Episode 27: The Invisible Rules of Roleplaying

[jared]

Okay, I think your stance makes more sense to me now. Is it that games are largely defined by having rules and goals, while TTRPGs generally have open and ever-changing goals and rules that vary wildly by group in actual implementation/shift throughout play and are so incomplete that this variety is inevitable, so even when two groups use the same rulebook their goals and rules are different enough that they aren't really the same 'game'?

Like, if we were playing basketball but I changed the rules to allow for running without dribbling, it'd be fair to say that the game was no longer 'basketball' but some different-but-related game? And if three groups were playing D&D and all decided to build a defensive wall, one group might hand-wave it (you just do it), another might call for a single skill check, and another might turn it into an episode-long minigame (where are you sourcing the stone?). So, if I'm understanding your argument right, it'd be fair to say that those games have rules different enough that they're effectively different games?

Well, no. Not precisely. The issue for me is I'm pointing to a thing that I think is a fundamental difference between tabletop role-play and many (most? all?) other kinds of games. So getting at it through basketball doesn't work. Let me see if I can be a little more systematic here.

So the question at hand is What bits of the mess of stuff that orbits play can we group together and call the "game"? In some situations, the answer is fairly simple. For instance, with video games I think it's really straightforward to point to the specific piece of entertainment software, the code and the ones and the zeroes and shit and say "Okay, so that's the game." That's a fairly naive conception of it, and we could trouble it to some degree I'm sure, but I think the initial basic intuition there that video games have some components that exist outside of play and are collectively constitutive of "the game" probably holds even given whatever scrutiny we want to give it. For something like basketball, it might be a little less obvious on first blush, but I think we can identify some set of stuff (the rules and regulations, the type of physical space required, whatever) that literally actually exists before we start playing, and that we can return to across arbitrarily many different instances of play. I'm not especially concerned with the question of whether changing one bit or several bits constitutes a different game or anything like that, I'm just trying to establish that there's some thing there that players are interacting with. And in the case of video games, and sports, and board games, I'm willing to intuitively just accept that yeah, there probably is. We might go so far as to observe that the game-object has some determining power over play, because it precedes play. Play, in these cases, might be comprised of any number of actions or attitudes or circumstances or other variables, but all of these must fit inside the game. 

But to me, and maybe this is me out on my own little limb, tabletop role-play doesn't seem to follow that pattern. Specifically, doing tabletop role-play seems to me like a full inversion of the standard formula of "game." Whereas with a video game, or a sport, or a board game, we can basically "pick up" some existing thing and play it, in tabletop role-play, we seem to be doing some other thing entirely, something that doesn't have its beingness in any set of rules or physical object or space. Colloquially in TTRPGs, we call the game book "the game," but that's obviously not even close to the reality of actual role-play: we're not playing the book, or even the thing described by the book. This is true partly because what we're doing is much weirder and larger than a book has the capacity to dictate or describe, but mostly it's true because the analogous things to what we call "game" in the case of video/board/sport games simply aren't static and reliable the way they are in those cases, and cannot be. When we do tabletop role-play, we're always shifting and changing and revealing and ignoring some things and not others, and which things those are change not only from table-to-table, and from play-to-play at the same table, but from moment-to-moment in the same instance of play. So I mean to say here that a book can't be the game of tabletop role-play first because tabletop role-play simply won't sit still long enough to be captured by a book. This is what I mean when I say that role-play is ephemeral and processual. Therefore, where many kinds of games contain and perhaps even produce play, tabletop role-play seems to me instead to be a kind of play that produces and re-produces itself by its own action, continually, as a definitional part of its beingness. 

Now, to be clear, I'm personally quite happy saying "Okay, lovely, so tabletop role-play has no game-object analagous to that of other kinds of games; instead, it has only play and the various bric-a-brac that clings play," and starting from there. But folks seem to hate when I say there's no such thing as "game." So I floated a hypothesis upthread: that perhaps, in the specific case of tabletop role-play, "game" is an emergent property of play. What I mean is (following on from some things Randalf said), perhaps we can understand the ephemeral structures that arise from the act of role-play as constituting the "game" of that particular instance of play. And perhaps, under certain circumstances, we could start to see patterns in what shapes those structures take on across multiple plays and tables and so on, specifically when we play alongside certain books or ideas or what-have-you, and we could build some functional conception of what "this kind of tabletop role-play" looks like, how it works, often and on average. And maybe it would be worth calling that conception a "game." We might find that, say, play alongside some certain edition of Dungeons & Dragons very often has some set of properties, which are related, semi-mysteriously, to the things described by the books, and also some broader cultural ideas, and these similarities crop up reliably enough across various tables and various instances of play that we can venture to hazard to perhaps declare them a Game. And that seems fine to me, except, as I said above, it's so far removed from our current colloquial use of the word "game" in this context (which colloquial use I find somewhat cancerous for books and play and authors and players across the board) that it's probably better just to not use that particular word. Because again, for video/board/sports games, "game" precedes play, but for the "emergent" kind of game we're describing here in the context of tabletop role-play, play precedes "game." This is a pretty fundamental difference ontically. To get a little Aristotelian on it, it would seem that a video game (etc) is the efficient cause of play, but play is the efficient cause of a TTRPG. This has some explanatory power as regards how a video (etc) game appears to be relatively stable ontically (that is, it persists across instances of play), and a TTRPG instead only comes into being processually---one is a cause, the other is caused. 

Embarrassingly, I don't know if any of that is helpful.

I think I'd half-agree with that claim, in that I think it's technically correct but I think that getting all the players oriented towards the same style of play is enough of a challenge that having a rulebook you can point at as a shorthand is useful and calling it a 'game' is more likely to communicate your intentions than confuse them. The distinction between book and all of the system of forces that create actual play is very important, and I can see how framing the activity of roleplaying so hard about a book can blur that distinction, but I don't really have a better alternative at hand.

Like, uhh, if we tried to move all study of TTRPGs to the theater department of schools I think you'd lose way more than you gained.

I think a book can serve to rally play just as well whether you call it a game or a book (which it happens to be). 

I don't really have an opinion about which department of various learning institutions tabletop role-play rightly belongs to, except to say that I'm not overly impressed with how game studies folks tend to treat TTRPGs, when they bother to acknowledge them at all (outside of my good friends Misha, Walid, and Sam, of course). I'd be fine letting the dramaturges have a go at it for a while. I bet the theologians would have plenty to say, to be honest with you.