Tobias blogs

Pretentious post titles aside, the question “what is the definition of a game” is perhaps mildly interesting even to us non-RPG scholars. Sadly, most discussions I’ve seen (and they are mostly coming out of the “your jeepform games aren’t games”) are just utterly fucking stupid.

They either boil down to talking about enjoyment (a game must be fun), or about ways to determining outcome (luck, physical power, skills). The shock-and-awe way of looking at this is that larps are not games, but rape is. Not so much for the enjoyment part, but for luck and physical power. And how do you define winner in a vampire game, anyways?

Some years ago I met an old larp acquaintance on the bus, going out to a con. We hadn’t seen each other in probably 10 years. We started talking about role-playing, and some stuff I was doing, at which point he said the brilliant phrase:

“If you take fighting out of role-playing, then it is not really role-playing anymore.”

If fights and skill-level challenges is what makes D&D a game, then surely, the “During” part of GR with its monologues and rules for not breaking eye contact makes that a game? (GR being a jeepform game quite frequently claimed not to be a (role-playing) game.)

But fuck that for a second, and let’s look at the term role-playing game. In Swedish (and its Danish and Norwegian dialects), we say “role-play” (rollspel, rollespil) and not role-playing game, because the word for play and game are the same: spel. Spel can mean play as in role-play, or play as in kids’ play (and a bunch of less-related things). And, it also means game. Whatever that means. I guess this gives us Scandinavians a less game-as-in-darts-ish approach to what role-playing games are, or, perhaps more importantly, might become.

To me, there is no one true definition of the term role-playing game. To my mind, I am creating role-playing games. Just because they are not about fighting, winning or rolling dice to obtain narrative power, they don’t cease to be role-playing games.

I am not interested in picking apart dictionary definitions of words like game, play, and enjoyment. Why, role-playing game as in playing a role and game as in “complete episode”. Surely, you cannot disagree with that?

Honestly, I would not think about Diablo or World of Warcraft as role-playing games, because to my mind, they aren’t that good at supporting role-playing. They could perhaps be more accurately labelled fighting-through-avatars-games? Come on, argue that fighting is a way of expressing the behaviour of your fictional character!

To me, we are defining what role-playing games are by applying that label to the things that we do. Some might argue that other people are stretching the term too far, but I don’t think so. At the end of the day, we cannot even agree on what football means, and that ain’t causing too much damage, AFAIK.

I was talking to some lovely people the other week who were telling stories about showing up to a larp as vikings, but not being there to fight but simply play their characters. Before the game started, they were approached by another viking dude who, filled of hope, asked them if they were packing a two-handed sword so they could kill goblins (or whatever it was, I cannot remember). When they replied they weren’t packing any steel, the guy left angrily, shouting “wrong fucking larp!” (fel jävla lajv).

I propose we should be more like that guy. Instead of saying “why, coming here not to fight, that’s not larping!” he accepted that there are many interpretations of larp, and not wanting to take part of anything touchy-feely, he left—which is what I would do if I didn’t want to play GR. Of course, just like you, I would have better manners.

(As an aside, some people are annoyed when others apply the jeepform label to describe their stuff. Maybe a post about the inverse problem—viral marketing and aggressive inclusion—is in order in the future.)

And if you don’t agree, maybe it’s because you’ve ended up on the wrong fucking blog! (Just kidding.)