Schismogenesis in TTRPGs

My wife and I have a game we play occasionally when we are people watching in the colder months. The idea is that couples and families will often have matching jackets. We call them Jouples. This sort of reflects that people who end up together often have complementary aesthetic tastes, or that their aesthetics grow together. It also probably reflects the fact that one member of the couple might be buying jackets for the other. So you can guess if a group of people are a family, or a more incidental group of individuals, like coworkers or something. You can also use it to guess how long a couple has been together, and it's fun to joke "oh those two will never work out," because their jackets don't match. There is, however, an exception to Jouple Theory. A child of a jouple will sometimes have a jacket with aethetics completely at odds with that of their parents. The idea of teenage rebellion is of course common to all of us. There is a big, fancy word that I've recently learned for this phenomenon, and it's the theme of this post: Schismogenesis. 

Schismogenesis is a word used by David Graeber and David Wengrow in their book The Dawn of Everything, which they use to describe intentional culture creation by a society which is a direct rejection of their neighbors. The word's roots 'schism-o-genesis' mean generation through schism. The first example of this in the book is that of indigenous tribes in what is now the Pacific Northwest coast of Canada, like the Kwakiutl, who had decadent lifestyles and held slaves, and their neighbors in what is now California, like the Yurok, who were expected to be modest and focused more on individual work ethic. It is also used to describe the differences between the ancient Athenians and Spartans, with their sharply contrasting democratic and militaristic societies. 

So like the teenager who creates their fashion by rejecting their parents' fashion, or societies who create their own culture through rejection of their neighbor's culture, TTRPGs can also be created by rejection of other TTRPGs. In an AMA on the NSR Discord, Vincent Baker said:

"I think that there's a common misunderstanding of game design at large — the biological metaphor, the idea that a game has ancestors — that hits PbtA especially hard. The fact is, new games contradict the games that came before, at least as often as they build on them. PbtA should best be seen as a movement of contradictions."

So in other words, game designers in Baker's Storygamer cohort were influenced by traditional mainstream games like D&D and Vampire, but not in that they wanted to copy those games, but that they rejected them and the things that those games did. They disliked the idea that the game master had total control of the narrative, saying that complex mechanics meant that a game master had to plan encounters ahead of time because they needed to have opponents and scenarios statted out. Their design of contradiction meant that narrative control was partly taken away from the game master and redistributed formally through mechanics to the players. It meant that opponents needed minimal stats, so that they could be generated on the fly to handle whatever situation the table found itself in. 

Later on in The Dawn of Everything, schismogenesis comes up again. In discussing one of the first cities, Uruk of Mesopotamia, the authors mention a theory of Hector Munroe Chadwick, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge in the 1920's (apparently a contemporary of J.R.R Tolkien who was at Oxford). Chadwick popularized an idea that fell out and then regained popularity of what he called heroic societies. These societies were characterized by "heroic burials, indicating in turn an emerging cultural emphasis on feasting, drinking, the beauty and fame of the individual male warrior." These societies emerge again and again throughout history on the margins of bureaucratically ordered cities like Uruk. What often happens is that a city rises to prominence, and establishes satellite settlements to help manage the flow of resources to the city, and that those settlements realize that rather than acting in service to the larger city, sending the majority of resources down the road, they can keep that wealth to themselves through the power of individual charisma and martial skill. 

My next analogy here is that the OSR emerged from mainstream D&D similarly by creating a 'heroic society' of their own. Groups of players existed on the margins of D&D culture, getting left behind as more and more complex editions written through bureaucratic process came down the pipeline. These tables eventually realized that their cultural cache could be used to carve out their own spaces, rather than bending the knee to 'Big D&D,' relying on individual writing skill and artistic talent to break away and forge their own path. 

There are of course many other indie games that have come about over the years through their own processes, some similar to the ones discussed above, and some totally different. I just mention these reductive analogies for their simplicity. 

Thinking in broad terms of these two artistic movements, its easy to imagine a dialectic of sorts, where there are two competing styles of indie games, and the logical way forward is through a synthesis of Storygames and the OSR. But through the schismogenetic lens, the opposite can also be the case. As much as artistic styles will go back to look at older games as biological ancestors, they will also reject their parents, and find cool new jackets of their own.