In the light of getting my new price-adjusted iPhone, I have a request for the podcasters out there:

Get some art on your podcasts! My podcast line-up is a long row of black squares because only the Sons of Kryos have got themselves some art. It’s very sad.

Thanks!

At Gamex, I got interviewed for Have Games, Will Travel by the inestimable Paul Tevis. I would say that I sound funny and that I don’t normally sound like that, but I think it’s mostly just how you never sound like you think you do. So apparently I sound like a nebbish. Good thing to know.

Paul and I talk about Full Light, Full Steam, the Sons of Liberty playtest, NerdSoCal.com, and… a whole lot of other stuff.

So the other day I went to France, right, and let me tell you, I couldn’t understand anything that anybody was saying. It was all fromage this and quel horreur that, and no matter how much they said, they just kept saying more, and let me tell you, it made no sense whatsoever. A few times I tried to get them to clarify what they were saying to each other, but they only looked at me funny and kept blathering on using their terrible, opaque words.

So finally, I quite reasonably told them, “Look. I’ve got an idea. How about you stop using all those silly words that you’ve built up over the last few thousand years and use the words that I’m more familiar with? Wouldn’t that be so much better? Then I could understand what you were saying to each other!”

Sadly, they kept speaking French. I wonder why.

Greetings, fellow roleplayers.

Over the last few months, there has been a series of discussions about how “geeky” roleplaying is and how roleplaying is ostracized from the respectable adult world. Folks have been trying to identify what exactly is geeky about sword-and-sorcery or space opera or pulps, what parts can be used in roleplaying, and what parts will drive away “non-gamers” like garlic waved in a vampire’s face. The relative merits of roleplaying’s geeky core have been debated: is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Is it interfering with spreading the Good Word of roleplaying across the globe and making every human being a roleplayer just like us?

Many times over, I’ve debated wading into these discussions, but I have abstained. You all seem to have been having so much fun. The discussions seem to be diverting little bits of self-identity, cotton candy for the geeky soul, as harmless as a cute furry creature. However, the discussions are reproducing like tribbles. If this goes on, we’ll be up to our eyeballs in them, and they’ll suck up all the air. I’d like to talk about something that isn’t how geeky you think our hobby is. Therefore, I’d like to take this opportunity to make the one contribution to these discussions that I’ve long refrained from making.

Roleplayers, please: get over yourselves.

You think roleplaying is considered geeky by outsiders? The adult world does not waste its time contemplating the geekiness of roleplaying. In fact, it does not waste its time contemplating roleplaying at all. The adult world has far more pressing matters to concern itself with, chief among them being who will be voted off of American Idol this week. Why would anyone spend half a moment’s thought on an activity whose existence they’re probably only dimly aware of when they could be figuring out how to afford a giant flatscreen television on which to watch sports, impress their friends, and keep track of their fantasy football team? The outside world does not care how geeky roleplaying is.

The only people who care about the geek-factor of roleplaying are roleplayers. I’m not even sure why. It certainly isn’t a valid concern over the hobby’s image: the hobby doesn’t have an image, any more than quilting has an image. Instead, it really must be something within roleplayers themselves that makes them obsess over their own geekiness. Is it the lingering effects from being snubbed at school for playing D&D? I think it’s about time to get over that. Is it because your parents don’t understand your hobby? Join the club called the Rest of Humanity. Seriously: are you not getting laid enough? Is that the problem? I assure you roleplaying has absolutely nothing to do with you not getting any.

What is all this sound and fury about? Why are we spending this much time talking about our own geekiness? Are any of these discussions improving the quality of your gaming? Designers: has your current game design developed because you discussed how nobody outside of gaming understands pulp? Indulging in a little self-centered identification is nice now and then; making an entire hobby out of it seems a little, well, narcissistic. In fact, for all the talk deploring how unfortunate the geeky label is, discussing that label ad nauseum is one of the best ways to make sure it sticks. Which is, quite frankly, the most probable reason so many folks jump into these discussions: establishing geek cred, and distinguishing oneself from the monsters of the outside world, who are themselves too busy watching Deal or No Deal to notice that you’ve taken your leave.

Me personally, though? Your obsession with your own badge of pride is getting on my nerves. You know what? You’re a member. Congratulations: you’re one of us, and not one of them. Now sit the fuck down so we can actually talk about roleplaying. Let’s talk about the games we played last night, the techniques we discovered, the book we just bought, the system we’re designing, the house rule we’re testing. Let’s talk about what place roleplaying has in our lives, rather than what place our lives have in roleplaying. Just, please: get over yourselves, already. This hobby is much more fun to participate in than to talk about. Go Play.

Doyce played The Princes’ Kingdom with his 6-year-old daughter, and she produced the Cutest Character Sheet Ever.

Awwww.

Short Form:

I make games about people.

People are gendered.

Gender appears in every game I make.

Long Form:

Gender appears in every game I make, either explicitly or implicitly, because there’s no such thing as an ungendered person and good roleplaying games are about people. I always include gender consciously, because I know it’s important — and, quite frankly, because it’s fun and engaging. Additionally, because I live and write in a gendered societal context, I cannot escape including gender unconsciously, too. If I do my job well, the balance falls into the conscious category.

One of the best things that’s happened to gaming recently is the (re)introduction of sex and gender into games, the recognition that it can create compelling stories, and that it’s as much if not more a part of the human experience as gaming’s first love, violence. This really should come as no surprise to us — every player in the world is gendered, after all, which means that gender in games provides something that they can relate to, whether it’s sympathetic (that’s me!), alien (that’s not me), antagonistic (that’s bad), or idealized (that’s good).

Then

Gaming has a history with gender, though. One which has been the topic of much brouhaha, well-meaning diatribes, and vitriolic flame wars. Gaming’s history includes objectification, infantilization, and stereotyping of genders, primarily women. We’ve all seen the covers of Avalanche Press; we’ve all heard the bullshit arguments. All of this, though, really should come as no surprise to us. Every player in the gaming world was gendered, after all, which means that gender provided something that they could relate to, whether it was sympathetic, alien, antagonistic, or idealized. Moreover, it sold books. It sold books primarily to one gender — boys — and it did it well. That these games did not appeal to girls and women is very similar to complaining that the Lifetime channel doesn’t have enough programming for men. That wasn’t the point. They had a market; they knew what their market was; they knew what their market wanted. They supplied the demand of the market — and went home to feed their kids.

For every young girl who was told that they couldn’t play D&D because it was a boy’s game — well, to some extent, that was true. It was a boy’s game, made and marketed for boys. Girls did not have any more right to have a roleplaying game written for them than the boys had a right for My Little Pony action figures made for them. Or to take it a step further, they had no more right for a roleplaying game than the boys did in the first place. Nobody has a right to have a roleplaying game written for them. Roleplaying games exist so the guy who makes it can play it, enjoy himself with friends, and maybe make some money to pay for rent. The game is the creator’s property, and nobody — girls or otherwise — had any right to say what the game should be. The roleplaying hobby didn’t fail the girls in its demographic — girls weren’t part of the demographic to begin with.

More seriously, that gaming’s history with gender may have led to objectification of women outside of games — that’s a completely different argument, and one that is difficult to prove. Did gaming promulgate destructive stereotypes that gamers applied to real women? Probably. I like to imagine that in the deluded young gamers’ encounter with real women, the real women kicked the shit out of the boys’ stereotyped expectations. On the other hand, I like to imagine a lot of things that are rosier than reality. But if the boys decided to apply make-believe principles to real life, is it really the fault of the books they based their make-believe on? To me, as one of those boys, I’d say it was way more our stupid fault than the books we read. Isn’t it the approximate equivalent of trying to cast Magic Missile on the schoolyard bully? What happens in make-believe doesn’t happen in reality — somehow, I don’t think that’s a warning label that was really necessary.

Now

Which brings us back to the present day, where the young boys have grown up and hopefully figured out that Magic Missile doesn’t really work, and the girls who were excluded from first-generation games are in a position to write and publish games that are made for them. So we look around and we ask ourselves what we’re going to put in our games. It will surprise absolutely nobody that I’ll now point out that answering this question is a marketing concern, and an important one. What we put into our games is determined by who we write the games for. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not writing games for prepubescent boys. Consequently, I’ve got a pretty profoundly different palette to work with.

Part of that palette is gender, and I am absolute ecstatic to have such juicy material to work with. The gender material that I get to work with in writing games for adults, though, is almost completely different than the gender material that I would use in writing for boys. Adults have different interests when it comes to gender. Boys are exploring gender for the first time, and everything comes in broad strokes; adults are familiar in at least some corner of the vast gender landscape, and are either exploring new corners or are delving into the details and subtleties of their own psychosocial backyard. Boys don’t recognize stereotypes as stereotypes because they have little to no empirical experience with which to compare and evaluate them — what is presented is accepted. Adults, on the other hand, know stereotypes well — so well, in fact that they are often quite adept at manipulating them to their own ends (this means you — if you’re a man, you’ve accessed your male privilege before; if you’re a woman, you’ve let a guy carry something heavy for you). Boys accept things at face value (girls don’t like adventure stories); adults know that there is always something behind what they’re seeing and experiencing (my wife doesn’t like this particular movie for about a thousand different reasons). I could keep going for quite a long time, but already the adult gender palette is familiar, detailed, nuanced, manipulable, subversive, layered, multifaceted, and quite simply complex. What’s not to love?

On the other hand, there’s all sorts of useless crap that I can pitch over the side once I abandon my plans for selling thousands of books to wide-eyed young boys. The cheesecake can go right out the window; in the simplest terms, it serves absolutely no purpose any longer. The embedded assumption that men must take up violence in order to save helpless women I can discard — but I can keep the shape of the assumption so that it can be held up to the light, with players poking and prodding it and challenging it and subverting it. The superfuckingcool overpowered giant dick-replacements — the mechs, the daiklaives, the endless angst — can go swirling down the drain. The mechanical underpinnings that say that all conflicts are solved with violence, that power is an end to itself, and that bigger is always better can evaporate away. The thus-lightened game is liberated, flexible, adaptive — and so much more capable to let the players tell their own stories rather than participate in a story the gendered skeleton of which is embedded in every book written for boys (cause they need the skeleton for guidance).

It’s not that gender assumptions and stereotypes need to be ripped out of gaming. We’re reinventing gaming from the ground up. We’re writing for new, more adult audiences. We now have access to so much more gendered content — assumptions and stereotypes included — that we can include in so many more ways. What might be a stereotyped constraint in OGL 17 Magical Lands of Wonder can be put to better use in our games rather than expurgiated wherever it appears. We can take it and use it, encourage our players to examine it, to identify with it and evaluate it, to challenge it and perhaps even find a little corner of it where they still find some truth. Instead of rejecting what has gone before, we can adopt and subvert it and make it ours.

And that sounds like a whole lot of fun to me.

Welcome to Alexandria Prime. You may be somewhat disoriented, especially if this is your first visit to a noological construct. That will pass — or persist until you have a psychotic episode. One way or another, your consciousness will adapt to existence outside of time and space, which is where Alexandra Prime is situated. As a noological construct, Alexandria Prime is composed only of information; in our case, AP is the repository of all human knowledge ever recorded. I’m sure you can understand its significance, if only for archival purposes — which is why we’ve brought you here.

Alexandria Prime is in trouble. The information which composes Alexandria Prime is being corrupted from within, and we need your special talents and experience in order to correct it. The library is infested with noological parasites called owlbears, which destroy information by removing the distinctions between units of data. We believe they originated from a book in the Americana section, which is where the infestation is centered. That is why we have awakened your consciousnesses from the written works you produced within your lifetimes — we believe that you will be best suited to deal with their threat.

Some of you will not recognize each other, since you lived in different time periods of the era known to history as the Deep Fried Period. You are: Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway, Alice Walker, and Edgar Allen Poe. Your consciousnesses may be slightly overlapped; take a moment to figure out exactly who you are.

Once you have self-identified, we will insert you into the Americana wing of the library. Your consciousness will experience this as a sort of menagerie of locations and scenes drawn from your era’s literature. No doubt, as you are all authors, you will be able to detect the aberrations to the pure noological matrix caused by the owlbears. Find the owlbears, and stop them. You have approximately four hours — as you experience time — before the corruption destroys the entirety of the Americana wing and we will be forced to call in Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce. Don’t make me do that. We are counting on you. Good luck, and godspeed.

A pictoral representation of the state of conversation regarding game design available through the internet.

Simon Rogers did a little stint of interviews among RPG publishers and compiled it all into an article, View from the Pelgrane’s Nest: Is the RPG Industry Screwed?, which is pretty interesting and you should go read it. Go ahead; I’ll wait here.

“The Industry” and its Woes

Now, I’m just going to skip over the guys who can’t quite see past the way the business model worked twenty years ago, because, while they’re quaint and all… well, they’re like that uncle who kind of forgets that he retired but he wants to tell you how the business world works but he has trouble sending email. Three things interest me:

The d20 Glut - A lot of the interviewees mentioned this, and while I certainly saw the terrible fruits of the d20 phenomenon on the local game store shelves, I can’t say that I was very impressed, or that it really registered on me. Oh look, another d20 product, cleverly titled 17 Rings of Power and containing… 128 pages dedicated to said seventeen rings, all of which are… pretty boring. I expected that this stuff either (a) sold slowly to people who either didn’t think or didn’t care about how they would use it in an actual game (the fetish-value of some of this material was relatively high) or (b) didn’t sell and got returned to the distributor and hence to the publisher and the publisher went under, which they should have. You put out a dumbass product, you lose your money. That’s justice. But apparently the retailers still have these copies? For some reason? Did they buy these books without part of the contract covering returns of unsaleable merchandise? Cause that’s… oh yeah, more stupid business practices. You make dumbass decisions running your store, you lose money. More justice.

Which is all well and good except it means that the retail outlets, outlets that guys who didn’t fall into the giant sucking hole called the d20 Supplement Mill rely on, are clogged with unsaleable merchandise. Which brings us to…

The Death of Gaming Retail - I have regularly patronized exactly three gaming stores my entire gaming life, which is now going on, like, 16 years or something. The first, I’m Comics, went under but as the name suggests, it wasn’t really a gaming store so much as a comics store with some games. But there’s nothing new or surprising about a hobby store going under; I remember way back when I was little there used to be hobby stores that sold model airplanes and model rockets. They’re gone, too. The second, Metro Games, has sold its soul and become Metro Entertainment, focuses far more on memorabilia and fan-fetish merchandise, and stays in business, as far as I can tell, by getting genre celebrities to come sign things every two weeks. I imagine that this works for them since they’re in Santa Barbara — hey James Marsden, come spend a weekend in Santa Barbara, oh, and sign posters for a couple hours. The third store, Game Castle, has stayed true to the gaming mother lode, sells roleplaying games and high-strategy board games (Catan, Rio Grande Games, etc), and a year or two ago had to find a larger space because they were doing too well for their cramped starter storefront. It doesn’t hurt that Game Castle is snugly situated between I don’t even know how many colleges — at least four or five — and is two blocks from the freeway (essential in LA).

When I was 12, I went to I’m Comics about once a week; when I was 20, I went to Metro every few weeks; these days, I go to Game Castle once every few months. My last gaming purchase that wasn’t online was Blue Rose, when it came out, and that’s like… three years ago, now? I get my gaming on via the internet. Which brings us to…

MMOs Take Over the World! - My wife and I started in playing WoW shortly after it started, and for a good long time I tried very hard to roleplay on WoW. They had, after all, RP Servers, and you could form guilds, and do guild RP, and… god damn did it suck. It was stilted and cramped and simply didn’t work. There was absolutely no reward system for anything resembling roleplay, and a giant reward system including experience, loot, pretty graphics, and tactical challenges for doing just about anything other than roleplay. In fact I got so frustrated with the difficulties in roleplaying on WoW that I gave up the game for six months or so. Somewhere in there I realized the simple fact: World of Warcraft is not for roleplaying. It’s for pretty graphics and tactical challenges and amassing XP and loot. I’ve since returned to the game with that understanding and it’s a whole lot more fun. It is more fun, in fact, than most tactics-based roleplaying games I’ve ever played, and certainly much more fun than all that d20 crap that won’t sell off the shelves.

“The Industry” Loses… and Gains

One of the best quotes in the article comes from Jeff Tidball, who says: “You can divide roleplayers into two general camps based on style of play, with smash-and-grab-and-level-uppers on one side, and everyone else (storytellers, world-builders, wanna-be novelists, etc.) on the other. The first, much larger, group is now — with current network and console technology — much better served by computer RPGs than tabletop RPGs. The computers are just plain better and faster at the game experience they want.” I think he’s spot-on. For tactical challenge, second-to-second action and suspense, and even the wonder of exploring exotic locales, computer games have RPGs beat. I’m not particularly disturbed by this; it’s a lot like saying “For creaming butter and making mashed potatoes, electric blenders have RPGs beat.” MMOs and computers do that stuff better than we can; let them. We do other stuff better.

However, there is the simple fact that the RPG “Industry” has long subsisted on the audience that enjoys that sort of thing, and for a long time RPGs have been one of the few ways to produce that sort of content. With that audience leaving, it signals some pretty big changes for the “Industry.” Jeff goes on to say “As those customers (the smash-and-grabbers) stop buying tabletop RPGs, it stops being economically viable to produce them professionally for the second group.” and here I disagree. I think Jeff’s got a little case of “industry blinders” and can’t see the opportunities that this shift opens up for RPGs.

Computer gaming can have tactical challenge and thrilling, pretty action. That’s what it does, and it does it well, and I’m going to be playing WoW this weekend. What RPGs need to do is focus on what they do better, and the things that are unique to tabletop gaming. From my perspective, the thing in question is people. RPGs can involve emotions, beliefs, ideals, creative endeavor, friendship, rivalry, and even romance in ways that computer gaming can’t (yet) replicate, because those things come from people and come from people interacting with each other. Now, I’ve spent lots of my life defending the internet’s ability to connect people — I’m not in any way saying that somehow with a computer involved it’s no longer socializing with real people, because it is. But the specific medium of online computer games is a pretty poor medium for — yep, emotions, beliefs, ideals, creative endeavor, friendship, rivalry, and even romance. That’s what RPGs do better.

The Roleplaying Game has spent its entire history hampered by geek status. The association has been so strong, in fact, that D&D has become one of the prime identifiers of geekdom. The irony, of course, is that RPGs aren’t a substitute for social activity; they are a social activity — just, historically, with a rather high barrier to entry in terms of tactical finesse, mathematical ability, and genre familiarity (what’s a drow?). However, if RPGs cede the tactical challenge territory to MMOs (which can handle the math internally) and focus instead on real people and crises that derive from real people, the resulting product can shed that barrier to entry and gain a far broader appeal to a hugely expanded market. When I ran a game store, the biggest seller (after jigsaw puzzles) was How to Host a Mystery which is, when you get down to it, a boxed one-shot LARP for eight players. Nobody thinks HHM games are geeky; in fact they’re kind of quirky and cool. Anybody who can throw a dinner party can run it. Now: which, do you suppose, is the larger market: (a) geeks who read Tolkein when they were 13 and who enjoy fiddling with math and (b) anybody who can throw a dinner party?

Games recently out and on the horizon — Primetime Adventures, Breaking the Ice, and 1000 Stories come immediately to mind — serve as stellar examples of games that can be marketted, not just to gamers, but to just about anybody. My mother, who has regular little get-togethers with her friends all the time, could take PTA to one such evening. Everybody’s familiar with television; everybody’s dreamed at least once of being in a television show or writing for one. For an extra added bonus, PTA uses a deck of cards, which is a much more common household item than polyhedral or even six-sided dice. Bunco night can be PTA night. If losing one part of the audience to MMOs expands the potential market for RPGs to include my mom and her friends and people like them, statements like “it’s not economically viable to produce RPGs without the smash-and-grabbers” become pretty ludicrous. In fact, the reverse is probably more true: roleplaying games become economically viable without the smash-and-grabbers.

The only obstacle is reaching that market, who are either completely ignorant of RPGs or burdened with Jack Chick-inspired misunderstandings. It’s a two-pronged problem of promotion and distribution. Luckily, the answer to the distribution half is already here, killing the retail game stores — the internet. With RPGs available to anyone anywhere with an internet connection, we’re already in billions of homes worldwide. And that’s not just the indie games — I can get a copy of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Player Guide or Mage: the Whatever They Renamed It just as easily as I can get Dogs in the Vineyard or Dust Devils. There is very literally nothing that a brick-and-mortar retail store can offer RPGs that a well-designed website can’t replicate (theoretically, a b&m offers face-to-face sales… but when was the last time that happened in your FLGS? — and nobody ever sold bunco to somebody else in a store).

Which leaves us with promotion, and that’s a sticky problem. Promotion is tough, and most of its success stories happen by happy accident. Promoters have to be in the right place at the right time to benefit, but they also have to be prepared to take advantage of the opportunity when it arrives. And that is the greater part of promotion — having material ready for when an opportunity arises. Primarily, we need sample games that anybody can get at and run with minimal fuss, with URLs printed on them for where they can find more. Then we need to put them in the spotlight, and be in the spotlight, ourselves. Now, I have a new-found love of the gaming conventions, but that is not the spotlight. That is, in fact, the opposite of the spotlight, a safe place and time away from everyday life where gamers can not worry about scrutiny. We don’t need to abandon the con, but we do need to outgrow it and start placing RPGs in other contexts. RPGs need to invade dinner parties, coffee shops, schools (take it home to your parents!), parks, community centers, and — I can barely believe I’m suggesting this — church groups.

It’s a huge undertaking, and not one that I expect anybody will be flinging themselves at wholeheartedly, but it also doesn’t need anybody to fling themselves at it. We’re already moving in this direction, anyway, and the distributed work of a few hundred people is, I suspect, going to push RPGs in some of these directions with or without conscious intent. And you never know, if such a thing happens and RPGs start getting played by millions of people all over the place, I might have to take the scare quotes off of “The Industry.”