RPGs and Interactive Design
The following is a rumination on role-playing games and their design, in response to Chris Crawford’s The Art of Interactive Design. Crawford is writing principally about computer software. I’m merely taking some of his ideas and applying them to role-playing. My thoughts are highly influenced by Ron Edwards’ System Does Matter and the “lumpley principle” by Vincent Baker, but this essay is not about them per se. Crawford’s ideas point to similar conclusions, but frame them in a somewhat different way. I’m responding here to just a part of Interactive Design, so there may be more ruminations to follow.
Components of Role-play
Role-playing games occur solely in your own head. Once you start playing, the rulebook doesn’t matter. Everything that happens, happens in your mind. Hence Ron Edward’s “system” as opposed to rules or mechanics. What goes on in your mind has two halves. First, there’s the part of you that experiences the game and makes conscious decisions. This is the “you” that plays the game. Then there’s another part of your mind that runs the game: instead of playing a game on something like a computer, you’re playing it on yourself. To borrow computer terminology, your brain is the “platform” of play.
The platform aspect of your thinking is itself composed of a huge array of ideas, which can themselves be divided into two types. First, there are “nouns”: parts of the fictional world, like characters and setting. Second, there are “verbs”: methods or rules by which you manipulate the objects.
True role-playing requires both nouns and verbs. Role-playing sometimes devolves into one person listening to another person’s story, and having no power over the fictional world himself. This is story telling, not role-playing, and consists of all objects for the listener, no verbs.
Of course, with a platform as muddied as the human brain, both the objects and verbs of the game are highly ephemeral. You can ignore the rules that you yourself have devised and change the fictional world as you wish. To a certain extent, this is probably inevitable, and often unconscious. However, we have rules because they help us play well; that is, lead more often to an interesting or fun experience. The success of a system of rules can probably be judged by how often you feel the need to break them.
The Role of Rulebooks
Where, though, do the rules of play, the verbs, come from? They come most obviously from the written rulebooks that we confusingly also call role-playing games. Really, they’re not games in themselves, they’re just instructions. They consist, at the least, of transcribed verbs, which you may then assimilate into your personal, internal set of game verbs. The better game books also provide instructions on doing this—on performing that assimilation. This is something that’s happening more and more now, thank goodness.
But books aren’t the only source of our verbs. We also absorb them from other people, from internet discussion forums, from previous games we’ve played, and, of course, we make them up on the spot. No game book really offers all the verbs necessary to play. Rather, they offer a few verbs, ones the writers thought were important. We may also be able to judge a rulebook by what kinds of verbs are included, and how many we (as players) have to make up on our own. Historically, game writers have been rather oblivious to a great many of the necessary verbs. All those about organizing how players relate to each other, discuss the game, time events, and many others, have been left out completely. Instead we’ve gotten shells of instructions that talk only about the most obvious, concrete kinds of verbs, like how hit points work.
Rulebooks also, of course, provide some of the fictional content of our games, that is the nouns. This is generally referred to as “setting.” Nouns are good, of course, but any novel provides plenty of them. Much better are verbs that will allow the players to make their own nouns.
In a post on the Forge, Ron Edwards talks about a conversation he had with Jonathan Tweet and his game Over the Edge. Tweet apparently derived great satisfaction from crafting a setting while he playtested Over the Edge. Yet when he wrote the game he forgot about this. He believed it was his job to provide a ready-made setting to players in the Over the Edge rulebook, so he included the one his playtest group had made. He didn’t encourage players go through the same process his group went through, and so robbed them of the creative satisfaction he got. In short, he provided nouns instead of verbs. Nouns can help a rulebook but verbs are more important.
Dec 03, 2005 | Filed in design | Tagged: nouns_verbs