what sort of game is an RPG? part 1: Suits and friends

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about games!

I mean, I do that all the time, but in this case I’m talking about the theory of what games even are. It’s a question that seems to be of great fascination to humans, and the subject is approached from all sorts of fields: game design and ludology of course, but also anthropology, sociology, philosophy, mathematics…

In circumstances as far afield as ‘reading a visual novel’, I found that concepts from people like Bernard Suits and Johann Huizinga kept coming up, so I thought I should go to those sources and find out what they had to say.

Of course, because I’m, well, me, I’m particularly interested in roleplaying games, which seem to be an edge case that really complicate a lot of these accounts.

This is a subject I got into last year in the what’s the book for series, inspired by a video by Vi Huntsman who argued in part that roleplaying games do not fit Bernard Suits’s definition of games. Now I’ve been mainlining the theories of game design for the last few months, I wanna come back to that question, and in general, to examine roleplaying games in light of all this other theory…

In this first article, I’ll introduce some of our main characters, whose works, and the questions they raise, will inform the rest of the series.

1. can you even define a game?
2. Bernard’s model
   1. Suits on roleplaying
3. the history of this question
4. what is to come

can you even define a game?

Wittgenstein famously used a game as an example of a thing that is impossible to define except by family-resemblance. Not everyone agrees.

A major point of reference for this article will be Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s book Rules of Play, a book which in 2004 attempted to lay out a textbook for the field of game design. While other books we’ll address are philosophical or anthropological treatises, Rules of Play occupies a rather different space: it aims to be a teaching tool aimed to get students of game design up to speed with the breadth of ideas in the field, as well as lay out the foundations of the field.

But this doesn’t mean it’s without novel ideas of its own. To build up to their own framework for understanding games, which we’ll get to in a moment, Salen and Zimmerman give a pretty broad review of other attempts to describe the phenomenon of play and games. They note that the objectives and fields of study are very different in these cases, and some are defining ‘play’ while others are defining ‘games’, but viewed together they give a pretty interesting overview of the phenomenon…

About the only thing that stands out to nearly everyone is that games have rules!

This matrix is worth reproducing because, well, I like theoretical eclecticism and it gives a nice little overview of the angles that we might want to consider here. Building on these prior efforts, Salen and Zimmerman go on to offer their own definition:

A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.

followed by elaborations of each of the defined words which are all more or less what you’d expect. The artificial one is particularly significant, though: Salen and Zimmerman elaborate on Huizinga’s concept of the ‘magic circle’, describing the (constantly ongoing) process by which people delineate the self-contained ‘game’ from the wider world. (Besides Huizinga, they draw here on the work of Stephen Sniderman, who wrote a great article on unwritten rules which we’ll be coming back to later.)

The rest of this book addresses various theoretical frameworks to apply to game design. Salen and Zimmerman’s model involves three nested ‘primary schemas’ called ‘rules’, ‘play’ and ‘culture’:

rules

the formal structure of games: how the purely formal, abstract mathematical structures underlying games relate to their specific instantiations; how information, feedback and strategy are theorised; the phenomena of rule-breaking.

play

the experience of playing games shaped by those rules; they model ‘play’ as ‘free movement within a more rigid structure’ and explore the ways games and play evoke emotional and sensory experiences in players, and narrative in relation to games.

culture

how games relate to the broader society: how games reflect culture and affect it in turn. Rhetoric and semiotics and so on.

By the 2000s, the field of ‘game design’ had become very broad indeed! I’ll be coming back to many of the questions raise in this book later in the article.

For most of these elements, it’s pretty clear how they’d apply to TTRPGs. The big sticking point, though, is that of goals. These are particularly central to Bernard Suits’s account of games, and RPGs are particularly tricky for his model, so let’s start with him…

Bernard’s model

Bernard Suits, in The Grasshopper (1978), was motivated by an attempt to overcome Wittgenstein’s philosophical challenge and provide a robust definition of games, presented in a very prettily illustrated book of playful Socratic dialogues between the Grasshopper of Aesop’s fable and his disciple ‘Skepticus’.

As such, he spends most of the book considering edge cases which might trouble his definition. He came up with the following…

To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude].

I also offer the following simpler and, so to speak, more portable version of the above: playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

The ‘prelusory goal’ for Suits is not something that we necessarily care about in its own right (like being at the other end of a racetrack), but along with the rules which restrict how you can go about pursuing that goal, it creates a structure which forms a game.

At the time Suits was writing, roleplaying games had only just been invented, so inevitably they are not on his radar—but he does spend a good four chapters of The Grasshopper discussing whether childrens’ games such as ‘house’ or ‘cops and robbers’ fit his definition of roleplaying.

Suits on roleplaying

Suits introduces the subject by having his character Skepticus propose that roleplaying should be explained by a broader definition, that games reverse ends and means. In a goal-driven game, you pick an end (cross the finish line) in order to give you certain means (run down a track); and in a roleplaying game, you pick a role to play in order to act in a certain way:

An impostor behaves like a Russian princess in order to be taken for Anastasia, but a player at make-believe chooses to impersonate Anastasia so that she can behave like a Russian princess.

Suits’s dialogue on this question involves two short stories: one about a spy called Porphyryo Sneak who realises he enjoys the disguise and roleplaying aspect of the work so much that he ends up orchestrating nearly all world events in disguise as various world leaders; the other about a man called Bartholomew Drag who loves to play different social roles…

Among his favourites were: Understanding Father, Understanding Husband, Pig-headed Father, Pig-headed Husband, Graciously Condescending Banterer (Typing Pool), Ditto (Assembly Line), Jocular Chairman of the Board, Gruff Chairman of the Board, Sympathetic Confidant, Shocked Confidant, and many others.

…to the point that other people around him are compelled to elaborately coordinate to give him suitable opportunities to play these characters.

From these examples, Suits argues that his original definition is sufficient for roleplaying, considered as a category of ‘open games’ where the prelusory goal is to keep the game going as long as possible, much like trying to maintain a ping-pong rally. But how does it have inefficient ‘constitutive rules’? Suits argues that the most efficient way to keep a narrative going would be to have everyone read from a script; by insisting on improvising, we are expressing the lusory attitude.

Suits was perhaps kind of prescient when he anticipated a more ‘adult’ form of roleplaying-based game…

And often such enterprises [games like ‘cops and robbers’] seem to be less games than dramatic projections of daydreams or fantasies. And so they are soon abandoned in favour of the unambiguous games that have succeeded in becoming established institutions: athletic games, board games, card games, and so on. Dramatic skill continues to exist in only the most attenuated form in parlour games like Charades, where it is very strictly subordinated to the arts of puzzle solving and coded communication.

But I suspect that there is nothing about dramatic skill which makes it inherently unsuited to being the chief, rather than a severely subordinated, element of well-constructed games. (…) Make-believe pastimes seem to provide such outlets for children, and if such pastimes are indeed games, we ought to find out how they work, so that they can be improved and instituted as socially acceptable adult pursuits.

Perhaps we RPG nerds have gone ahead and done exactly what Suits had in mind! He’s still around, actually—I’m not sure if he got around to considering modern RPGs in his later sequel, Return of the Grasshopper…

In any case, the challenge in a hypothetical roleplaying game, for Suits imagining it in 1978, was in coming up with ways to keep the game moving forwards in a dramatically interesting way, without having a script to fall back on. Let’s see how that stacks up against the games that followed.

the history of this question

Of course, the exact nature of this weird game that we’re playing has been a subject of enormous debate ever since D&D was invented, argued in the pages of fanzines like The Judges’ Guild, as Jon Peterson meticulously documents in the pages of his book The Elusive Shift: How Roleplaying Games Forged Their Identity.

Starting with identifying various precursors to RPGs in the worlds of wargaming and science fiction fandom, many of which went quite far down the roads of character-identification and long-term narrative, Peterson’s book is largely a summary of major currents in late-70s fanzines, organised loosely around various questions of what an RPG is, the role of the referee, questions of narrative and challenge and character ethics. Early contributions were very much of the ‘one true way’ school, with people writing tirades about how others were playing the game wrong, but it gradually evolved into early theories about different player types and different types of fun that can be had in RPGs.

Peterson’s book has gotten reviewed in a few places on the internet, such as OSR blogs for whom early D&D is naturally a subject of interest. One commenter I found particularly interesting is Moreau Vazh…

Vazh observes that Peterson never brings together a really clear narrative of what RPGs started out as and what they became; they speculate that perhaps Peterson intended to come at it from a ‘roll-playing to role-playing’ perspective, but it didn’t hold up to the evidence in his sources. Instead, Peterson described the emergence of a pluralism as the endpoint. Vazh argues that pluralism is a bit superficial:

In truth, little has changed since the early 1980s. Back then, people played Dungeons & Dragons in radically different ways because nothing in the Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks told you how to play the actual game. Forty years later, and people are still cobbling their games together based not only upon poorly-written and poorly-understood rules, but also on negotiating in-group tensions born of different people wanting different things out of an evening’s gaming. Gaming is still atomised, it’s just that nowadays gamers are more ready to recognise that their isolation is born of legitimate differences of opinion rather than one side or the other failing to play the game ‘properly’.

The effort to sort this out, to taxonomise games and players, comes and goes over and over. Just one more conceptual framework, bro! Of course, in modern times, the biggest shadow is cast by Ron Edwards and GNS/Big Model. That body of theory is pretty disreputable nowadays, and justifiably so, but it will be worth addressing.

This long history of argument is the focus of another review Arthur B, a long-time online reviewer of all sorts of nerd shit, someone who by odd coincidence I used to be online friends with on a website called FerretBrain.

In his article, Arthur goes over some of these cyclical debates, and argues that for all they proved cyclic, they proved worthwhile because the tensions within all these different theories proved generative of new, influential game designs—from Peterson’s examples of Champions and Call of Cthulhu in 1981 to the Forge-diaspora in the 2010s that gave us PbtA and all of its consequences.

Will this contribution to the perpetual debate prove similarly productive? I can only hope so. In any case, it’s a fun subject to dive into…

For now, I’ll save further summary and long quotes. Over the rest of this series, I’ll be pulling from The Elusive Shift frequently, because it turns out all the questions we’ll address came up in the 70s too…

what is to come

In part 2 of this series, I’ll start examining the question of how ‘prelusory goals’ factor into RPGs and the objections raised by Vi Huntsman and C. Thi Nguyen, and I’ll take a look over some of the space of RPG designs in light of different views of what the goal is.

This will naturally lead into part 3, which will take a close look at Stephen Sniderman’s analysis of unwritten rules, and see how they factor into the procedures of different RPG traditions.

In part 4, I take a look at the other side of Suits’s structure, the voluntary restrictions. I’ll be looking at how RPG rules restrict what sort of narration the players can make.