Yak-Hack

Recently, I've been questioning the primacy of "Design" within RPG products. There's a kind of determinism that is generally accepted among RPG folks that Design determines what Play looks like. Listening to some versions of what Game Design is, you'd get the sense that the job of a designer is to manipulate and mind-control the people who play it, and perhaps to teach lessons about some things. If they are correct, and game design truly is a form of Vault-Tec style behavioral control, we might have to ask ourselves if this is even desirable? I don't doubt that design to a certain extent shapes the behavioral patterns and the choices role-players make, but I find that designers more often than not overrate their own presence at the table in a rather self-aggrandizing way. There is a famous, perhaps dubious sentiment surrounding Vampire The Masquerade - that the games mechanics seemed so contrary to the intended playstyle of the game that it is a wonder a...

The Ideal Games Debater Hey, you there! Are you into debating, reviewing or designing games? Do you find yourself alienating everyone you talk to or engage with? Are the people who agree with you all gigantic assholes? I get it, taking a stance and defending it is fun, exhilarating even, especially in those moments where you've really humiliated and "destroyed" another person because of how "good" you are at debating. Maybe it reflects badly on you as a person in some circles, but why should you care? You won, you were correct, and at the end of the day, the truth is what matters. Except, of course, that we aren't really talking about truth at all, but a set of assumptions that bad-faith debaters are making about what roleplaying games are, how they exist in the real world and how to evaluate them. Those assumptions can be challenged, and circumvent a lot of toxic, divisive debate. Challenging those assumption might be hard, because you've built yo...