Significance

Let's set a few rules.  In the real world, you're not a game designer until you've sold a game.  You're not a "good" game designer until you've sold a million games.  You're not a "great" game designer until your game is still selling at least a hundred thousand copies a year ten years after launch.  Finally, you haven't done anything important unless people are still playing your game a hundred years after you've made it.

Ouch, eh?  Yeah.  I concede the gentle reader will want to bend those rules a lot in their favour, which is fine.  Only, I have no intention of bending them for me.

It is hard to write a book that your own generation will enjoy and appreciate.  Most will never do that much.  I once hoped I'd do that much and more, but I'm learning to be comfortable falling short.  I may yet, who knows?  But significance as a writer is a whole other thing.  Pick your writer: Louisa May Alcott, D.H. Lawrence, Jack London, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickensen, Horace Greeley, Ralph Waldo Emerson ... these were all celebrated as writers in their own time.  Then they were celebrated by the children brought up after their own time.  Then they were celebrated by the grandchildren.  And now they are celebrated by a generation that might, at best, barely remember anyone of the generation for which these writers wrote.  These work of these writers survived.  A written word that has not yet survived, that has not won its right to be significant to people not of its time, cannot yet be called important.

The game designers of today are entitled to their fleeting respect.  But that is a far cry from my believing that anyone is going to care about the old school renaissance 58 years from now.  My book How to Run is sure to be dust; as will any of this work put down for this blog.  This is the standard to which I hold myself.  As of yet, I don't think I've done anything significant.  Perhaps this is why I don't take to praise all that well.  Or why I won't give it easily.

A respectable game designer is a rare thing, from this point of view.  It requires that for a game designer to earn my respect, they have to want more than making a thing for common use by the general public.  For most designers, that's the pinnacle for them.  For me, that's barely putting one foot forward on the mountain.

In 2004, Penny Arcade was a significant voice in the games industry, including influencing thought and philosophy about D&D.  This comic from 2004 created a considerable stir:

The observation remains seminal to this page on Wikipedia.  We've been living this reality since, so I'm fairly sure they were dead on.  When it came out, it felt edgy and new; now it feels ho-hum and obvious.  Penny Arcade has been off the radar for 8 years.  Imagine what it must be like for them, to have hit their stride at a time before Patreon.  Yet what gamer didn't read Penny Arcade in 2004?  What happened?  Why did they stop being relevant?

You and I can play a game where we name hundreds of people in the music industry, film, literature, politics and youtube who were huge once ... and are now unrecognizable to most of the population.  Recently I ran across a musician named Duane Eddy.  Eddy had 15 top-40 hits between 1958 and 1963; he had 7 in 1958 and 1959, two more than Buddy Holly had in that same time period (Holly had 8 altogether, from 1957 to 1959, when he died).  How many Duane Eddy hits do you remember?  Have you even heard of him?  I'm 57 and I hadn't.  His last hit happened the year before I was born.

So, deciding to listen, here's his first hit in 1957: Rebel Rouser.  And it's instantly recognizable ... from Forrest Gump.  Which, interestingly, fits with the film-time of the scene in which Forrest is running from a truck — well done, Zemeckis.  Eddy is not a one-hit wonder.  He had more hits in his time than Bon Jovi (6), Blondie (8) or Barry White (10).  But you recognize their names, right?  Maybe that's only because they're more recent.  There's a good chance someone reading this has no idea who Bon Jovi is.  Yeah.  Frightening, eh?

Let's look at those rules again.  Yes, I'm not a game designer.  Oh, I call myself that, but it's a lie.  I've never invented a game that I sold to anyone.  I did invent a few games that were very popular with my peers for a time, but none that I've sold.

My agenda has been explaining how a particular game can be played a LOT better.  I teach how to be a better dungeon master; how to build a better game world; how to advance rules that fix game problems; how to view the game; what the game can teach you; and the relationships between the game and the real world.  I have written books about this ... but I've never written a game.

I'm piggy-backing on the game, and that is no way to become significant.  Once the game ceases its hold on the populace, the work I've done will come to naught.  Except that those people I've affected will apply what they've learned from me, and what they teach themselves while following my example, to whatever comes next.  I will be forgotten.  I will never have a wikipedia page like Penny Arcade and I'll never be brought up as an example of an ex-famous person, because I've never been remotely famous.  But the work I'm doing will still have an effect.  I am changing minds; and that's my fundamental goal.

I'm not a game designer, but I am a game philosopher.  As a philosopher, I have less and less interest parsing subjects that will never achieve a resolution.  "Should game-designers take responsibility?" is a null program.  Whether or not they should, they either will or won't, about which I have no influence, because taking responsibility isn't a game issue, it's a psychological issue.  A person who wants to take responsibility, who happens to be a game designer, will automatically take it.  A person who feels no desire to take responsibility won't, period; not as a game designer, not as a lawyer, not as a doctor, not as an engineer.  Which, incidentally, is the reason why the academic expectation is impossibly high for those professions: because you won't survive if you don't work with others; and others will recognize instantly if you're the sort that doesn't take responsibility.  In which case, they will exclude you, and you will go down in flames.

Game design is a soft subject.  It isn't socially crucial.  A game designer can be woefully irresponsible and no one will die.  A few marks will lose some bucks.  Big deal.  Game designers can work alone, even if they're terrific monsters like Phil Fish ... until they gather so much hate that no one will touch their games.  We gain nothing trying to convince these people that what they do matters, because IT DOESN'T.  If it did, there'd be harder consequences than unpopularity.

Talking about expectations of responsibility, or for example, when rules should be simplified, or how rules should be made more readable, is a waste of my time.  I'm not giving a game designer seminar here.  If what's wanted is learning how to write clearly, there are only a million videos online talking about that.  Those videos are ONLY useful to people who can't write.  For anyone who can write, those videos are ... erm ... well I guess they're useful to someone.

Occasionally I've written a post about why rules are necessary.  I'm befuddled by having to address this subject at all.  It's a group activity.  ALL group activities, even those that involve nothing but a bar, a table, drinks and time, have rules.  These rules may not be written down, but it's sure fucking obvious when someone breaks one.

I was recently asked to write another post answering this latter question.  As ever, I go straight to Calvin & Hobbes:

Judging from game descriptions I find on Reddit, this is how everyone except me and some 60 other people plays D&D.  It's easy to find huge discussions on Reddit and elsewhere in which every commenter defends this approach, as the only decent way to play, while vilifying anyone who so much as mentions a steadfast rule.  I must point out that the above depicts a child and a make-believe toy.  Two real children have to be pulled apart when this shit occurs ... by an adult who THEN MAKES RULES because that's how children grow up.  Calvin, funny as he is, is funny because he's a fuckin' sociopathic narcissist, not a role-model.  Except, of course, on Reddit, where everyone is so far apart, anonymous, has an audience and can therefore be a fuckwad/shitcock ... just like Calvin is to everyone.

Anyway ...

There's no sense in going down these roads over and over.  It's far harder to talk of things we can change, things we can improve, ways we can be better at something we love doing.  Let's talk of those things, since they're significant.