Stop Having Fun: My Game is Better than your Game

Spinning out of Chatty’s discussion on the “Tyranny of Fun“, we see that what a lot of the argument boils down to is that people have different playstyles and tastes, and different games meet those playstyles and tastes. However, many of the “Edition Warriors” out there attempt to frame it as a matter of one game being better than another, through a metric of their own divising. Indeed, as the discussions heat up, it goes further into claiming that the designers and players of the non-preferred edition are incompetent (and in one particularly disgusting case that I’ve seen lately, forum posters have actually described how they’d torture some game designers because they worked on a game. I think we can all agree that goes too far.)

Now, the primary conflict that’s been in my face lately is what I’ve alluded to above: 3.xe D&D for 4e D&D. For my gaming groups and I, the change was more than welcome, but that’s because of our playstyle. I’ve been running D&D with a battlemap since 3e came out (with a few mini-campaigns in there where I tried otherwise, but found that my awful spacial sense prevented me from taking advantage of all the rules that were intended to be there.) Our group likes it when there’s some semblance of balance between the classes. We like to kick some butt when playing D&D (though not necessarily in every RPG we play.) We have a healthy mix of min-maxers and those who don’t care to optimize as much. (I also strongly believe in the Stormwind Fallacy, since I play with plenty of people who can min-max with the best of them and have had incredibly deep character story arcs.)

There’s also been some other side-conflicts that have erupted independent of the edition wars. For instance, as alluded to above, there’s lots of complaints about “min-maxers” and “munchkins.” You also hear plenty of the old cliche of “that’s not role-playing, that’s roll-playing!” I could certainly argue the specific points that have been raised, but I’m going to go broader: why is “roll-playing” bad? If you have a group that really enjoys nothing but combat, rolling dice, and blowing stuff up, who are we to step and say “you’re doing it wrong!” Yes, I’m sure we all have “bad gamer” stories, but I find that many of those more stem from an anti-social PLAYER that an inherently worse PLAYSTYLE.

But it’s not just limited to D&D by any means. In fact, I’ve been somewhat shocked to find that players of different editions come together to gang up on LARPers! LARPing is a pretty close cousin to tabletop roleplaying games, probably even closer than boardgames of the same genre. Again, yes, there are plenty of stories of LARPing making others look bad (and some things that draw the derision of the mainstream and cause bad associations), but again, I’m not going to say that what they’re doing is worse than what I enjoy, and to go onto LARP message boards and tell them to stop having fun.

We can even move out of this field and find similar conflicts: Fallout 1/2 versus Fallout 3. Some people really enjoy turn-based games, whereas others don’t. Some people DO just want Oblivion with Guns. Is that wrong? Arguments can be made that it’s far from the original spirit of the game, but I don’t believe that makes it any worse. (I’ve heard the same argument for Fallout as I’ve heard with D&D: “they should have just called it something else.” That goes back to “what is the essence of a game.”)

Even the humble boardgame is not safe from this type of rhetoric. A ways back on Boardgamegeek, there was a huge conflict over Eurogames vs. Ameritrash, two styles of boardgames with very different design philosophies. There have been huge, long threads hashing out what is better. My design philosophies tend to lean heavily towards the Euro end of things for a variety of reasons (even if my game falls somewhere in the middle), but I can’t fault anyone for wanting to pick up a handful of dice and trying to blast each other. There are design philosophies that I would argue for any game (and as a critic and a designer, I am going to be opinionated about any game you put in front of me) but I’m not going to tell anyone not to enjoy a game, unless the game designer is a real dick or something.

Now, lest I be branded a hypocrite, I’m sure I’ve fallen prey to some of the same accusations at some point during my long gaming career and my almost-three year career here. But I will say that I’ve tried very hard not to go out of my way to drop into an online discussion about a product I’m not fond of and complain that it’s not like another product I like. I find it’s much more useful to look at a game in terms of its design goals and audience, and assess it from there. And if I’m not part of that audience… I let it pass on by.

To close, I’d like to quote from the seminar run by Mike Mearls at Origins:

Whenever there’s a new edition of D&D, there are some people who buy all new stuff, some people who wait to decide, and some people who like the way it is now so won’t change. Pathfinder is good for people who don’t want to move. It’s good for everyone since it keeps people playing games.

Getting more people to play games is essential to the survival of game companies, to game conventions, and to the hobby in general. Telling people not to have fun only damages our hobby as a whole.