I’ve spent the last six articles (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) exploring all sorts of questions around game design and RPGs.
Towards the end of the last article, I dared to actually venture an opinion, instead of just describing things which other people have observed. Whatever you think about the Forge, I believe Vi Huntsman put her finger on something important: hacking, improvisation, ad-hoc systems invented on the fly and the parts of play that are transmitted through play culture are all pretty cool and important actually, and risk getting elided in any discussion that centres on rulebooks.
- rulebooks ain’t all that
- designing for invisible rulebooks
- Vi’s Dread video
- is this all a matter of two different play cultures?
- maybe Huizinga knew all along
- is the playing of RPGs an ‘art’? maybe even ‘folk art’?
- what does this all mean for game designers?
- RPG systems as creative tools
rulebooks ain’t all that
If there’s one thing that roleplayers really love to talk about, it’s rulebooks. If “D&D” often unfortunately stands in for the hobby as a whole for many people, conversely, players who use a different rulebook-product will tend to make absolutely sure to say that when they describe their activity. “I’ve been in a Prime Time Adventures campaign.” “X ran an amazing game of Dread at the convention.” “I joined a 5e game recently.” “I really want to try Mothership.”
You can’t really be against this, because rulebooks are a great tool for getting people on the same page and laying out procedures, for all the reasons discussed in the what’s the book for series last year. Referring to the rulebook in use is a great shorthand for the type of game that is being played. But, following Vi Huntsman, I think that can put the explanatory power in the wrong place. Rulebooks are just one element in the brew that makes up a roleplaying game.
So, in this article, I want to focus on facets of RPG design and play that focus on the flexibility and creativity of players. We’ll be moving away from Bernard Suits and towards the ideas of Huizinga and Caillois. This time, though, I’m gonna do the opposite of what I usually do: we’ll start in RPG land.
designing for invisible rulebooks
I recently found a treasure trove of RPG analysis writing, helpfully compiled in one place by Walton Wood of Līber Lūdōrum. This has led me to fill in a few gaps in my knowledge of “shit people have said about RPGs”.
One particularly interesting set of entries comes from S. John Ross at ‘Rolltop Indigo’, one of the creators of a popular rules-light RPG called Risus. S. John, as people who do this thing are wont to do, wrote an ‘RPG Lexicon’ describing various qualities of RPGs with his own personal jargon between 2018 and 2023.
For S. John, the key thing about RPGs is the tactical infinity: anything the players can think of can happen in a game and be used to solve problems (S. John’s example is that players in a military game might dress up as nuns to sneak into a village), and it will be handled with a metaphor of invisible rulebooks:
We’ve all got a library up there. We’ve got the Book of Realistic Firearms As I Understand Them, and the Book of Genre Conventions Volume XIV: Action-Comedy Westerns. We’ve got the more general Book of Physics and the Book of Ensemble-Based Table Behavior and even the Book of How We Decide Who Gets the Final Dorito.
Of course, my version of the Book of Realistic Firearms As I Understand Them is probably different from yours, because we have different experiences and sources to draw from.
RPG players are constantly, says S. John, handling the little tensions between each players’ invisible rulebooks and the explicit rules. And that’s no problem for us! He describes a design continuum: on the one hand, games which attempt to have the written rules do all they can, and leave only a few gaps to be covered with invisible rulebooks; on the other, designs which attempt to address only the few gaps where the invisible rulebooks break down.
So far, this overlaps a lot with what we’ve discussed so far. ‘Invisible rulebooks’ are more or less Sniderman’s ‘unwritten rules’, as applied to RPGs. ‘Tactical infinity’ can be mapped nicely to Emily Care Boss’s ‘fictional positioning’, which came up in article 4. But S. John elaborates further. The last entry in his lexicon examines various continuums that rules, written or unwritten, can exist on.
I’m sometimes going to call these ‘game elements’ rather than ‘rules’, just because I think it’s clearer.
- game elements can be more or less ‘shareable’: they draw on experiences we’ve had (e.g. media inspirations, other games), on the game books, etc.; and some of those experiences can be shared, others can’t. S. John’s example of the non-shareable is a depiction of a ‘fantasy merchant’ informed by things like a specific GM doing a bad accent in the 80s. If you weren’t at that table, you don’t have that as a reference point.
- game elements can be ‘reliable’ in that they apply throughout the game, like an ability on a character sheet; or ‘ephemeral’ and specific to a situation at hand.
- rules can be firm or soft: there might be more or less nuance in whether they apply/are relevant. ‘Gravity applies’ is generally inarguable, and your character sheet might give a fixed damage number, but ‘the duke is self-conscious about his baldness’ is nebulous: how self-conscious is he? How far can that be exploited?
- game elements and rules can be diegetic or extradiegetic. Usually the ‘tokens’ side of Vincent’s model is extradiegetic—characters are not aware of hitpoints etc. But ‘this character is a wizard’ is an element of the fiction. Extradiegetic elements can correspond to diegetic elements more or less precisely.
- rules can be character-facing or not, depending if the player characters know about them, distinct from the players. A player can calculate how much damage an attack will do and know it will be lethal with x probability, but their character does not know this. S. John prefers things to be character-facing as much as possible.
At the end, S. John cautions that genre conventions like ‘can you safely shoot someone’s hat off their head’ exist in a rather nebulous relation to some of these binaries, like ‘would a character implicitly understand that this convention is in effect’.
Elsewhere in S. John’s series we see some other really interesting design spaces. For example, an open-ended situation can provide an opportunity to create characterisation in how specifically a character approaches the problems at hand. He describes situations that expect, or sometimes reject, a specific approach to solution as presumptive challenges: there is one correct solution, they’re engineered to avoid a default solution, they force a selection from a limited array of options…
Evidently, S. John is against ‘presumptiveness’. He likes RPG situations to be as open-ended as possible through the infinite complexity of the invisible rulebooks, offering the maximal potential for characters to respond in unique ways. This is something we can map to ‘play’ in the sense described by Salen and Zimmerman, of ‘free movement within a rigid system’.
open-ended Kagematsu?
I have mentioned Kagematsu a few times in this series, so it’s probably worth noting I have never actually played it. I just think it’s a nice example of a highly procedural, scenario-specific story game we can examine in light of all these design questions. Kagematsu is about as complete a game as you can ask for: there is basically zero prep that any of the players need to do. Maybe you’d wanna watch some samurai movies to get the vibe down.
In Kagematsu as written, players can do only a few things. They can enter a scene with Kagematsu and angle for one of a fixed list of possible Affections with varying costs. Of course, the players are free to roleplay exactly how they go about approaching Kagematsu, and they could be quite inventive in that. But in the end, it will come down to the same dice roll, and a point of Love or Pity. In S. John Ross’s language, this is just about maximally presumptive.
We could imagine the ‘Kagematsu scenario’ approached in the sort of game S. John likes. The players control townswomen in a town under threat, but luckily for them, there is a wandering ronin called Kagematsu who could defend them.
They could do what Lewon’s rules describe and try to seduce him, by earning an escalating series of favours. But they could do a lot of other things. They could research his motivation and try to offer him something he wants. They could sit down face to face and logically argue that it would reflect well on his honour to defend the village. They could blackmail him. They could challenge him to a wager, with the stakes being that he will defend the village… and then try to rig the wager in their favour. They could decide that Kagematsu isn’t all that, and appeal to the local daimyō to send soldiers. They could persuade Kagematsu to stick around just long enough to train them in martial arts so they can defend the village themselves.
So the ‘Kagematsu scenario’ definitely fulfils the ‘half-dozen rue’ that Ross describes. Kagematsu the story game does not. But this is of course intentional: Lewon was pretty upfront that she was interested in exploring a specific dynamic around gender. To that end, the game is, by story game standards, strongly railroaded.
This is certainly not true of all story-games. In a game of Fiasco, the events of the game are designed to be chaotic and unpredictable. The meat of the game is a great big random table of scenario elements (locations, macguffins, etc.) and a procedure for selecting what will be in play by rolling a bunch of dice and then taking turns spending them to add something to the fictional brew. The only real ‘tokens’-side mechanic is that players gradually get assigned dice from the pile if they or the players decide a scene went well or poorly for them, and these dice play into the ‘tilt’ and the final outcome. Pretty much everything else is left to the fiction, with the scene-framing round-robin ensuring each character gets some screentime.
Fiasco is on the low end of ‘presumptive’. Its characters may try to solve problems, although with the way the game is structured to produce chaos, it’s likely they won’t fully get to implement their solutions.
Vi’s Dread video
Unwritten rules, invisible rulebooks. With so much that isn’t in a book, does it matter what is?
I’ve been responding to Vi Huntsman’s video on Root throughout this article. But now it’s time to refer to another video in her library: the one that is (loosely) about an RPG called Dread.
Much like her other video, it talks about all sorts of subjects with the game in question as a loose frame. (Indeed, she only specifically brings up Dread about half an hour in.)
Vi’s central question is whether a game system can evoke emotions such as horror. That is, if you play a game of Dread and get scared shitless, can that be credited to the game system, as opposed to say the talents of the players? To this end, she spends some time exploring what it means to be said to be playing a specific game.
I don’t actually care very much about Dread, but as you can tell from the fact we’re in Article 7 of this series, I love getting into philosophical rabbit holes about roleplaying games, so let’s see where this takes her.
minimal-formal-system RPGs
To this end, she starts her exploration with Splatoon roleplaying ‘tournament’ events. I will admit, I had no idea this was a thing people do in Splatoon, but of course it has all the ingredients! You can put on outfits and walk your avatar around and talk to people. That’s all you really need. Everything else is a nice extra.
Interviewing someone called AL, Vi asks her about how these tournaments work. The actual competitive part of the tournament is largely defined by dicerolling, plus some flavour description by players. Afterwards, players can hang out and roleplay. This can be distilled to the formal elements of this game’s ‘system’:
So…what are the core components? There’s character creation: Give your character a look and a weapon and a name. A strong shared premise: to play inklings and octolings in Splatoon’s world. Player skill: Composing a personality, a history and maybe relationships with existing characters. And of course the resolution mechanic which, with another helping of player skill, acts as a jumping off point for more roleplay. Through that lens, this ‘system’ has contemporaries in micro-RPGs, 1-page RPGs and business card RPGs, yet can make some of them look complex by comparison!
She then briefly describes some one-page RPGs such as Tunnel Goons and Honey Heist. One of them comes in with a baked-in premise, the other is more flexible.
variants of D&D
From this, Vi addresses the spectre of people who play D&D but don’t actually touch the dice, or use any other substantial ‘mechanical’ elements of the system. All they’ve borrowed from D&D is the procedural elements common to most ‘trad’ roleplaying games: a game as a conversation where players describe their actions in words, the DM controlling the world. These players nevertheless consider themselves to be ‘playing D&D’. Are they right?
Vi describes her own earliest experiences in roleplaying. She talks about passionately getting into D&D, cooking up spell cards and magic words for her players, evolving from The Lost Mines of Phandelver to original material and having a great time. Then, she picked up online discourse that D&D is only good for combat, and changed her game accordingly…
Having read a lot more tabletop RPGs by this point, and maybe with a growing resentment for 5th Edition, I started to view my home game through this lens…and it got worse. They basically became a string of big-game hunts. Combat was balanced, the setting was flat, my NPCs were signposts for the next combat encounter, and my players could feel the difference.
So, she started to wonder whether the system was essentially holding her back, and the best way to go would be to eliminate formal rules beyond perhaps a minimum resolution mechanic.
Adira’s expansive definition of a game
This segues into a conversation with game designer Adira Slattery, whose games you can find here.
Adira says some really interesting and seemingly contradictory things. First, on the subject of people using D&D for other purposes, she remarks:
Adira: The reasons when those sorts of things become sub-optimal is when the people who use D&D to do something else are cowards about it. If you’re gonna take D&D to do something else and you’re gonna just play a politics game or romance or courtly intrigue or whatnot, you should be just entirely excising a big chunk of mechanics, right? If those people just like…went and did a little bit of design, they’d have a much better time. And if they go, “Well I also homebrew D&D.” I go, “Ah! That’s a different game now, congratulations. You made your own game, I’m very proud of you.”
Vi questions whether that means a game is its rules; that changing the rules makes it a different game. To this, Adira answers:
Adira: When I think about game systems, I don’t think about just the text of the book itself? Um, sitting down to play D&D is a holistic activity.
Vi: Okay.
Adira: Like, the…the whole like, “World’s Greatest Role-Playing Game” marketing shit is part of the system of D&D.
Vi: Woah that’s way broader a definition than I was using…through that lens, what other parts of a game are its ‘system?’
Adira: Um…the art. The layout. Every single word. The weight of the book, the size of the book, where you bought the book, how you store the book…how you interact with it.
(anecdote elided…)
Adira: …reading a game on your phone vs. reading it on a laptop. Not reading the game at all and just going off of the culture of play.
Adira gives an anecdote about how she was invited to run a game of D&D 5e for novice players, and did so for a few sessions, without ever once reading the rules.
From this we cut away from the interview with Adira, and Vi examines one of her ‘lyric games’, Feedback, which involves drawing lots of chairs and filling out forms about the experience under a decreasing time limit. She discusses the different experiences she had reading the rules and imagining how the game would work, vs. actually playing the game on camera. Since many ‘lyric games’ are intended to be read and not necessarily played, both are responses that Adira sought to evoke as a designer.
But what of the question that Adira raised, about changing a game?
A group who ‘plays D&D’ but doesn’t use most of the mechanics in the book is still potentially using many of the other parts of D&D that Adira describes. They are almost certainly taking inspiration from the broader play culture at the very least. So, they might be said to be playing a version of D&D, or some other game derived from the idea of D&D, and maybe it doesn’t really matter that much where we draw the line in such a nebulous situation. (To be real, I’m not quite sure where the ‘that’s a different game now’ line lies for Adira, or if she reconsidered that in the process of the interview with Vi? Possibly I’m misunderstanding something.)
where does horror come from in Dread?
From here, Vi goes on to consider Dread, which apparently came widely recommended as a good horror game (widely recommended, that is, after Vi made a kind of trolling tweet that said there’s no such thing as a good horror system.)
I wasn’t familiar with Dread before, but basically the core idea is that the resolution system is a Jenga tower (it’s the game that introduced Jenga towers as an RPG mechanic, in fact.) Instead of rolling dice, to succeed at something hard, you move a block to the top of the tower. If the tower falls, your character dies, or something similarly ‘bad news’. The game’s other mechanical innovation was a scenario-specific ‘questionnaire’ system for indirect character creation.
Vi meticulously reviews the book, explaining and acknowledging the novelty of these mechanical features, but also criticising the book on things like layout and repetitiveness, and the poor design of the sample adventures. Along the way, she makes some observation about the game’s play culture, seen in e.g. ‘actual play’ videos:
Vi: There is also some good advice in here that has been enshrined in the play culture. My favorite is it says you should NOT jumpscare your players while they’re pulling a brick, but that you CAN monologue about the danger they’re in while they’re deciding whether or not they should pull the brick, abandon the pull or…knock the tower down voluntarily.
Her contention, though, is that the precise formal structure of the rules is not what leads you to have a scary time playing a Dread game. The Jenga tower is not scary of itself, but the tension of fiddling with the tower can be connected to the tension of the story. This still hinges on the story itself being scary:
Vi: The Tower isn’t scary, but it IS memorable and really catchy. So catchy in fact that I’m pretty sure it’s eclipsed all of the book’s problems. In my estimation, it exists to correlate the heightened emotions of playing Jenga with the heightened emotions of good storytelling. It says, “Ah! You know that apprehension you feel about approaching the tower because it looks like it’s about to fall over? That’s what the story’s doing right now, too! That’s the story!” Which is…I’m not gonna say ‘only effective’ but maybe ‘especially effective’ if the story is in fact good. So it’s not impossible to ‘be scared while playing Dread,’ (…) but the rules aren’t ‘inherently scary’ as much as they are a guideline for how scary you should make the story at any given moment.
Along the way, she quotes a tweet where someone speaks of playing a version of Dread where the only idea someone has of the rules is ‘you use a Jenga tower’.
rules & replacements
Vi then launches into her big bugbear, the Forge-ite focus on rules. She talks about the numerous hacks of the minimal one-page RPG Tunnel Goons, and then about how players of one such hack, Dish Pit Witches—a game where magic is only metaphorical—in turn used that to create a game where they blackmailed a dragon. She says not only did the game not lead them to that, but also…
Vi: What’s cool is: the players found that story themselves without any help from the rules, and, AND THIS IS IMPORTANT, if there was a game that did that, they obviously don’t need it, because they’re skilled enough to have done it themselves. And that’s a success, in my book! So why is it so important that the system supports your fun? Why don’t we celebrate players succeeding without the help of a rulebook?
From there she launches into the question of people using 5e for stuff it’s really not designed for, like trying to play in the SCP Foundation setting. She says leading with ‘D&D can’t do that’ is a hard sell:
If you insist that systems tell stories, and then tell the person that the system they’re playing doesn’t tell the story they want, it opens up room to recommend an indie game. The only problem is it’s not true, and some 5e fans know that because they’ve likely felt all kinds of emotions and told all kinds of stories in D&D, so it ends up sounding like you’re asking them to trade in a game that does everything for a game that does 1 thing.
After some back-and-forth jokes with one of her friends who’s an SCP writer, the reason it’s not a good tool for the job, Vi and her friend seem to agree, is less that the rules cannot be used for SCP stories, and more that everything else in D&D, like the history it carries and the setting elements, are a lot of work to remove that wouldn’t be necessary with another starting point. These players might indeed be better served using a system like Mothership. Vi’s problem seems to be not that people are recommending using another game over D&D, but that their reason for doing so is based on formal analysis of the rule system?
it’s not about the great D&D vs. indie war
One stumbling block that seems to keep coming up around Vi’s videos is this: Vi criticises some of the discourses of story game fans (she’s evidently got a real chip on her shoulder about the Forge in particular), and says that some of the denigrated practices of D&D players may not be entirely worthless in fact. This is taken to mean: Vi thinks that indie games suck and you should just stay with D&D. Fans of story games, particularly those who are game designers, respond with hostility to someone trying to take their lunch.
At this point, as the person going ‘hey watch these videos it is interesting’ with RPG designer friends, I sometimes end up the strange position of trying to explain that Vi is not trying to promote D&D, but a third thing, that she values is frequently collateral damage in the anti-D&D fusillades and that’s what she’s trying to defend.
And indeed, Vi puts her shots at D&D at the end of the video. She pulls in an essay from Marcia B which is… kind of a lot, it’s the fourth part in a kind of psychoanalytic analysis of the whole history of the hobby and frankly far too much to go into at this point (not least because, bless her heart but my eyes kinda glaze over when Marcia breaks out the Lacanian formulae with the arrows). But in any case: through their ploy to capture the rest of the scene using the tool of the Open Gaming License and ‘D&D can be anything’ framing, Vi accuses WotC of this…
For their consumers, Hasbro Incorporated has co-opted the ritual of play to associate the act of communal storytelling itself with the D&D brand. When you’re telling stories with your friends? Even if it’s in your own world, even if it’s with homebrew rules?? Even if you don’t touch the dice??? That’s hashtag D&D, babyyyy!
It is this ‘ritual of communal storytelling’ which matters to Vi, and the stance she is objecting to is that this can be attributed to the rules, whether they be D&D or indie story games. Vi presents this as a skill instead.
[It doesn’t matter what constitutes interacting with the ‘whole game’] not only because a game is a holistic experience (that’s impossible to play perfectly or wholly), but because in the end, the emotions you felt and the fun you had probably had far less to do with the rules than you might think.
And that goes for you D&D folks too! Wizards of the Coast has a vested interest in making you think systems aren’t easy to learn and your skills aren’t transferable, but they really really are! On both accounts!
Telling meaningful or impactful stories together, with people you trust, is a skill and no ‘book’ can do it for you or let you skip the learning process or prevent failure. And that’s okay! It’s okay to fail, it’s okay to be a beginner! Being a beginner in tabletop games is awesome!
I’ve spent a lot of words—maybe too many words—drawing out the beats of Vi’s Youtube essay. But I wanna be clear: she’s driving at something fairly specific and inside-baseball here, not just lobbing grenades over the parapet from D&D land and those mean indie gamers. Everyone in this conversation plays, makes, buys, and indeed sells indie RPG books.
is this all a matter of two different play cultures?
While trying to find out if Vi had a Bluesky or Tumblr I could poke to be like ‘hey I’m writing about your videos’ (because I’m vain lmao), I stumbled on a post someone called Aeon, who found a really funny way to sum up the thing in contention:
proposing “rhizomatic games” as a way to refer to the RPG style commonly known as “trad” while being maximally annoying
the other type can be “formalist games”, I guess, if you’re into that kind of thing
Asked to elaborate, Aeon continues:
basically: I’m thinking here about two contrasting cultures of play in TRPGs, specifically with respect to the relationships between the players, the rules text, the act of play at the table, and the wider community
one culture, which is strongly connected to but not completely synonymous with “trad”-style play, emphasises a kind of informal “rules-last” approach, where “how to play an RPG” is a skill that transcends any particular game, learned over time through a kind of apprenticeship or inculturation
(…) in this case what I’m focusing on is the idea that at a “trad” table, the culture of play has no single authoritative point of origin. the GM is usually the final source of truth for the storyworld within the context of a specific campaign, and the mechanics used in that campaign, BUT: in a “trad” game the GM cannot definitively tell you that you are Playing Wrong, any more than you can tell the GM that they are Playing Wrong. what constitutes “correct” or “incorrect” play is determined by interpretation, discussion and negotiation
anyway obviously this is contrasted with what I’m calling a formalist approach, most closely associated with the “storygame” community, that strongly values rules-as-written, disdains ambiguity and houserules, and treats the designer as the final authority regarding the interpretation and use of the game text
Aeon observes an overlap of ‘trad’ and OSR norms here. But basically: this is not so much a matter of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way to think of RPGs, but two different ways to approach the hobby.
And oh, goody gumdrops, Aeon gives me another dusty blogpost to cite! Brendan of Necropraxis, an origin point of the ‘proceduralism’ design movement, wrote here on how different strains of the hobby might prioritise either text or cultural norms for defining and transmitting games.
On the one hand, the Forgies:
The games developed by designers from the Forge and the subsequent Story Games forum tend to have clear, explicit procedures and written creative agendas. Critique often focused on potential disconnect between what a game text promises, either explicitly or implicitly, and what the game delivers.
Besides the Forgites (Forgists, Forgistas, Forgians..?), Brendan also associates the D&D/Pathfinder character-optimisation and game balance school (who seem to have inherited all that from D&D 3E) with the ‘textual fundamentalism’ side of the fence, even though that is definitely ‘trad’.
On the other hand, certain flavours of trad, and the OSR norm:
In this approach, no single text contains the full game and various aspects may lack textual basis completely. This is not just house rules, where players modify a canonical text to suit local group preferences, though house ruling is a part of how rules evolve culturally. Instead, the full game is more like a cultural tradition rather than a solid, defined, bounded artifact.
Brendan argues for a ‘both sides’ view: he puts in a lot of work to formalise stuff and ‘proceduralise’ his rules to make them easy to apply at the table. But…
insisting that individual texts be highly pedagogical and entirely self-contained both creates strangely unmoored documents, seemingly unaware of their likely audience, and ignores the massive, brilliant social fabric to which we all belong.
That ‘brilliant social fabric’ is of course what supplies the ‘invisible rulebooks’ favoured by S. John Ross.
the leaky wall between these two tribes
OK, so trad and OSR players do it like this, and story gamers do it like that. So you just gotta pick which side best fits your temperament?
Except… you could say Apocalypse World happens to contain a fantastic GMing guide, an encoding of Vincent and Meguey’s long experience. There’s all sorts of clever little tricks in there (e.g. the ritual of giving the player the mic on something about the setting with a leading question like ‘what horrible monster have you been hunting for the last fortnight’). And it’s also got a lot of great suggestions for keeping the game moving and spicy and introducing troubling complications. I can pretty confidently say I got ‘better’ at trad games from spending time with games like Apocalypse World—which is not to say that every game should be run in that style, but learning it gives me a more flexible toolkit.
Conversely… it’s because I have experience with culture at large and roleplaying games in particular that I can pick up a new game quickly and feel confident improvising when the moment arrives. Admittedly, that may sometimes lead me to miss what ‘non-default’ approach a designer was trying to get me to try—I realised later that in my games of Apocalypse World I didn’t particularly use the MC moves, I just did it off the cuff because well, I already know how to GM right? But nobody is ever really approaching a story game in isolation, without any ‘invisible rulebooks’ to scaffold them.
Vi is right: the unexpected, moving stories of roleplaying games come from the players and their storytelling skills and the infinite web of inspiration they bring with them, it can’t be reduced to an emergent feature of a system’s cogwheels. My favourite moment with Apocalypse World, which I mentioned last time, was a sorta bullshit metafictional move inspired by the text of the system but certainly not generated by the system.
I spent years identifying with the storygames ‘tribe’, attributing the design for the good times I had with storygames. Really, I think what I liked was simply that it was a play culture oriented towards improvisation. And now, I suppose I am a convert to something else again…
maybe Huizinga knew all along
I’ve spent a lot of this series talking about Bernard Suits. Huizinga and his magic circle have been mentioned in passing—I mean of course you know about the magic circle, right? As an avid reader of all my writing on the internet, you of course remember that I summarised it in my liveblog of Umineko episode 4, chapter 18. Whyever should I repeat myself? :p
But really, when it comes to roleplaying games, surely the theories of Huizinga and Caillois are much more relevant than old Bernard? After all, we had to do a lot of work to figure out whether Suits can even be partly applied to RPGs. Meanwhile, if you swing by the internet archive you can take on Huizinga’s winding description of play, as translated by someone who strangely remains anonymous…
Play, says Huizinga, is an irreducible thing that we can describe as voluntary, free/superfluous, and standing in an interlude outside of ‘ordinary’ life. But even after it is over, it can be repeated, and become a tradition. Paradoxically, it is the ‘opposite of seriousness’, but it can nevertheless be taken very seriously. On page 10, Huizinga identifies that play has a spatial limit, identifying his famous ‘magic circle’ as one of a list of such spaces. Within that ‘play-ground’, it creates its own special order. And it’s kinda like art, man:
The profound affinity between play and order is perhaps the reason why play, as we noted in passing, seems to lie to such a large extent in the field of aesthetics. Play has a tendency to be beautiful. It may be that this aesthetic factor is identical with the impulse to create orderly form, which animates play in all its aspects. The words we use to denote the elements of play belong for the most part to aesthetics, terms with which we try to describe the effects of beauty: tension, poise, balance, contrast, variation, solution, resolution, etc. Play casts a spell over us: it is “enchanting”, “captivating”. It is invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony.
Later, Huizinga will elaborate on claims that poetry, music and other forms of art are founded in playful contest.
It also has rules. “Indeed,” says Huizinga, “as soon as the rules are transgressed the whole play-world collapses. The game is over.” A spoilsport does not acknowledge the rules, and they are treated with appropriate severity. Here’s another fun passage:
In the world of high seriousness, too, the cheat and the hypocrite have always had an easier time of it than the spoil-sports, here called apostates, heretics, innovators, prophets, conscientious objectors, etc.
But they might go and make their own niche community with its own rules, as outlaws, revolutionaries, ‘cabbalists’ and members of secret societies do. And indeed, play-communities have sticking power for the people inducted into play’s secret world. In that secret world, you can become another being, perhaps especially when the game invites you to dress up.
Well, sure sounds like he could be talking about an RPG, doesn’t it? Indeed, Liber Ludorum is way ahead of me here.
Huizinga and Caillois on mimicry
Huizinga identifies two aspects of play: ‘a contest for something’ and ‘a representation of something’ (which can unite: a game ‘represents’ a contest, or becomes a contest for best representation). It is this representational aspect, elsewhere called ‘mimesis’, which is the part of Huizinga’s account largely missing from Suits.
Huizinga’s account wants to show that ‘play’ is foundational to civilisation (good, for Huizinga), the primary pole in a dyad with culture, and much of his book is spent dealing with early-20th Century anthropology and history, aiming to show how various aspects of society (such as law, war, knowledge and poetry) overlapped with and emerged from rituals and contests in different parts of the world. A fun theory but rather out of scope for an article about RPGs.
In the 60s, Roger Caillois would pick up Huizinga’s theories and spin it into his own book Les jeux et les hommes (or Man, Play and Games in English, which can’t do the same French pun) with slightly different emphasis. He expands on Huizinga, arguing that Huizinga’s binary scheme isn’t quite it, and questions aspects of Huizinga’s account like the emphasis on secrecy. Caillois instead develops a four-part categorisation scheme, with each type of play named in Greek: agôn (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation) and ilinx (vertigo and physical sensations).
Caillois agrees with Huizinga that that play must be voluntary, and emphasises that it creates no wealth or goods, unlike work or art (put a pin in this!). It is ‘pure waste’, so for Caillois, professional athletes are not playing but working. (Gamblers, on the other hand, are not producing anything, so they’re playing.)
The meaning of play, for Caillois, is intrinsic. Play of a game proceeds on rules that are inarguable because they are fundamentally arbitrary, but this can be replaced with ‘free improvisation’ in playing make-believe:
Despite the assertion’s paradoxical character, I will state that in this instance the fiction, the sentiment of as if replaces and performs the same function as do rules.
In games with rules, the rules themselves create a fiction of such a thing as this game existing, so ‘as if’ is not necessary. So there is a binary:
Thus games are not ruled and make-believe. Rather, they are ruled or make-believe.
Later, Caillois gives these catchy Greek names too: paidia for make-believe and ludus for games with rules. This is a fascinating sentiment given I’ve been probing the tension between ‘ruled’ and ‘make-believe’ for this entire series!
For more detail on Caillois’s framework, Liber Ludorum has provided a nice breakdown.
revenge of the magic circle
According to Eric Zimmerman, the ‘magic circle’ of Huizinga wasn’t a popular part of the theory of games until he and Katie Salen wrote Rules of Play in the 2000s, composing a new version of the magic circle out of Huizinga and Caillois, along with Zimmerman’s work with Frank Lanz.
Since then, he laments that it became fashionable in game studies to try to undermine a caricature of the ‘magic circle’ which acts as if meaning emerges entirely from the game rules without attention to the wider picture. His book, he retorts with evident frustration, is just one that emphasises the aspects of games that are relevant to designers, and doesn’t try to be a whole theory of games… and these critics ignore the large parts of Rules of Play that focus on those kinds of broader cultural questions, as part of its relativist, multi-schema approach.
Maybe this should invite some caution when thinking about Vi’s critique of the Forge. Obviously the Forge people would focus on questions of the design of rules and game texts—they’re game designers, that’s what they make. Perhaps it’s less that they intend to minimise the other parts of games, they’re just trying to put them aside to focus on what they can tinker with?
However, RPGs are a weird type of game. Game designers have considerably less control over what comes into existence in the air above a game table in RPG-land than in almost any other type of game. In RPG-land, all a game designer can really offer is instructions, which are really more like suggestions because so much must be elaborated by the players.
Because players are eagerly inventing their own autonomous procedures, each RPG truly does enforce its own ‘magic circle’. It can be hard to step into a long-running RPG because it is so heavily shaped by the context created by its players. Even over the few hours of a convention game, the elements introduced at the outset develop and evolve in ways that are hard to explain to anyone outside the game. (Back in the day, ‘RPG stories are really boring’ was a common complaint. I think nowadays, people have gotten better at establishing the shared context that can make game experiences legible? But maybe that’s wishful thinking…)
is the playing of RPGs an ‘art’? maybe even ‘folk art’?
Towards the end of her Root video, Vi introduces a term ‘folk art’ for what she considers RPGs to be:
For me, tabletop roleplaying occupies the same place as this painting [of one of Vi’s characters, by a friend]—tabletop roleplaying is folk art! Now, I’m—very importantly, I’m not talking about tabletop roleplaying game books, I’m not talking about this [Root: The RPG]. But the stories we create around the table with each other? THAT’s folk art. That’s you! That’s art that you made! I LOVE making art like that. But now, some corporation, based on some bullshit forum theory from the early 2000’s, is trying to alienate me from my own storytelling by mind controlling me into mass producing one of the only things I’ve got left in this capitalist hellscape. Fuck you. And fuck the effect it’s having on this supposedly literary medium.
Folk art (referring to physical objects) and folk arts (which can include stuff like performances) are terms in with varying meanings. There is apparently a different European and American sense. There’s another term, naïve art, which is related. It might only refer to things that are also utilitarian. Whatever it is, it’s not fine art. Oh, we can throw in more categories: fine art is not popular, decorative or applied art, so I guess folk art could be any of those? Yeah, nobody’s going to be using all this consistently.
Anyway, folk art. Vi’s not the first person to call RPGs this thing, whatever it is. Līber Lūdōrum’s great big list includes a whole section on RPGs as art, but sadly a number are deadlinks. Walt even has his own contribution to the subject, which I’ll get into in a moment, but let’s stick with the ‘folk art’ line for now.
So, we have Luka Rejec, who writes in 2023 that RPGs are folk art. Luka says RPGs are an artform as well as a game. Some quotes:
The published books, codified rules, and accumulated procedures— the material strictures of play—create a framework that encourages an inventive, collaborative art form. Some uncanny cross between improv theater, campfire ghost stories, literary jazz, and—in its heroic tropes—epic poetry and fairy tales.
To be less obtuse, “It can be both a game and an art form. Those aren’t exclusive.”
While some live-play shows have become popular (popular performance), the heart of the roleplay experience remains explicitly private and domestic, created by amateurs at kitchen tables over frozen pizzas and greasy sheets of paper.
‘Folk’ for Luka means unprofessional, ‘by folks for folks’ rather than ‘professional products for sale or status’. I feel like the notion of ‘folk’ is a troublesome one, and status has been a big part of RPG culture since the days of Gygax, but still.
Luka compares the role of the game designer to a playwright, and the role of the DM and players to a director and actors. In linking Luka’s piece, Walt questions this comparison, but he says it makes a good contrast to other theorists.
I mentioned earlier that Caillois insists that games are unproductive, in comparison to art. But here we’re saying that the playing of games is art, and also that it produces stories (perhaps by retroactive interpretation).
Well, ‘art’ has to be one of the most ill-defined and overloaded words in the English language. Perhaps we should put it aside. But before we do, we should consider Walt’s own position…
Līber Lūdōrum: RPGs are more than art
In this article, summarising a more academic piece he wrote, Walton Wood criticises another scholar who identifies the materials of RPGs—rulebooks, etc.—as carrying “games’ artistic merit”.
These materials can definitely be art. As you may expect, I cite Mörk Borg as an example. Pelle’s concepts and prose and Johan’s illustrations, layouts, and graphic design are all smart and creative, and their collective merits unpretentiously qualify as artistic.
But none of these things constitute the game itself. The game exists in being played, and this naturally leads to the question: is play an artform?
However, I think this is a false question because it inverts the cultural precedence. Play isn’t a form of art; art is a form of play. Play is pre-cultural, and the play impulse undergirds and conditions culture’s emergence and development. Art—paintings, poetry, music, films, sculptures, and every other form—are all products of artists’ creative play within their chosen media.
Unlike ‘traditionally recognised artforms’, says Walt, the ‘ergodic’ form of RPGs is actually more sophisticated: rather than one-way communication of artist to audience,
RPGs draw multiple lines of simultaneous interaction amongst multiple parties in a dynamic network, and they facilitate flexible, heuristic (rather than rote memory-based) knowledge.
Walt argues at length that by trying to pull RPGs into the frame of art in the hopes of granting them cultural legitimacy, we bring a bunch of preconceived notions which limit the analysis of RPGs. Ha, imagine doing that… that’d be like bringing a bunch of game design theory built around sports, board games, computer games and the like, and trying to apply it to RPGs… haha… ha…
He pulls in Huizinga and Caillois, on the broader subject of play, and another guy called Richard D. Duke who thinks that games are a ‘multilogue’ form of media that do things which ‘sequential communication’ cannot.
Walt wants us to do a kind of Kuhn/Feyerabend move, and break out of the assumptions of our interpretive community. Unfortunately, there’s a fundamental problem when it comes to analysing play, rather than the physical artefacts. The actual play of RPGs is very hard to study because of observer effects: if you have someone watching the session, you play differently. Walton’s proposed solution to this is pretty wild: we should make an RPG about analysing RPGs. He doesn’t feel he’s up to the task, however!
This idea is insane enough that I want to try it at some point.
what does this all mean for game designers?
What a rabbit hole we’ve been down.
Throughout all of this, a recurring theme has been that the make-believe play element of RPGs, the shared fiction, the imagined space, the cloudy thing in Vincent’s diagrams, the tactical infinity and invisible rulebooks, which makes them special. This mutable thing is something which is inherently hard to address with theories, though, because as soon as you pin it down into something concrete, like a rule, it loses some of its potential. It cannot be scripted, it is something the players themselves must conjure into existence.
This is not just saying ‘freeform is the right way to do it’ or ‘just do whatever, man’. There are always at least unwritten rules in play. Play cultures will develop standard ways of doing things. Sandra Snan put it nicely with her concept of ‘bones of steel in a cloud of description’; Katie and Eric’s definition of ‘play’ has two parts: free movement and a rigid structure. In the spirit of Bernard Suits and the lusory attitude, putting restrictions on what we can narrate is a scaffolding to build something interesting.
For designers (whether they be the book-publishing kind or simply players fiddling with their own activity), spotting the implicit assumptions of a play culture and mixing them up can be a great source of new potential. In doing so, we may need to draw things out of the invisible rulebooks and write them down.
But we must take care not to feel obliged to pin everything down. Ultimately, it is our smart, skilled, imaginative players who we hope will take our suggestions and make a game out of them. We are co-conspirators, not teachers, let alone playwrights.
So, what does it look like to design with that in mind? Constantly gesturing to ‘you can change this if you want to’ is not it. We can trust our players to do that if they want to. Absolute minimalism is also not it, although it can be one worthwhile approach.
RPG systems as creative tools
If RPG play is akin to art—or something more than art, like Walt says—then we game designers are basically in a similar position as software developers making tools for creating art. A great tool opens up a new way of thinking and brings a whole lot of expressive possibility into play.
This is where I take my philosopher hat off and put my programmer hat on. Wait, isn’t this just the same hat, rotated? Shh…
For example, art tools include 3D modelling programs such as Blender, or programming languages. Let’s focus on Blender. The amount of things you can do with Blender is bewildering, and it is also a constantly evolving thing as people come up with new techniques, and developers add new features and refine existing ones.
A program like Blender attempts to give you lots of pieces and reasonable ways to combine them, with the emergent potential of the pieces in combination intended to be as wide as possible. But it also tries to give efficient affordances for common operations—hotkeys, widgets, etc.—to reduce the friction of ‘fiddling with the tool’ as much as possible, and make it easy to translate intent into the representations of the program. (Many Blender uses still feel there is too much friction, of course.)
In some ways, Blender is much more akin to a closed game than the infinite openness of an RPG. Anything you wish to do in Blender must be translated into its formal system. There are literally only so many buttons you can press, even if Blender has far more buttons to press than most software… On the other hand, the expressive combination of those pieces is effectively infinite, because you can make a model of anything you can think of.
Blender has multiple ways of creating a 3D mesh. You can go into Edit Mode, create a geometric primitive, and move individual vertices around with the transform tools, add new edge loops, reflow with the knife tool and so on. You can add non-destructive modifiers. You can go into Sculpt Mode, and push the vertices around like a plastic sheet or lump of clay, perhaps adding new ‘material’ using Dynamic Topology. Or, you can essentially program a mesh into existence using the mathematical operations of Geometry Nodes. Since all of these come back to the same representation of ‘mesh vertices’, you can, and frequently will, do all of them in succession.
Each of these affordances gives different ways of manipulating the underlying representation—different ways of thinking about it. Some operations will be much easier with some tools than others; each choice of tool gives both ‘agencies’ and restrictions. Using each tool will lead you to explore different paths.
The same is true for different activities in RPGs. Freeform narration, back-and-forth hashing out of the situation with other players, fiddling with ‘tokens’-level representations such as hitpoints or Jenga towers—all manipulate the game state/narrative in some way.
So, what tools can we offer to assist players in creating their narratives? What affordances? In my book, that’s what a designer’s job is to provide! Even if it’s just leading them to an interesting page of the ‘invisible rulebook’.
I don’t just mean proceduralist tools like ‘here is how to do a hexcrawl’. A compelling description of a place or an NPC can help get the ideas flowing. This is I think what Vi has in mind when she talks about preferring adventures.
Software is in various ways modular, interfacing through files, APIs and so on. I can render a picture in Blender, then pop it into Krita to do a paintover, or export a model for use in a game. The film industry uses lots of different specialist software that speaks common formats: ZBrush for sculpting, Houdini for effects, Maya for animation, Blender for 2D-in-3D animation. Individual programs are also frequently modular, providing an interface to attach ‘plugins’ or ‘add-ons’.
Roleplaying games can be even more modular. To make two programs work together nicely, you have to make sure they are speaking a common format exactly. For RPGs, the common interface between everything is on the level of the shared fiction, which isn’t nearly so exact. An adventure which only addresses ‘in-fiction’ facts is extremely portable. The same is true for a ‘proceduralist’ mechanic that is relatively agnostic to other game systems. A rulebook which makes references to specific ‘game mechanic level’ stuff, like OSR stats or D&D feats, is much more locked-in. Both approaches can have their merits, but I prefer the portable side of things.
Next time… your guess is as good as mine! This might be a good place to end the series and move onto actually doing some game design. We shall see…
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