What Ought We To Be Doing As Artists In Game Design?

The question of "what is Art" is endlessly fascinating to me, and it forms the touchstone against which I evaluate all art, including game design.

We are a species unique because we are the only one that makes images about our experiences and tell ourselves stories about who, and what, and why we are. 

We are a species of meaning seekers.

Games, and especially modern role-playing games, are interwoven with branches from literature, theater, film, and television.  These story telling media all inform game design whether NSG, or any of the new categories.

Unfortunately, many creative designers have imported leftist politics into their game design.  This is problematic since leftist politics are a hellish blend of post modern relativism, and the dehumanizing savagery of Marxism.  Even worse, less talented followers have joined the riot and demanded equal esteem with their output. 

I would assert that Art, should be seeking to reveal Truth, Beauty, and Craftsmanship in some form.  If the philosophical basis for a worldview is fundamentally devoid of objective truth, how can it possibly reveal true and beautiful things except by accident?

Of course, fun, competition, skill, and other factors are also part of a game, and those are also good to pursue in game design, but I don't see those things being such problems.  The hate, and discord by the noisy, strident left and the marginal, ugly, over-reaction by the right do not help games, art, or designers.

We ought to be seeking whatever is most common to humanity, not what is most specific to some niche demographic.

Postmodern Politics Polluting Educational Game Design Too

HERE is a game that goes full stupid into political game design.

Despite the fact that President Trump (for all his flaws) has behaved less like a leftist (either Nazi or Communist) than his Democrat opponents, and has not remotely committed atrocities like the figures surrounding him in the illustration have, we have an absurdly foolish game made by a hysterical leftist asserting so.

When will the hateful hysteria of the left end?  Do we have to go through a nightmare Reign of Terror, or October Revolution to see where this goes?

What?  Accusations of hysteria pointed back at me?  Except that lies, propaganda, and riots-for-hire have all been practiced by the political opponents of Trump, just as they have in times past by the other tyrants.

I don't like him either, but let's be rational and make our criticism at least reflect reality.

Game Design Is Unfair If You Are Not A White Guy?

Here is an excerpt from a post by a game designer whose work I really admire, and whose politics make him say foolish things.

The odds of that cool thing getting the slightest shred of attention increase when certain boxes are checked. The biggest boxes are "male" and "white", and they correlate with things like resources and confidence, which of course correlate with privilege.
I am sure that I have never bought a game because it checked the boxes of "male" and "white".  This assertion is so deep in hogwash that I struggle to even begin. The white guy who wrote this is generally a thoughtful and creative game designer.  But when he gets intersectional, his blinders go up as the irrationality of intersectionalism is wont to do to anyone who wears it.

If I decided that I wanted to play Cyberpunk 2020, I am certain that it has nothing to do with the race or sex of the designer (not a white guy, BTW); it has everything to do with distopian rebellion against impersonal and amoral megacorporations with bleeding edge cyber tech.  If I want to play The Quiet Year, it has everthing to do with the idea of making an artifactual map while telling a story on a clock, and not anything to do with the guy who wrote it (who now calls himself a woman).  If I decide to play Downfall, it is because I love the high concept of creating a society and then telling the story of it's destruction, not because it is written by a woman.  And if I should decide to play most versions of D&D, especially the earliest editions, it has everything to do with wanting to play the high concept of going down into underground monster infested places, avoiding traps, uncovering mysteries, killing nasty things, and taking their stuff. There is no "white guy" box to check.  That assertion is simply ridiculous.

Here's a thing that happens all the time:

Someone creates a cool game, and it is met with deafening silence. It is hurled into the void and, despite its inherent genius, it is never played by anyone or heard from again. As a game designer this is as essential an experience as the act of creation. It happens to everyone.

But!

If somebody makes an intensely interesting game that speaks to an experience outside the mainstream, or somehow not aligned with a conventional narrative of violence and power, or just plain weird, the chances that nobody will touch it increase dramatically.

And this is because of "white male" check boxes? Seriously?

I have a different explanation; let's look at why the first thing happens.  Let's say that there are 100 new products a month released on just one channel (say Drive Thru RPG for instance). Many will be products written by white guys.  Honestly, I don't have time to look up 100 writers and find out if they are white or male.  What do I look for?  The HIGH CONCEPT.  I might have time to pick up one or two to read, and that only so that I can winnow it down to one to play this month.  That means that about 98% will go to the wayside, including a whole lot of white guys work. Congratulations for identifying how this happens to everyone in the game design field.

Now, let's look at the second thing.  What makes something intensely interesting?  A hundred things or combinations of things.  Sometimes I am interested in traditional violence narratives, sometimes not.  But if I don't have time for more than one, and I have to pitch a game idea in limited time to multiple people, I have to try to find whatever has the most common ground for everyone to connect with the game experience.  Are we to seriously belive that "white guy" is the primary issue that I am evaluating to decide which game to play?  HOGWASH!  Yes, genius, it is true that most people want to connect to something familiar enough to understand and exotic enough to find novel for whatever reason.  It it is too far afield, you marginalize most which makes for a bad game experience.  If you shove politics (that often hate white guys) down people's throats, you are probably going to make it worse regardless of who is playing.

Furthermore, the notion that narratives of violence and power are somehow a white guy thing are absurd.  If not, then why are there more games written by "marginalized" designers that are about taking power, often with violence?

Perhaps we would be better off just focussing on the basic design questions, and deciding if the game is good, not applying SJ criteria to the game in order to decide who to hate and when to virtue signal.

Magical Thinking Nonsense From SJWs

HERE is another article by a well intended SJW, who nonetheless seems utterly ignorant about the topic of which he speaks.

The short of it is this:

Things like the Hermetic type of magic in World of Darkness games and D&D’s rote magic have never set my imagination on fire. Mind you, I don’t think they are bad, exactly. They just never rang ‘true’ for me. They never had that sense of verisimilitude that never has anything to do with reality, but rather how real something feels.
And magic in the hands of the already enfranchised never feels ‘real’ to me. Why would a guy like Harry Dresden need to search for another source of power, for instance? He’s a white, straight, good-looking dude. He’s 99 percent of the way there. Or Harry Potter for that matter? Or Dr. Strange? Yes, they have challenges. But in the context of the greater society, their challenges are ones that almost tailor-made for resolution within the existing power structure.

While WOD certainly takes it's liberties for the benefit of gamifying magic, it actually does base Hermetic magic in the game on historical Hermetic magical thinking.  And, oh-by-the-way, Hermetic magic never really had anything to do with SJ (silly fellow).

For that matter, it was merely a codification of the sort of looser magical thinking that every culture across the planet through history has practiced.  And, oh-by-the-way, that sort of magical thinking, while culturally detailed, was practiced and thought about by all sorts of people of every different color, race, and sex.  The wizard was on the margins, because they were weird and not entirely understood, not the other way round.  I will concede the possibility that in some cases, marginalized folk took up the practice, but it was undoubtedly for the same reasons that rich non-marginalized people in other times and places did: they had a lust for power that they did not possess.  This, by the way, is a sin not limited in the slightest by social class, economic affluence, sex, race, etc. etc. etc. 

There are no new sins, and humans across the board have them.  Every one of the seven deadly sins is held in the hearts of humans in both marginal and non-marginal social positions, and because we are sinful, we seek a way to "cheat" the universe in order to get what we can't otherwise.

This article is a load of crap.