CW: child abuse, ttrpg discourse
It’s this, in case your wondering. And if you’re not keen on watching a three hour video to catch up on the latest ttrpg discourse, I don’t blame you. There’s a full transcript provided, which you should check out if that’s more your speed. Also, the visuals are well done, but aren’t strictly necessary to absorb the content, and there are natural breaks in the video, so you can definitely pick it up, listen to it for a while, put it down, and come back to it later like I did. All this is to say I won’t be summarizing the video very much, or providing a tl;dr. If anything, I’m here to provide more context, in my typical “old man yells about the bad old days” kind of way.
Which is all to say, if you’d rather just skip this whole thing and go about your merry way, I fully support and endorse that decision.
Still here? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Suitsian Games and Alternative Structures
The video talks a lot about Suitsian games, a framework of understanding game design that they dive into pretty deeply. I’m not going to rehash whether or not this is a good framework, mostly because I don’t feel qualified to judge that sort of thing, and the video does a pretty thorough job explaining it’s weaknesses, especially when applied to ttrpgs. Though, I feel like it’s important to note that it is far, far from the only way to understand games (not that the video implies that it is the only way to understand games, mind you). If you’re interested in alternative structures of understanding games, I highly recommend reading Talen Lee. He’s been at this for a long time, and probably has forgotten more about the philosophy of games than I’ll ever know. Be warned: there are a lot of theories around what makes a game a game, and none of them are really the platonic ideal of “perfectly fits every game every time.”
ABA, Behaviorism, and Game Design
Alright, this next part is a bit heavy. The video goes into an in-depth discussion of ABA, behaviorism, and seeks to connect threads of that psychological practice to what one might call “indie”, “story-driven”, or “forge” game design. I do think there’s some missing context here about how these two things actually interact with each-other, if at all.
The most direct connection the video makes between behaviorism to game design philosophy, particularly in the PbtA space, is by quoting from a podcast with Brandon Leon Gambetta and James Malloy talking pretty explicitly about applying behaviorism to game design. With all due respect to both Brandon and James, they’re not exactly the be-all and end-all of game design thinkers or philosphers, even in the relatively small pool of ttrpg design or even smaller pool of PbtA design. It seems silly to speculate on the impact of this podcast on game design thought, but if you put a gun to my head, I don’t think more than 100 people listened to this. I don’t necessarily think the video means to overemphasize this podcast (or it’s hosts) impact on game design and thought, but I do think it definitely overestimates the influence of Ron Edwards.
The Forge, It’s Pretenders, And It’s Inheritors
Ron Edwards gets a lot mileage in the headspace of modern ttrpg designers purely by virtue of running the web domain for The Forge and writing some nigh-incomprehensible articles, and The Forge gets even more real estate than it deserves by the volume of pretty bad takes and outdated game design it produced. It’s hard to hear The Forge discussed anywhere without it immediately being preceded by “I hate.” There’s a lot of reasons for this, which have to do with how The Forge is described, how it marketed itself, and who gets remembered from it’s school of design.
As with most discussions of The Forge, the phrase “predominantly white predominantly dudes” does a lot of heavy lifting, mostly in discounting and minimizing the contributions of some of the most insightful and impactful thinkers that came out of The Forge, some of whom were decidedly not-white and not-dudes. The Forge as it exists in discourse is a sort of perpetual marginalization engine. You can have written some of the most profound, insightful, and thought-provoking design and analysis of your contemporaries, but you’re going to be buried under a pile of “predominantly white predominantly dudes” that everyone who hates The Forge remembers.
To whit: If you want to know what the fuck The Forge actually did and what useful content it produced, you are much better off reading anyone but Ron Edwards, though to get you started (and out of my own personal bias) you should definitely read Bankuei. Among his achievements are designing the Same Page Tool, Explaining Flags, Explaining Narrativism, and being a pioneering voice for inclusion and considering issues of cultural appropriation in games. Reading Bankuei is sort of like a cheat code, as practically every discourse cycle about ttrpgs already happened about 10 years ago, and Bankuei wrote them all down.
Language and Meaning
In connecting behaviorism and forge design, the video puts a lot of juice into some of the same language being shared between both of them, namely the terms “functional” and “dysfunctional.” While I’m no expert, it seems like ABA and behaviorism considers “functional” behaviors to be ones that make someone appear more “normal.” Though what does forge theory define as “functional” and “dysfunctional” play? Does it hold functional play as some invisible standard of “normal” gameplay?
In “Honest Communication” Bankuei talks about how honesty at the game table is what defines functional play:
“Oh shit, you’re right. This isn’t what I wanted to have happen at all. Let me figure out how to change what I’m doing.”
This is the path where you can FIND honesty and create functional communication.
–Honest Communication, Bankuei
In “The Same Page Tool“, Bankuei states:
Functional play depends on everyone playing the same game. Sadly, many people don’t even know or negotiate what that means, and a lot of game texts leave crucial things out. Too often, people come with different ideas and don’t realize it, and it turns into a mess during play.
– The Same Page Tool, Bankuei
According to Bankuei, functional play vs. dysfunctional play is all about honesty. It’s about using tools like The Same Page Tool and table communication to create a space where all players, including the GM, feel comfortable communicating what they want to have happen at the table, when they feel things have gone off the rails, and how they want to play their characters. At it’s core, functional play is defined by the old saw about what to do if you have a problem with someone else at the game table: “Just talk about it like adults.”
Ironically, functional and dysfunctional in behaviorism is defined by it’s dishonesty. The video tells us a story about how ABA dictated a young boy should stop covering his ears every time he hears a toilet flush. According to behaviorism, the boy should deny his emotional and mental truth, likely (though it isn’t certain) that the loud noise bothered or hurt him, and that he should instead pretend it doesn’t hurt him, for the sake of other people’s comfort or a sense of normality.
Functional play rejects this dishonesty at a fundamental level. It says “hey, if you have a problem with what happened to your character, or what’s happening in the game, or anything else, you have every right to say no, this isn’t right.” The fun of everyone at the table is everyone’s responsibility. I know this sort of thing may not seem revolutionary in modern ttrpg design, but there was a time when players, when faced with a bad ruling, or an unintended consequence, or a crossed line, were told to shut up and play the game, for the sake of normalcy, for the sake of not “ruining the game”, for the sake of not rocking the boat. “The rules say your character dies. Sucks to suck. Move on and make a new character.” That was what the old-school style of roleplaying was like, in all it’s faux-macho and rules-as-arbiter “glory.” This, what ABA and behaviorism might call “functional behavior”, is the antithesis of “functional play” as defined by forge theory and explained by Bankuei.
Incentives, Skinner Boxes, and Mind Control
In another linguistic overlap, behaviorism and forge theory talk a lot about incentives. The core principal in behaviorism being that all behavior flows from incentives, and that to change a behavior one only has to chance the incentives presented. As the video reminds us, “behaviorists don’t really think about thought”, that intervening niggle between incentive and behavior. But what does Forge Theory and Bankuei think about incentive structures and thought?
In “Relationship Mechanics as Flag Mechanics“, Bankuei talks about flags and incentive structures.
Flag mechanics are explicit mechanics a player uses to tell the GM and the group “I would like the story/situation to focus on THIS for my character”.
[…]
The mechanics don’t tell you, you tell the mechanics, to tell each other
This is, once again, almost a complete inversion from behaviorism’s view of incentives. You, as the player, define your own incentives, and then use the mechanics to translate those incentives into flags that communicate your intent to the other players, and mechanically point towards scenes that will help you achieve what you’ve set out to do.
Some may balk at the mechanization, why do you even need mechanics to tell other people what you want, or to reward you for playing your character the way you have decided to play? This, I think, comes down to personal taste, some like mechanics that reward them for meeting the standards of the game, some prefer mechanics that reward meeting the goals you set yourself, some prefer mechanics to not interact with goal-setting or reward systems at all. But far from the mind control of behaviorism, forge theory specifically enshrines the players right to determine their own goals, rather than a goal set by the designer or mechanics.
PbtA, Moves, and Rules
I should say up front that I’m not a huge fan of PbtA or Moves, so I’m coming into this with my own biases. I prefer traditional “stat” games, where you roll on a stat and get an outcome, rather than the more programmatic method of Moves.
That said, I do think the discourse has taken this video’s position on a specific PbtA game, “Root: The RPG” and generalized it out to all PbtA games, which I think is a bit overblown. The biggest stretch you can make from the video is that it treats the design of Root as emblematic of Magpie Games’s strategy of game design, specifically licensed property game design.
Take Moves for example. I recall it being said that Moves were never meant to be emblematic of PbtA, that Vincent and Meguey Baker expected designers to try out more traditional, stat-based designs within the PbtA framework.
While “making everything a move” does feel counterproductive, I do think where it really falls down is in the idea that if something isn’t covered by a move, a “substitution” move or some GM move should “cover” for it. I want it understood that this isn’t a globally accepted solution to “what do when there’s no move,” and I’d argue, especially in more modern games, the more common procedure is to just say “if there’s no move for you to do X, X just happens as you narrate it.” In this framework, moves are meant to focus on and extend out mechanically certain parts of the game, not to gate off or punish all possible action that isn’t tied to a move. To take the video’s example, if you don’t have a move to rifle through some papers looking for something, you just say you rifle through some papers until you find the thing you’re looking for.
System Matters Discourse, Rules, and Guidelines
A lot of the discourse around this video has taken on the tenor and mantle of “system matters vs. system doesn’t matter” discourse, which feels odd to me. I checked the transcript, and “System Does Matter” only gets brought up once, in reference to it being an article that Ron Edwards wrote. We can extrapolate that maybe the videographer doesn’t much care for the article, but as far as I can tell, the video doesn’t seem to wade too far into that old debate. Though maybe I’m just missing some dog-whistle only people really invested in that particular discourse can hear.
That said, I do want to point out one last example an important break from old-school “Ron Edwards” style forge design. I don’t think any modern designer has the ego to suggest any of their games is “perfect”, and that perfect adherence to their rules will produce a perfect game. What’s more generally understood, at least from my perspective, is that all ttrpg systems are essentially built out of guidelines and suggestions. Nearly every game either contains or implies a disclaimer that amounts to the golden rule of ttrpg design: “If a rule makes the game less fun, ignore the rule.” Fun, of course, being subjective, and not always the desired goal when playing a ttrpg. In which case, substitute in the desired outcome for fun.
The mark of a well-designed system is not how consistently or reliably it produces the same results across playgroups, but how successful it is as a tool for self-expression by the playgroup. A game like “Blades in the Dark” does not succeed because it holds every rule to be rigidly necessary and required, but because it “fails / collapses elegantly” down to a single basic rule. “When in doubt, roll some dice, use this table to judge their outcome.” Every other rule, on top of the base mechanic, adds optional color, guidance, or mechanical engagement at the pleasure of the game group. The system only matters if it serves the players, the players create the game.
Rolling the Hard Six 