packets of collectible cards and finding ones you'd never seen before ... or having them show up in your opponent's deck. Eventually, like many security-though-obscurity hopes, this was dashed through the posting of complete spoilers on the nascent Internet, and through the practice that rapidly developed (to Wizards of the Coast's great joy) of buying whole boxes of product in order to get a complete set. Within a few years it was a poor collectible card game whose manufacturer did not provide rarity symbols, checklists, and eventually complete spoilers and previews.

Was there an attempt to keep the fantastic around through obscurity in early D&D? It's hard to deny when reading the Gygaxian objurgations in AD&D to keep players' noses out of the Dungeon Master's Guide. But that is already late in the day. The time of wonder and fantasy is fading, and the desire to standardize the game deals the death blow; the secrets that used to be kept in the Dungeon Master's cranium are now holy writ. In this light the railing against players accessing the mass-produced secrets sold in Barnes and Noble sounds as hollow as Canute's commands against the tide.

In the age of the Internet spoiler the sense of wonder is even more crucially down to the individual game master. In the comments on Monsters & Manuals I made a point that bears expanding here.

1. When players are denied access to the rules that let them carry out mundane tasks at the starting level, this creates a denial of mastery. You can certainly play this way, with players issuing orders and seeing what happens, in a "fog of war" kind of way. But a lot of players are used to a certain level of rules mastery; a generation has grown up with console RPGs. You don't have to deny them this all the way.

2. Expanding what I've said about high level magic spells, denying knowledge of rules and techniques found at higher levels also helps create the sense of wonder. If the game was about kung fu, then not being able to read all about what a high level Taoist master can do would help achieve this.

3. The technique in Lamentations of providing no standardized monsters or magic items points the way to a game system where the rules of the mundane are known to the players, but the fantastic elements are an idiosyncratic revelation from game to game. Yes, creating the fantastic is hard individual work for the DM. But the alternative, especially with experienced games, is a group of players who ready the oil when they see a troll, who can find out exactly how much every gland in every dead monster corpse is worth, and for whom the only surprise is tactical, not strategic.

I have a few ideas of my own, both on how to make the hard work easier, and how to make the hard work mean more. Next post I'll try to articulate them more fully.

The Panda's Hit Points

I guess everyone who writes about D&D has to tackle the enigma of hit points sometime. Here's the basic paradox:

1. Hit points are a gross abstraction, representing nothing more specific than how long a being can stay in combat without dying. By most accounts, a fighter with 50 hit points taking damage is dodging, ducking, wearing down her favor with the Gods, running out of luck. A dinosaur with 50 hit points taking damage, though, is taking huge slashes to its flesh and hide. This is poison to those who want their game to be a sensible simulation. It's one of the most frequent "problems" that tinkerers try to fix in D&D - by separating body points from luck points (Star Wars d20, etc. etc.), physical damage from defensive skill (Runequest, etc., etc.).By the standards of simulation, hit points are terrible.

2. Hit points are the most successful game element to be exported from D&D. Almost without exception, any computer or board game that simulates a fight at the skirmish level for the past 35 years has used hit points, life points, health bar, or some variation thereof, instead of a more realistic system where individual injuries are tracked. Compare the longevity and sales of Soul Calibur vs. Bushido Blade. By the standards of meeting gamers' needs, hit points are great.

I'm going to take a roundabout trip to explain the discrepancy between the two. I want to argue that hit points are an evolutionary exaptation in game design, adapting to needs gamers have that a more realistic system would not meet.

Exaptation in evolutionary biology means the development, through natural selection, of a new function for a given structure. The concept was popularized by Stephen Jay Gould in an essay on the panda's thumb. This appendage, used to grasp bamboo, actually evolved from one of the panda's wristbones. Another example is feathers, which originally evolved on dinosaurs for temperature regulation but then became important in flying.

Games also have selection pressure. In the game designer's ideal world, the best-selling games will be those that use elegant mechanisms to capture the essential experience of that which the designer is simulating. In the real world, market-dominating games tend to be meatballs like AD&D in its heyday and Monopoly.

Faced with this tragic state of affairs, designers will often resort to a narrative in which, Microsoft-like,  industry leaders achieved their position through sheer corporate throw-weight and user conservatism. I am not discounting these factors. But I want to present an alternative view. Although these games are anathema to intelligent design, they often hold within them features exapted from other games that crudely address some of the very real needs of game players. The crudity of these panda thumbs may offend the sensibilities of refined gamers, but they help explain how these games come out ahead in the more rough-and-tumble process of mass market natural selection.

Take Monopoly as a simulation of real estate dealing, for example. In real life, real estate moguls do not randomly move house from street to street, hoping they will not be forced to pay rent in an an expensive location. Their purchases do not depend on their physical residence, either, and precious few of them enter beauty contests. What a lousy simulation, huh?

These features make more sense in accounting for Monopoly's longevity as a family game. They are exaptations from dice-and-track games (Parcheesi, Snakes and Ladders) that let young kids play along and even succeed sometimes by sheer chance. Monopoly also gathers a couple of other game concepts alien to the simulation of real estate dealing - set trading and collecting, chance cards.

So where are hit points exapted from? Some of you may already know, but here's a roundabout clue:

T-shirt available at Threadless.com

More next time.

Choose Your Own Adventure / Intrinsic Rewards

B. F. Skinner

Grady Hendrix has a great article on Slate, linking together three early forms of interactive media - choose-your-own adventure books, text adventures, and role-playing games. The CYOA genre has a surprising pedigree. Apparently, the idea came before role-playing games, and was foreshadowed by B. F. Skinner's self-paced teaching books that are themselves based on psychological reinforcement principles. Get the right answer, and advance; get the wrong answer, and go back to study some more.

The "reinforcement" in Skinner's books, as well as the CYOA books, is completely internal. The point of Warlock of Firetop Mountain was not to score points, but to open the damn treasure; likewise, even though most text-adventure games kept score, the points never really got taken seriously. This is an insight basic to all kinds of games: finding new stuff is its own reward.

It's because of this I don't see experience points for exploring as necessary. For fighting the monsters you don't really want to fight because they can kill you? Sure. But adding to the map, hearing the DM's description of a natural wonder, those are intrinsic player rewards that have nothing to do with extrinsic rewards: experience or gold being accumulated in the name of characters.

It is this division between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards that, I think, characterizes the divide between the power gamer and the rest. Simply put, a power gamer is focused on the extrinsic system of rewards. In roleplaying games, it's leveling up. In competitive games, it's winning. The intrinsic pleasures of simulation, role-playing, discovery, or socializing carry no weight by themselves to the power gamer. If winning comes by a boring technique; by assembling an implausible but min-maxed deck, character or army; or by being rude to other players - so be it.

Image by CosmoDNA, somethingawful.com

The other side of the coin is the extrinsic punishment system of the game. Character death, in roleplaying games, is the ultimate punishment. An intrinsically driven player will appreciate a good death; not so an extrinsically driven one.

This is also why every attempt to regulate player behavior by manipulating experience points, gold, levels and other such things plays into the hands of the power gamer, becoming in the end just another tool to victory. In the end, going up one level into the real world to apply social pressure, or down one level into the fantasy world to work out the consequences of the undesirable behavior, works out better than playing around with the twilight world of the game mechanics.

15 Bad Games I Learned Something From

No, no, no. I can't be like everyone else. I got to be negative. I got to be me!

1. Monopoly, Munchkin, etc., etc. Sometimes even a "bad" game in terms of board game developments in the 90's can be the "right" game because everyone knows it. Hence my decision to stick with a core D&D system rather than more novel rules-lite systems.

2. Source of the Nile. Commits so many board game sins by modern lights. Is not faaaaiiiir. But the very unfairness and tedious stretches make the good parts fun as all hell!  Previously.

3. My own crappy 11th grade AD&D campaign. Someday I'll do an expiatory post on this rules-bound monstrosity.

4. My high school friend's home-brewed "urban combat" role-playing game, Gay Slayer. I was so repulsed by the prospect of being invited to this that I started running my own transgressive alternative for the group, City Crime, in which you rolled up your race, social class, sexual orientation, and criminal compulsion at random. And GMing that game taught me the joys of fast and loose improv rules.

5. F. A. T. A. L. At the end of the slippery slope of any attempt to include sexuality in your role-playing game rules lurks this anal-circumference abomination. The more rules, the less meaning.

6. Hyborian Gates, Redemption, etc., etc. Elements of a customizable game with different power levels should be costed differently. Amazing how many first-wave CCGs missed this particular lightbulb.

7. HumAliens CCG. Not every kiddie franchise out there is Harry Potter gold.

8. Diskwars, Clout, etc., etc. Most fantasy gamers would rather roll INT than DEX when competing in real life. (These were games where part of your success depended on accurately throwing Pog-like cardboard discs or poker chips.)

9. The Hundred Years War (Strategy & Tactics magazine game). When you are putting a new wargame out every 2 months, simple little playtesting details can fall by the wayside, like whether you have the right counter mix for the set up instructions. Quality over quantity.

10. Power Kill, Train, etc., etc. "While you thought you were playing an innocuous pastime, LOOK, you were actually causing the deaths of innocent people!" Manipulative, morally didactic games don't work.

11. Cleopatra and the Society of Architects. Cool components do not excuse, in fact may encourage, over-complicated mechanics and multiplication of mini-games. I'm looking at the Tetris puzzle in this one, in particular.

12. Champions CCG. Not even the most cynical planned obsolescence gimmick in all of gaming can overcome crap design and humor insulting even the intelligence of 8-year-olds. (This was a British CCG I saw a few packs of, where your monster cards actually permanently lost hit points as you scratched off their damage dots, so you woudl continually have to buy new ones after each game.)

13. Every goddamn eurogame where you use one thing to buy another thing and then another thing which in turn buys another thing which you use to win the game; overcomplicate with auctions, worker placement, and special effect card decks to taste. If you have a good mechanic, bring it front and center rather than covering it up with all the usual dreck. Particular offenders: Princes of Florence; Hamburgium.

14. Dwarf Fortress. Space bar does this on the one screen but this other thing on the other screen and yet a third thing over here? Sometimes, a user interface that is actually hostile to human input - the equivalent of switching road signs to confuse the German paratroopers - can come to feel like an initiatory ordeal into an exceptionally cool and all-consuming cult. See also the rules of De Bellis Antiquitatis.

15. Spore. If you want to release a creature generation toy, release a creature generation toy, but don't hype it to be the most cosmic and profound thing since 2001: A Space Odyssey when it's actually boring and baffling to play. Lesson: Don't believe the hype.

The Heroic Ego

I have been thinking recently about the heroic versus the naturalistic way of thinking, spurred on by a chapter I'm co-authoring for a volume on extremism and uncertainty.

Brief recap of what has gone before: in a heroic fiction the world is there for the sake of the protagonist. It is there to test, challenge, scare, amaze, delight.

In a naturalistic fiction the world exists with its own logic. The protagonist just stumbles upon it.

Four very different instances where this applies:

1. I've abandoned my re-reading of Stephen King's It  The bloat that was annoying in The Shining becomes nearly unbearable here, way too many characters and I don't feel like plodding through to the conclusion, which I recall as a total, disgusting WTF moment.

The real annoying thing, though, is that it's heroic mode. The Bad Thing is there primarily to test, tempt, taunt, and scare the protagonists. You peek in over their shoulder at a never ending parade of horror shows, most of which don't work, and you can almost hear King running around frantically going "I am the master spookster! Boo! Did I scaaare you?" The images may be disturbing, but the underlying message is reassuring. You are important enough for the Ultimate Evil to personally care about you.

Lovecraft doesn't play that. In his stories, you stumble on a universe that doesn't care if you exist or not. That's scary for keeps.

2. In a conversation with a grad student here who is studying conspiracy theories, he mentioned the belief that at the same time the plotters are incredibly powerful and capable, and incredibly stupid. One exhibit of the "incredibly stupid" variety is the mustache-twirling dialogue of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document forged by the Czar's secret service that purports to be the minutes of a global Jewish conspiracy. Again, a product of the heroic mode, as with so many villain tropes. The bad guy is only understandable as a foil for the hero, rather than someone who ruthlessly pursues their own goals. To this end his minions are set up to fail, he provides exposition of his own plots, leaves the hero in a death trap with an adequate Challenge Rating, and so forth.

3. The feminist Bechdel Rule judges films according to whether they contain more than one female character that talk to each other about something other than men. A similar rule could be applied to men who appear in "female" entertainments such as Sex and the City, I guess. Fiction tends to play to its target gender, presenting members of the opposite sex as props in the drama.

4. Hit point systems are heroic. Location injury systems are naturalistic. Guess which one overwhelmingly dominates the world of computer gaming.

The irony is that it is more natural to us as story listeners or game players to prefer heroic to naturalistic tales. Stories and games in heroic mode are comforting; easy to get into; do not tax our thought or motivation; appeal to a wide range of tastes. Stories and games in naturalistic mode are slightly more difficult; they ask us to step outside our heroic ego, face the possibility of death, disidentify with the hero or characters and become more of a puppet master.

I suspect which mode any given person prefers in a game depends on how much they see the game as an escape from the complexities of life, versus an arena in which to confront the complexities of life.

It's all in the game

Just remember: evolution does not imply progress...

Pretty cool - if necessarily incomplete and arguable in details - pedigree of social games through the ages, from Jon Radoff.