Game design mumbles

 A tiny, tiny post today.

I've been working on writing things for the game I'm putting together (an unholy fusion of Risus, Blades in the Dark, and other games from around the place that I'm sure I'm cribbing from but can't exactly recall). Specifically, one section I've worked on, part of the GM section, was "Why make this game?" Terribly self-indulgent as it sounds, my point was to get some thoughts down about what the game does, and especially what it might do differently to other games that would help people run it by telling them what sort of dynamic I was shooting for with my design decisions. Sort of like telling someone just starting Blood (a 2.5d game from the 90s) "Don't try and play this like Halo, or it'll be deeply unenjoyable. Here's what the developers were thinking when they put it together..."

The point I'm rambling around to is that I get a feeling sometimes from commentators on the indie rpg scene that they view a lot of games as pointless passion projects of the designer. I personally felt this strongly enough to put in a section on why you shouldn't feel this way about my game, why my game is different. But I don't think it's actually really a thing to get overly worried about.

See, I think of indie game designers as similar to artists. I mean that in a non-pretentious way - there really is a non-pretentious way to mean that, honest. What I mean is that artists do studies - they'll paint or sculpt the same thing many times in minutely different ways because it fascinates them. Artists want to explore the different features of a thing by portraying it in various ways that bring out a different quality each time. Tsutomu Nihei is fascinated by machinery and architectural space, so much of his manga (especially BLAME!) basically consists of composition pieces exploring both those things. Cézanne was so fascinated by the hill outside his house that he painted it literally hundreds of times. I think indie creators often do the same thing with games; there's a particular feature of rpgs they want to bring out or explore, so they write a game that does so.

Look at those mounds

See? I didn't mean anything pretentious about elevating rpg design to an art form - it's just about putting one feature or mechanic in the foreground.

You get this dismissive attitude towards many fantasy heartbreakers, and other D&D derivatives, in the OSR. Yes, in a certain sense, it might be a bit redundant to own The Black Hack and Old School Essentials and Knave... they all centre on quite a similar form of gameplay after all. But the point is they all approach it differently - they're all different distillations of the mechanics of original D&D. This is why the OSR still holds a fascination with, well, the old school; it's about wanting to unpick a particular style of game by bringing out different aspects of what made it apparently so uproariously fun and engaging in the first place. Far from being as deeply conservative a movement as something with the name "Old School Renaissance" might appear on the surface, the movement is in fact founded on practices of deconstruction rather than regression.

No-one ever said to Cézanne "Oh God, not another picture of that bloody hill! Why don't you paint something else for a change?" Or, if they did, I think it's fair to say they were missing the point.

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