As I write this, I’m sitting in the aftermath of quite an important event. I don’t usually write about current events in this column; the delay between when I write and when something is published can mean that my article is out of date or someone said what I was saying in a different format. Despite that, this gave me pause and thought about quite a number of things about the RPG sphere.
Editor’s note – Apologies to Ben; his work gets stored in a long-term archive and used when the situation arises, and as a result I’ve delayed a timely article.
As you may know, the online store Itch.Io was hit with a form of censorship, forcing them to edit the content they sold and get rid of a number of more ‘adult’ games or face an inability to process payments via Mastercard or Visa. This censorship, undertaken by the payment companies themselves, was a dystopian move straight out of a Cyberpunk game. The side effect of this is Itch felt it had to remove anything that might trigger the Payment companies’ ire, including games where the ‘adult content’ basically featured nothing more than LGBTQ+, feminist themes or mature discussions about the impact of sexual violence. This blanket ban lacked nuance of any kind, removing not only harmful content but also content that harmed no one, maybe even saved some people.
I could spend a whole article ranting about this, I think we can all agree that just from a historical perspective, the idea of just losing the availability of a whole swathe of games is an issue. I’m of the school of thought that we shouldn’t ever just try to vanish an idea. Even if some of the content was problematic, in RPG history those sorts of games have become part of a wider discussion of who we are by the community. We hold up games that feature racist content and SA by player characters and say ‘we aren’t about this’. To whitewash over them is to paint a false picture and make us have to have those discussions all over again with a new set of people.
My stance on this notwithstanding, though, it also made me think about what we are actually doing with roleplaying games. I’m sure that some people are simply just playing a dungeon exploring game with their friends where they slay monsters and vanquish evil (hell, I’m doing this with my kids right now) but I expect most of us are at least also engaging with RPGs on an emotional level to some extent. We’re invested in the characters. We go through a journey with them. We feel a sense of triumph when they succeed. Some of us are going further still, putting themes into our campaign. Games like Vampire or Sigmata or Cy_Borg or Queerz are about something. Yes they’re games but they also explore an idea. Sometimes it is just one line that makes you realise the game is hinting at something deeper, other times the whole game is based around it.
So some games are aiming at introspection, or at least provoking discussion amongst the players. This is a function of an artistic work. We’re not just putting out a game system to be easy to play, we’re trying to make people feel something. Even the ‘back-to-basics’ OSR crowd are trying to evoke feeling more than write a ruleset, they’re invested in their games that instead make you feel something when reading them. This is important, right? While we often judge games, as we judge a lot of things, by if they make a profit or see a lot of table action, this is a kind of false metric. The question could be, did it move those people who read and understood it? By that metric, maybe the ‘best RPG’ I ever played was Blackout, it haunts me to this day. Perhaps the ‘most successful’ RP book I read was Charnel Houses Of Europe for Wraith because I openly wept when I read it. I don’t think we should be happy to ever see stuff like this taken away.
Some games might not really even really be designed to play. The game Violence was just a meta in-joke about flaws in 90’s game design. Lacuna Part 1 becomes more unplayable as you play it, We Are But Worms entire ruleset is one word. These games are invested in telling us about the person who wrote them and ourselves. They’re here to be experienced by us in and in me, they create a weird feeling of joy in the human race, a real person built this just because they could.
In the era of everything we consume being ‘content’, marketable and saleable chunks for us to consume and thus focused on the digital, sitting down and using a game to just tell a story with people is close to a revolutionary act against the modern world. We’re taking time to be with each other and share a story without it being a focus for marketing something to us. With one rulebook, we can make a game and tell whatever story we want. While games and their marketing might be ‘content’, the actual playing of them in amongst your friends is almost ‘Anti-content’. When Facebook says its main competitor is ‘sleep’ then you know doing anything for yourself when awake is an amazing act.
This is important because it means really, in the face of a future that looks increasingly like various powers might start to try to control us by what we can consume, a story where the powers that be can’t write the story for themselves is more important. Going and saying something about the state of the world or the human condition in your weird little fantasy campaign is legitimate art and if you’re doing that, I’m proud of you. Still waiting for my players to realise one of my mysterious bad guys is the arcane equivalent of a rogue LLM that is consuming worlds ravenously in order to have more datasets for its long obsolete purpose. When they do, I can’t wait for them to work out how to fight it, how to survive in the face of it. Maybe it’ll teach me some new things about people.
I hope wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, you’re safe. The world is a scary place. Pull your people together, tell stories. Make them about what you’re going through, face it together. Open up. Talk. Form bonds, support each other. Keep telling your story. For a few hours, just be with your people. Listen when someone writes a game or campaign, they’re sharing a part of themselves. Because what we are doing with RPGs, more than anything else, is being Together. We’re making stuff just for us, and we’re saying to other people, ‘I want you to be a vital part of my story’. Â That’s more important than being a footnote for organisations that care nothing about you. Every time.
I’ll see you next time, my revolutionaries.
Creative Commons credit: Standing still in a moving scene by TomTC and Cambot 406 by uoa7.
