Loved Ones, Loved Ones, Visit the Building
I appreciate the sympathy expressed in comments to the previous post, and while it was cathartic to get the experience off my chest, it was mainly a way of considering some of eyebeams arguments about friendship, meetup games and Forge/Story-Game design principles in his long post on the subject and comment-thread thereunder. I agree with him that gaming with friends over time offers a better chance of better gaming than gaming with strangers once or occasionally. For me, meetups and minicons are an opportunity to try different games and meet new people. I can't speak to why every other person attends them. But I find Malcolm's concluding statement, "Tabletop play is about intimate experiences. It thrives on compassion. It needs friendship, or good faith in friendship to come." to be moving and true. And a particular kind of classically "indie" game leaves me cold. These are the "fight for the conch" games ranging from Capes to Prime Time Adventures to Dust Devils. They just don't float my boat.
That said, I get the feeling that Malcolm has taken a genuine social concern - the decline of friendship in North America - and a genuine cluster of personal and esthetic dislikes - Forge-diaspora games and discourse - and yoked them together because, by god, he thinks they both suck so of course they're related.
My problems with this include:
* Forge-y games I do like and have played include several that practically require friendship among the participants to reach their enjoyment potential.
IAWA, a game Malcolm slags as seeming "to strongly correlate with not being able to hack being decent to each other in other contexts": First, the text presupposes "You and three or four of your smartest, boldest, most creative, and hottest friends" will be playing. Later, "I’m certain that if any two of your friends come to a dispute [about who gets to play which available character] you’ll be able to help them resolve it." When a session concludes, "Wish your friends a dear good night; the chapter’s done."
As mentioned in a previous post, the actual history of IAWA is that it was designed by Vincent Baker while playing it with his wife and their friends in Western Mass. I haven't met the Bakers, but I'm not prepared to say that they can't hack being decent to each other, or to the people they share their lives with.
From playing the game, let me say: I've played the game at a meetup and I've played the game with friends. It pretty much requires play among friends to catch fire.
Polaris: practically requires friendships to play at all, let alone well. For one thing, most dudes are not going to sit around lighting candles and intoning ritual phrases while pretending to be ice elves overdosed on Bowie's Low, unless they trust the other three dudes doing it implicitly. For another, unless people like and trust each other, the key-phrase system is actually a really good way to tick someone off. For a third, Polaris is actually a game where everyone doesn't just have custody of a character; they each have custody of another player, too. You can only have fun playing Polaris if the Mistakens are intensely interested in what the person sitting across from them will find fulfilling. And the whole table comes alive only when everyone is alert to picking up threads from the stories of the players sitting next to them too.
Of course, that's just me, and my perspective is limited by my own play experience. The author, on the other hand, writes
"Polaris is intended to be played with four people, all of whom are friends, whenever they have two or three hours of leisure time that they wish to devote to the game." - p. 34 of the pdf.
Oh! Maybe it's not just me. Of course, later he qualifies that emphasis on friendship by adding that
The most important thing about the game is to remember that you are playing with your friends and trying to make a good story. Working well together requires trust. Don’t abuse the trust of your friends. Despite the fact that the story is a tragedy, make sure that your cruelty and conflict is directed towards the characters inside your game and not the players outside of it.
If, at any time, a player is not having fun, he should say so at the earliest opportunity. Take time to discuss and resolve his difficulties. If you cannot resolve them, set the game aside and play another time. - p. 36
Well, shit. But how important is this supposed "friendship" to the author's vision of play? After all, page 55 says
Just as any other time when a group of friends gathers together, you will want to do other things than just play a game - eat a meal, catch up on each other’s lives, talk about the events of the day, chat about creative projects, put the kids to bed, schedule other social events, etc. But, at some point in the evening, you will want to start playing the game and shift the focus toward that activity.
Jeebus. This dude basically won't shut up about the friendship thing, later (p. 92) going so far as to write, "If you can’t get a constant group of friends to meet to play your game, even irregularly scheduled, Polaris is probably not the game for you."
Dogs - DITV merely tells us, on page 6, that "you and your friends" will be playing this game, and, in the passage on page 10 that people either love or hate
You’ll get to see sides of your friends you haven’t before. It’s wicked cool.
I don't have a lot of other Forge-y games on PDF, and I'm not going to exhaustively flip through what print copies I have. But some others I know will do much better with friends than people you don't care about at all: Misspent Youth is one. And the mid-decade discourse in Forge/SG circles about "hooking the players" requires knowing and having enough interest in the players' lives to even be an intelligible principle.
* Malcolm's argument about how "indie" game design and meetup culture are joined at the hip seems internally inconsistent. He writes that these games are built for the "cool, cautious relationships" of the zipless-gaming encounter, but also declares, that "in my experience, the 'indie' table is one of the unhappiest at the con." In my experience, the "indie table" is sometimes very happy and sometimes very unhappy. But to the extent Malcolm's observation holds true, it would make perfect sense if, in fact, these games were really designed for play by people with "selfless, trusting informal relationships" - which, as Malcolm points out, do not obtain at many con tables.
* I'm a little uncertain of just how far Malcolm wants his "love will keep us together" argument to go. A variant of it could argue against any rules, since by his principles real friends should even be able to overcome the "cops & robbers problem" with sufficient applications of trust, loyalty and good will. The strong version of his argument makes an excellent case for freeform gaming, but clearly Malcolm finds games with actual rules valuable, since he keeps publishing them.
Me, I think one thing rules are good for among friends is simply to foster an experience that they wouldn't otherwise have together - to condition play in a way that everyone will enjoy and which, in the absence of that set of rules, simply wouldn't have that texture, pace and tone.
Another thing rules can be good for is cushioning us against our worst impulses. Malcolm overreads my previous discussion of the social value of improv rules in his discussion of my "little bitches" quip. I also expect and prize "friendship, or good faith in friendship to come" in gaming and improv. I also expect people to be flawed, including me. After all, even among friends, we have etiquette. We may be friends, but I don't help myself to what's in your refrigerator unless you tell me to. I don't stop talking to you to make long-distance calls from your phone. I don't even talk with my mouth full in front of you if I can help it. As I said in the previous post, much of our literature and drama is about people who care a great deal for each other and still fuck each other up. Because that stuff happens.
There are all kinds of reasons why so-called "indie games" are not the last word in roleplaying, but "designed for the post-friendship era" isn't one of them. In fact, the coherent account of why "the 'indie' table [would be] one of the unhappiest at the con" might go the other way: These games require the very qualities found in games among friends that Malcolm prizes. BUT, this is an era in which real friendships are harder than ever to find, AND, this is a hobby that comprises, as I read one store owner putting it the other day, "Dungeons and Dragons, plus a bunch of art projects" in terms of audience share. SO, the people drawn to Forge-y designs cast their nets well beyond their immediate social circle to catch other players. BECAUSE OF THAT, they end up with unhappy experiences, because all gaming, and especially this gaming, requires "friendship, or good faith in friendship to come."
The above doesn't make Forge-y gaming either the best or the worst thing in the world. But it at least hangs together.
That said, I get the feeling that Malcolm has taken a genuine social concern - the decline of friendship in North America - and a genuine cluster of personal and esthetic dislikes - Forge-diaspora games and discourse - and yoked them together because, by god, he thinks they both suck so of course they're related.
My problems with this include:
* Forge-y games I do like and have played include several that practically require friendship among the participants to reach their enjoyment potential.
IAWA, a game Malcolm slags as seeming "to strongly correlate with not being able to hack being decent to each other in other contexts": First, the text presupposes "You and three or four of your smartest, boldest, most creative, and hottest friends" will be playing. Later, "I’m certain that if any two of your friends come to a dispute [about who gets to play which available character] you’ll be able to help them resolve it." When a session concludes, "Wish your friends a dear good night; the chapter’s done."
As mentioned in a previous post, the actual history of IAWA is that it was designed by Vincent Baker while playing it with his wife and their friends in Western Mass. I haven't met the Bakers, but I'm not prepared to say that they can't hack being decent to each other, or to the people they share their lives with.
From playing the game, let me say: I've played the game at a meetup and I've played the game with friends. It pretty much requires play among friends to catch fire.
Polaris: practically requires friendships to play at all, let alone well. For one thing, most dudes are not going to sit around lighting candles and intoning ritual phrases while pretending to be ice elves overdosed on Bowie's Low, unless they trust the other three dudes doing it implicitly. For another, unless people like and trust each other, the key-phrase system is actually a really good way to tick someone off. For a third, Polaris is actually a game where everyone doesn't just have custody of a character; they each have custody of another player, too. You can only have fun playing Polaris if the Mistakens are intensely interested in what the person sitting across from them will find fulfilling. And the whole table comes alive only when everyone is alert to picking up threads from the stories of the players sitting next to them too.
Of course, that's just me, and my perspective is limited by my own play experience. The author, on the other hand, writes
"Polaris is intended to be played with four people, all of whom are friends, whenever they have two or three hours of leisure time that they wish to devote to the game." - p. 34 of the pdf.
Oh! Maybe it's not just me. Of course, later he qualifies that emphasis on friendship by adding that
The most important thing about the game is to remember that you are playing with your friends and trying to make a good story. Working well together requires trust. Don’t abuse the trust of your friends. Despite the fact that the story is a tragedy, make sure that your cruelty and conflict is directed towards the characters inside your game and not the players outside of it.
If, at any time, a player is not having fun, he should say so at the earliest opportunity. Take time to discuss and resolve his difficulties. If you cannot resolve them, set the game aside and play another time. - p. 36
Well, shit. But how important is this supposed "friendship" to the author's vision of play? After all, page 55 says
Just as any other time when a group of friends gathers together, you will want to do other things than just play a game - eat a meal, catch up on each other’s lives, talk about the events of the day, chat about creative projects, put the kids to bed, schedule other social events, etc. But, at some point in the evening, you will want to start playing the game and shift the focus toward that activity.
Jeebus. This dude basically won't shut up about the friendship thing, later (p. 92) going so far as to write, "If you can’t get a constant group of friends to meet to play your game, even irregularly scheduled, Polaris is probably not the game for you."
Dogs - DITV merely tells us, on page 6, that "you and your friends" will be playing this game, and, in the passage on page 10 that people either love or hate
You’ll get to see sides of your friends you haven’t before. It’s wicked cool.
I don't have a lot of other Forge-y games on PDF, and I'm not going to exhaustively flip through what print copies I have. But some others I know will do much better with friends than people you don't care about at all: Misspent Youth is one. And the mid-decade discourse in Forge/SG circles about "hooking the players" requires knowing and having enough interest in the players' lives to even be an intelligible principle.
* Malcolm's argument about how "indie" game design and meetup culture are joined at the hip seems internally inconsistent. He writes that these games are built for the "cool, cautious relationships" of the zipless-gaming encounter, but also declares, that "in my experience, the 'indie' table is one of the unhappiest at the con." In my experience, the "indie table" is sometimes very happy and sometimes very unhappy. But to the extent Malcolm's observation holds true, it would make perfect sense if, in fact, these games were really designed for play by people with "selfless, trusting informal relationships" - which, as Malcolm points out, do not obtain at many con tables.
* I'm a little uncertain of just how far Malcolm wants his "love will keep us together" argument to go. A variant of it could argue against any rules, since by his principles real friends should even be able to overcome the "cops & robbers problem" with sufficient applications of trust, loyalty and good will. The strong version of his argument makes an excellent case for freeform gaming, but clearly Malcolm finds games with actual rules valuable, since he keeps publishing them.
Me, I think one thing rules are good for among friends is simply to foster an experience that they wouldn't otherwise have together - to condition play in a way that everyone will enjoy and which, in the absence of that set of rules, simply wouldn't have that texture, pace and tone.
Another thing rules can be good for is cushioning us against our worst impulses. Malcolm overreads my previous discussion of the social value of improv rules in his discussion of my "little bitches" quip. I also expect and prize "friendship, or good faith in friendship to come" in gaming and improv. I also expect people to be flawed, including me. After all, even among friends, we have etiquette. We may be friends, but I don't help myself to what's in your refrigerator unless you tell me to. I don't stop talking to you to make long-distance calls from your phone. I don't even talk with my mouth full in front of you if I can help it. As I said in the previous post, much of our literature and drama is about people who care a great deal for each other and still fuck each other up. Because that stuff happens.
There are all kinds of reasons why so-called "indie games" are not the last word in roleplaying, but "designed for the post-friendship era" isn't one of them. In fact, the coherent account of why "the 'indie' table [would be] one of the unhappiest at the con" might go the other way: These games require the very qualities found in games among friends that Malcolm prizes. BUT, this is an era in which real friendships are harder than ever to find, AND, this is a hobby that comprises, as I read one store owner putting it the other day, "Dungeons and Dragons, plus a bunch of art projects" in terms of audience share. SO, the people drawn to Forge-y designs cast their nets well beyond their immediate social circle to catch other players. BECAUSE OF THAT, they end up with unhappy experiences, because all gaming, and especially this gaming, requires "friendship, or good faith in friendship to come."
The above doesn't make Forge-y gaming either the best or the worst thing in the world. But it at least hangs together.