Catch is a Bug

Let's talk about catch.

Tynan Sylvester, in his book Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences, describes the game of catch as an opportunity for two people to participate in a joint activity that keeps them physically busy, while allowing them to talk.  Traditionally, a father and his son participate in throwing a baseball back and forth, because it gives them something to focus on when the conversation becomes awkward.  Sylvester adds, "The fact that the game of catch is simple and thoughtless is not a bug; it's a feature.  More complexity would just get in the way of the conversation."

Of course, as children grow up, complexity becomes the feature, since as adults we move adroitly towards more complex games.  Following up on this (because game design books never explain how their premises apply to table-top role-playing, only video role-playing), we can argue that the excessive complexity of something like D&D seriously threatens the sociability of game-play, because it has the potential for obliterating any need to have a conversation at all, since the game is so engrossing.

Hence, we might consider two threads worth discussion.  First, that a role-playing game to be played well requires the minimization of conversation, because it is conversation that gets in the way of the complexity.  Second, we have a clear, concise explanation for why some people rail so vehemently at the complexity of RPGs ... because if the game isn't simple enough, they find their accessibility to conversation compromised.

Consider the motive, then, for the players:  when we sit down to participate, do we want to play, and say fuck conversation, or do we want to talk, and fuck playing?  This need not be a black-and-white thing.  The mix might be 3 parts talk and 5 parts play; or 7 parts talk and 1 part play.  Finding the right group means finding the right composite between talking and playing that fits your personal expectation.

We might, then, though we're sure to be called out on it for creating a straw man, that those who bark so much about simplifying their games really just wish they could talk more and adjudicate less.

So let's not go down either road.

Let's go back to catch.

Thinking on good memories I had with my father, catch is certainly one of them.  We would play frisbee in knee-deep water off the beach at Sylvan Lake, in about fifty different spots contained within this picture over the space of 30 years.  It was pleasant and friendly, exactly the sort of experience that Sylvester describes, as the frisbee-playing, the beach, the sun, the scenes of other people all around us, each provided for enough distraction so that twenty minutes spent doing something together meant that we were certain to have a good talk and a good time.

This does not, however, describe the manner in which talking was celebrated in my family.  While games did figure into some nights, as did sitting around campfires, fishing off docks and hiking through the nearby mountains, my parents encouraged their children to sit in chairs, respectably, drinking lemonade as kids, and later coffee, and finally wine and spirits, without any game play whatsoever.  Many a time I sat for hours with my father, doing nothing else but gently imbibing in coffee or spirits, talking.  My mother came from alcoholics, and my father knew many as well, so neither ever drank to excess.  I never saw either of them drunk, but there was always liquor in the house and when I reached eighteen, I was entitled access to it.  I don't get drunk either.

Those conversations weren't always good.  In fact, more often than not, especially as I got into my thirties and forties, they got downright awful.  But they instilled an appreciation for human beings to sit and engage on a wide variety of subjects for lengthy periods of time.  About 19 times out of 20, apart from D&D, I don't get together with my friends to work-out, kayak, fish, see a football game or any of the other things that virtually everyone else does.  I prefer to get together with people and talk.  With my friends, it is easy to do this for 6-10 hours at a stretch.  With my daughter, I can do it for six days straight, as we demonstrated to ourselves when we went to Toronto together in 2014.

These are the people I play D&D with ... my friends, my daughter and son-in-law, my partner Tamara.  We get together, we talk for an hour; we finish playing, and we can talk into the wee hours of the morning, if there's nothing special to do the next day (though I'm sure that, post-covid, the grandchild has nixed that experience for awhile).  And so, when we play D&D, there isn't any reason to talk ... except about D&D.  Perhaps that is one reason why I'm able to play such an intensely complex game, with people who want it that way.

One theme that has run through our culture, going right back to before I was born, has been a lamentation that the art of conversation is dead.  I tend to agree.  I only have a few friends; those who cannot talk on a level that interests me bore me to tears and I do not waste my time with them.  I stopped going to parties a decade ago because I cannot abide being in a room with twenty people who are playing board games because they can't bear each other's company well enough to just talk (or they haven't remotely enough to say to fill five minutes, without talking about their jobs or their miseries).  When I was a teenager, and we were all dumb as socks, we could sit in a room and talk about the humanities and the arts until the sun came up.  I can still do that; but the people I did it with have grown up into poor souls who can only talk about grouting their bathrooms or the principles underlying actuarial tables.  God damn, but the world of adult people grew awfully myopic and banal ... a banality I see reflected in thousands of youtube videos and blog pages.  It's a good thing that there is enough beer in the world to render a substantial portion of the population dumb.  It's not like they've got anything to say.

Gab is not a gift.  It's a means of conveying passion.  People that are full of passion cannot shut up about it.  People who are dead inside need catch to prove they're still animated.  Catch, and the dependency on it as a crutch, is absolutely a bug.  Sylvester and others can herald its success as a great social generator, but if the brain is so on the fritz that it can do no better than to produce smoke and stench, well then fuck it.  If you want to know if the DM you want to play with has any chance of running an interesting game, then prode and poke that lump atop those shoulders to see if it can function without a pull-cord.  If it can, check first to see if what comes out is just the same choking sound repeatedly without surcease, or if it's able to hum more than one droning tune.  If it can; and if it demonstrates that there's enough passion rolling around that it doesn't need a starter to run perpetually, then make sure you play in its game.

If you're a DM, and you don't know how to talk, here's advice for you.  Quit DMing.