God what a title! Pity I didn’t write the article .
A few minutes ago, Wally, a non-RPG blogging fan sent me an article he wrote.
The insights he brings are troubling and somewhat accurate. Be warned about the explicit use of sexual language.
Although, I must confess, I just can’t bear to imagine my Friday night game, surrounded by a bunch of married guys, being construed as Tabletop Pornography.
See for yourself and please, go wild in the comments. Wally is a good writer.
85 words.
(P.S: I apologize if you get the Increase your Penis size google ads, I need to ajust the adsense filter)
It’s a good read, but I don’t agree with most of it. It seems like he’s missing, ignoring, or glazing over a few issues that take what he’s saying a few steps beyond just rpg=sex…
I’m not that well versed with this type of subject, but by reading the article, and with other things I’ve learned over the years, he’s sort of saying “A = B”, when I think it’s really more like “A and B are both subsets of C, so they have many things in common.”
😛
Edit: Er… why is CommentLuv saying that my name is “Gem”… and show some picture of a girl?
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@SeiferTim –
Thanks for reading. Actually the combat:fantasygaming::sex:erotica isn’t central to the article as I (on rereading what I’ve written) understand it – the post is to do with how difficult it is to commercialize fantasy (fantasizing), how much easier to market satisfaction (a state, an end) than the ongoing exploration of fantasy, and how we should treat pornography/erotica and RPG’s/children’s games as fantasy-related and therefore analogous, rather than separating them artificially by the form the participants’ eventual satisfaction takes (for RPG’s: combat, dicerolling; for porn: flogging). The initial analogy illustrates or clarifies a point, hopefully – namely that what’s happening when you play D&D has nothing to do with combat or spellcasting, it just ends up in those things, and to treat the activity as if it boiled down to its ends is to obey a limiting commercial imperative.
I don’t want to shut down comments – far from it! – but I do wanna avoid being unclear, which is an unavoidable side effect of me being a deeply, deeply inconsistent and at times flat-out silly writer. 🙂
Wallys last blog post..It went somewhere unexpected yet predictable, meaning it’s me who has to change, not the story. The story will follow me.
@Wally
Sorry, I still don’t see it. I understand perfectly what you’re saying, I just wish I was 1/10th as capable of putting it into words as you are so that I can explain my reasoning.
Not that I think there’s anything wrong with your reasoning, or your article, I just feel that there’s one other piece that’s missing that I can’t quite put my finger on…
SeiferTims last blog post..Tutorial: Show D&D Icon Font on Page using FLIR
Some interesting commentary on the evolution of RPG gaming aids. I suspect there is a parallel arc in pornography (that is, things have gotten more explicit over the years). I’m not sure that means the two activities (as imagination stimulators) are as analogous as the post suggests, or rather that they are unique in that regard. Everything seems to have gotten less subtle/more explicit in the last few decades.
I’d chalk it up to the combined media deluge. Video games have been largely driven by graphic realism. So much so that the design of video cards has become a centerpiece of the industry. When a game combines interesting gameplay or a unique mechanic with hyper-realistic graphics, sales go through the roof. However, many games sell on their graphic merits alone. Audiences have become conditioned to look at the pictures without paying much attention to the content.
I think the mechanical aspects of the D & D rule system have languished in the wake of the publishing juggernaut of splatbooks. Yeah, they’re cool to look at, but they’re often rife with typos, rules that need extensive errata, and information that is poorly organized. The rules are stuffed in there to fill the space between the pretty pictures. As long as the players can build their ultimate fighting machines armed with 7′ great swords and spiked armor, they’re happy.
How true is this in other aspects of life? In the U.S., you could argue that this is the mechanic behind the credit crisis. How many people bought McMansions when they needed a simple home, or took out 2nd mortgages to pay for elaborate rooms to house their SUV-sized plasma screen TVs, when they could have made do with the durable 32″ CRT they’d had for the last 10 years?
Damn! I clicked through in my RSS feed reader just to see if I _would_ get the p3n15 adverts… oh.. did i just say that outloud?
>_>
<_<
OK.. I’ll read his post. thanks for the link to a non-RPG blog! heh…
jonathans last blog post..Open Game Table: Clarification and Discussions
Made a comment on Wally’s site about the original article (which hopefully he’ll forgive me for… posts that make me think can make me a bit wordy). I don’t think you have much to worry about as far as your game being like tabletop porn though. Unless you really want it to be. Imagination doesn’t always go where you want it to but it never betrays who you are. So the only way for it to really disturb you is if you aren’t being honest with yourself.
Although since we’re talking about sex appeal already, who’s your pin-up girl? She’s kinda cute. I’d ask for her number but she doesn’t seem the cell phone type.
@Seifer Tim: I took the article with the proverbial grain of salt. While it was about D&D it also wasn’t. Wally is what I would call an exploratory writer and it makes for quite the entertaining read.
I actually disagree with his definition of satisfaction. I don’t see the ‘orgasm’ or ‘combat’ as satisfactory in itself… altough it can bring release or brief pleasure.
I’m more of the ‘satisfaction comes from effort, frustration and timely release of said frustration”.
@Wally: Thanks again for bringing this up to my attention. It seriously was a fresh take on things we have discussed extensively.
@Anarkeith: Welcome on the Blog! Consumerism has struck D&D ever since TSR realized that people ate up book after book. It’s the shift in quality that ends up lowering the overall experience I dislike. But then again, nobody ios forcing me to buy the books… or accept them when given to me.
@Lanir: Ha ha! She’s a Succubus from Dungeon magazine… The issue about Strongholds and Fortress… I’m sure Rich from Order of the stick used that image to create the Succubus from the linear guild.
@Chatty:
That’s similar to my mindset on this. At the highest level, there’s ‘pleasure’, then there are a myriad of ways to achieve pleasure, of which sex is one – but not the only way, and each method has it’s own type of pleasure that is gained. I think they’re similar and related, but not identical.
Gah, I’m no good at explaining these things 😛
SeiferTims last blog post..Tutorial: Show D&D Icon Font on Page using FLIR
She’s from Dungeon huh? Well there go my usual pick-up lines. Somehow my plan B lines don’t sound like they’ll work out as well.
“So… Seen any good stalactites recently?”
“What’s your sign? And, er, please don’t brand me with it.”
“Have you eaten the face off any stupidly too large to fit in the door monsters lately?”
“You look like the girl that’s causing -all- the monsters to wander.”
I prefer the original quote:
“Combat in Dungeons & Dragons is like sex in pornography”
To me, it says “While there may be other good things in DnD, combat is the main reason people are there.” Which seems like a perfect fit with DnD to me.
I haven’t played any other table-top RPGs yet, well one game of Rolemaster many years ago that never really took off, I have listened to many Podcasts and read a lot of blogs/forums/etc and they lead me to the belief that if what you are looking for is a game that is not combat oriented you are better off looking to other games. (Holy run on sentence.)
DnD does combat, and it does it well. And for the most part it gets out of the way for more involved social interaction.
So basically:
“We start in a tavern” or “we go talk to the king/lord” is the DnD equivalent of “The pizza guy rings the doorbell”… its just an introduction to get the audience into the real action.
Does this stop the game from having a deeper storyline? Of course not. But how many DnD players don’t like rolling their d20s, and get a certain satisfaction from smiting the goblin?
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Hats off to the bold article! That’s a whole different arena.
Having said that; it looks to me like the author is kind of negative about his/her discovery…
At the risk of being shot down by people with other agenda’s; I think everything we do is done with the goal of (preferably sexual) satisfaction in mind; which proves to me how resourceful we are by default. For a marketing agency to use this merely human attribute to its advantage, is just plain old smart, and I applaud it.
Tim Kask (TSR’s first employee (74-82), think Sword of Kas) over on dragonsfoot wrote at length about how early D&D was all about the imagination, the gestalt-mind of the players overcoming the puzzles, tricks, and traps the DM put forward, no matter how fantastic; but that a loud part of the market always pushed for more rules, more certainty, wanting a definitive answer for every question, especially conflict.
So ‘Wax Banks’ there’s wrong about what D&D was created for originally, as far as I can see. Still, he’s right about what sells in porn, RPGs, and everything else: there’s always a money-shot. Sex, violence, and the grossly simplistic but definitive resolution thereof.
The products just conform to the market. Those that don’t quickly fade away into little niche markets with little or no competition, like RPGs with vague combat rules.
I think you guys are getting way too hung up on the pr0n=D&D thing. The argument is clever, and I like it, and it simply consists of observing that the mechanics overwhelm the underlying purpose during the drive to market the product. Pr0n is just the most obvious representation of this phenomenon, which I think it’s reasonable to say occurs in many areas of commerce etc. But I think its too simplistic, and over-simplifies the dynamics of modern pr0n and RPGs.
The most obvious way in which this can be seen is the claims about splatbooks. They just don’t serve the role Wax Banks claims. The article ignores the importance players put on the imprimatur of game authors over products, i.e. we buy expansion packs because we trust our game company to develop the ideas which interest us in such a way that they work within the game rules. Good expansion packs are the very opposite of the “splat” which Wax Banks claims.
Similarly modern developments in pr0n don’t necessarily always represent the victory of mechanics over feeling. contra Tussock, there is not “always a money shot”, which is in fact a reasonably modern innovation in pr0n. Modern mechanics in that film genre at least partially represent the increasing diversity and vibrancy of modern human sex lives, and may actually continue to reflect the fantasies and desires of ordinary people. It’s not as if the study of this genre is exactly unbiassed enough to provide clear answers as to what the viewer “wants”, which makes comparisons with it pretty dangerous unless, like Wax Banks, you’ve watched an awful lot of it…
I think this is an interesting topic. I commented at Banks’ place, I’ve commented here, I think I’ll post about it on my own blog…
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