Why We Suck at Critiquing the Forge

It's pretty common to hear someone in the TTRPG space say that they hate discourse. I think its fair to say that this online discourse is shaped by social media algorithms of the platforms that the conversations are happening on. As the people who participated in the hobby moved between forums, blogs, Google+, YouTube and Twitter, the way that people interacted also changed. Modern social media algorithms maximize engagement by promoting the most divisive arguments, and under the forces of this machine, a certain conflict crystallized. This conflict was built on the unresolved tensions already existing in the discourse, but it distilled them into the argument that provokes the strongest reaction possible. This argument more or less makes the claim that game mechanics are analagous to real life systems of oppression, and that it is virtuous to get rid of them. We then go on to say that the idea that System Matters, and its originator Ron Edwards are the face of game designers everywhere who would impose their mechanics on you.

Regardless of how much I agree with the virtues of throwing off mechanical shackles, this critique doesn't seem to be familiar with the ideas of the Forge, so it feels like an unsatisfying critique to me. The problem is that advocating for rules light, lore heavy games is a preference in design, so it is still effectively a statement of system matters in the Forge sense. This creates a pretty deep cognitive divide and is a big part of the "discourse" we have all grown so tired of, with people shouting back and forth, not at each other but at boogeymen. Despite all this I don't think that discourse itself is bad, and I even still think that critique is the most interesting way to explore and understand the world.

-

I got into the hobby the same way a lot of millenials like myself did, I played as a kid and then after a long hiatus, got back into it with the release of 5th Edition D&D. As I scratched the surface of the hobby, I discovered the two most interesting sub-cultures within the hobby, OSR and Storygames. The OSR was mostly blogs, and Storygames was mostly discussions on a handful of online forums. I dived into both and in the process I read some of Ron Edwards' posts about his Big Model and its three styles of games: narrative, game, and simulation. As an aside, these three categories are not his and date further back into forums in the 90s. I thought his writing was thought provoking, but at times infuriating in his condescention towards what he called incoherent games. Incoherent games did not have a clear idea of whether they were narrativist, gamist or simulationist, and suffered some sort of debilitating, internal conflict.

Modern day Forge adherents do exist, and they do still apply these principles of mechanical purity in the service of a taxonomical view of game design. In this view a game is an animal, and it should be a mammal, reptile, or fish. It should not be more than one type.

Why can't a game be an ecosystem, or group, or symbiotic relationship? What if instead of basing our conception of a game as an atomized creature, we think of it as an assemblage of interacting actors that feed off of each other? Maybe a TTRPG is like five goblins in a trenchcoat.

The clownfish can swim among the anemone's tentacles, immune to its sting. In exchange for this protection, it cleans and protects the anemone in turn. This mutualistic relationship goes beyond the pair, an array of crustaceans and algae can be a part of the anemone's symbiotes. A good example of symbiosis in games might be the core gameplay loop of D&D that cycles between dungeon to downtime. Dungeon exploration would fit into a competitive, gamist style of play, it features combat, problem solving, and stategic resource management. Downtime fits into a simulationist or narrativist mold, as it has to do with economics and making social connections. In the Forge purists eyes, this is a dysfunctional or incoherent game. But the truth is that these two parts work together perfectly well and even complement each other, despite their differences. A group of players who have a lot in common may still have people who are inclined to one or the other style of play, while still having fun playing together. These two parts can also have clear exchanges of gameplay currencies, benefitting each other. Just as a table contains a group of people, a game can contain a group of interacting, modular systems.

-

In The Dawn of Everything, Graber and Wengrow write about the myth of the descent of humanity from primordial times. This myth says that we started as bands of foragers, then as we progressed to sedentary farming and then to industrial society, we became increasingly more organized and hierarchized. A progression of societal development follows where each form dominates and forces out the previous one. But the truth is that through prehistory back to the ice age, and up until modern times there have been societies that alternate between wandering nomadism and sedentary farm life with the changing seasons. Their social structure might annually cycle from fiercly hierarchical to egalitarian openness. If an entire society can choose to regularly change their fundamental mode of interaction, why can't a TTRPG table?