Where Have You Been?

All manner of impediments and distractions have kept me from updating this happy little blog for a long while, not exclusive to but including the following: buying a house and moving into said house, large piles of seething academia, and some unpleasant interludes in blog/website service.

My recreational level of writing has been low lately, mostly do with the brain space required for all the essays and research papers and whatnot that I've been doing, but the idea wheel keeps turning, and my readers (all four? of you) can expect to find more installments here in the near future. For today, besides letting people know that I have not spontaneously turned to vapor, I'd like to mention an observation that I had while filing through my library the other day.

In sorting through some very old (1970's) gaming magazines, I realized that a good many of the articles therein had bibliographies, both as references and recommended reading. A quick assay of modern gaming magazines revealed no such references. I mentioned this to the lemur, and she replied that clearly gaming was for intellectuals back then.

It is certainly true that a comparison of the older gaming magazines like White Dwarf (particularly before it became exclusively Warhammer) and Dragon with the newer publications will show that they are very different creatures. In terms of language alone, the tone and mood of the earlier articles points towards expectations of a well-educated, intellectual and eloquent audience. There was very little need to emphasize how innovative/cool/special anything happened to be. I'd like to clarify that I'm talking about intellectualism in the sense of examining concepts and conceptual information, cultural study, methodology of narrative and system and how system might best be applied for a given 'feel', and not so much about crunching numbers to determine 'balance' or maximum damage output.

Naturally, this got my brain spinning. A rule set for a game can be applied in many different ways. The mood of a game relies heavily on the presentation of that system and how it is used by the group playing the game. I prefer an intellectual, improvisational style of game in which there is a lot of deep-rooted story telling as well as problem solving in the form of encounters, social situations, riddles and so on. I particularly enjoy letting my players come up with features of the story and setting; this is a cooperative endeavor, after all, and I encourage them to improvise as much as I do.

So, has gaming culture changed the expectations of how RPGs are supposed to work? Did these expectations end up changing the focus and feel of newer game mechanics? Did attempts to reach out to a wider audience result in a lower benchmark for gaming literature, and if so, is there any place for the old philosophy and intellectualism in modern RPG gaming except in the niche market? So much of modern culture is he said/she said with a healthy dose of wikipedia; people prefer to look things up immediately rather than rationalize or consider on their own.

As I put it to a friend once: "If you quote someone else, everyone listens. But if you quote yourself, then you are pretentious. How is it different, really?"

Food for gaming thought.

Oh, closing note and somewhat related: the amount of time it takes for RPG illustrations to get in and out of their clothing/armor has got to have increased tremendously. With some of the newer outfits, it must take an hour to get all the buckles done or undone, and with all the little BITS all over the place, it's a wonder they don't cut themselves to ribbons by walking.