Schismogenesis Redux

After reading Gila RPGs recent substack post On New Games I was inspired by a few thoughts, enough that I figured I could write a short blog post. I'll say that I think he is right in describing how science is done and how games are made, I have also written a handful of academic papers during my PhD work in Materials Science. In scientific research, people take an established field of knowledge and add a bit onto it to learn something new building on a solid scientific foundation. In exploring complex systems, if you change more than one variable at a time, you won't be able to suss out cause and effect. By analogy the same can hold true for TTRPGs. That said, I left an R&D position in industry because I was politically radicalized and delved into communist and anarchist theory, so I have some ideas that might meaningfully add on to this perspective. I think I can say everything I want to with examples from science, so I will stick to them for the sake of consistency.

My first comment comes from historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, who popularized the idea of paradigm shifts. In a paradigm shift, a new idea or perspective is introduced, which changes the foundations of our understanding of science. Einstein is the famous example of this, with his theory of relativity which changed the way we see Newtonian physics, and then soon after with quantum physics (by other physicists), which once again changed our basic understanding of the world. Kuhn's paradigm shift reminds me a bit of a topic I wrote about earlier, Schismogenesis in TTRPGs, where I cited Vincent Baker saying, "new games contradict the games that came before, at least as often as they build on them." Although you will be more successful in science and in game design if you take existing ideas and just add one new thing (we can't all be Einstein), it's also true that radically new ideas shape the field as much or more than cautious exploration does. 

Another historian of science, Paul Feyerabend has some ideas to add on to this as well. He had a critique of the scientific method that goes like this: the scientific method which follows the basic process of "question -> hypothesis -> experiment -> conclusion" does not represent scientific exploration as it naturally happens in the lab. It represents the process of reporting and control imposed on science by the capitalists who fund and oversee scientists. In reality, many of the greatest discoveries are made through joyful exploration and curiosity. For example, the discovery of conducting polymers, which are now widely used in industry, were discovered when a chemical reaction went sideways. Instead of throwing out the flask, the scientist was fascinated and probed deeper. TTRPG design can be based on research and sales, but it can also come from just messing around and spontaneously coming up with ideas for the sake of fun and curiosity.

The last point I have comes from evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould. He popularized a theory of evolution that contrasted incremental change in the development of new species', called punctuated equilibrium. Gould noticed the archaeological record apparently contradicted the theory of evolution with long periods of stasis where one species remained mostly unchanged. These periods of stasis were punctuated by periods of rapid change where new species came about called cladogenesis. I think the same sort of evolution can hold true for games, where history is not shaped by incremental shifts, but by big, discontinuous shifts.

People try to make new games through joyful exploration, and even though they mostly fail to find anything new, we will never find those breaking points were new styles of play are born, shifting our fundamental assumptions of what play can be and changing the course of games history.