Engineering colleges and limits on human power

From my living room, I have a good view of a hill on which stands a college campus. The college is focused on architecture, engineering, and the sciences, although, this being the US, it also offers degrees in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

My undergraduate degrees were conferred by a similar institution, although one where the humanities and social sciences were, for the most part, relegated to a service department. It lies on the side of a mountain - my legs were much stronger when I was forced to climb up and down from classes back then.

Isn't that a bit curious, however? Why is that one college on a hill, why is the other on the side of a mountain? Surely it would be more convenient for the students and faculty if the college were at the same level as the city's downtown, where some of the dorms are, and surely my alma mater would have been much more accessible if it were on a flat surface. These are engineering-dominated colleges - surely if any body would have the knowledge and ability to turn that hill, that slope, into a conveniently flat surface, it would be these.

And yet, there are limits. Despite the fact that humanity is almost defined by its ability to redesign its environment, in practice, often we work with what's in front of us. We will build a road around or over a hill instead of tunneling through, we will accept a given coastline to build along, instead of filling it in or digging it out. When we don't, sometimes we regret it - climate change with its hotter, more acidic, higher sea levels will likely destabilize neighborhoods built on reclaimed land.

We currently live in a world that is full of environments that are close enough to what we can live with that we are able to engineer them to our comfort, or at least, to our survival. When we leave the Earth and try to live in outer space, or in other planets, the whole situation is different. A system's failure doesn't just require us to accept slightly harsher conditions, and maybe retreat to a safer environment - it will likely mean death. We don't even have to go to space - going too far into the ocean is dangerous enough in that sense.

I think we should respect the limits, to understand that we have them. Our imagination may be free, but we should constrain it so that it leads us into improvements of what can be done, not paths forward that might eliminate all of our margins of error.

Modern art and computer graphics

Last weekend I spent a long time at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, most of it covering their 5th floor galleries, holding their "Collection 1880s-1940s". Now that I've been in computer graphics for a while, I feel like I get a bit more of an appreciation for what many of the artists were doing, particularly the abstract ones.

Piet Mondrian's works (like this, this, or this), which used to look like a bunch of rectangles, now seem like representations of spatial hierarchies that you would see in computer graphics, like quadtrees or bounding volume hierarchies. Joaquín Torres-García's work here is a bit like a three-dimensional version of this concept, and Irene Rice Pereira's work here is like the visualization of a more elaborate one.

I've always enjoyed Vasily Kandinsky's work, but now pieces like this, this, and this, forming complicated pictures out of simple elements, have me thinking of how real graphical scenes are composed for rendering.

Even Pablo Picasso, that I've always struggled with, has made more sense to me, and I could finally internalize an interpretation I read somewhere, that he was trying to capture a single scene or moving person from multiple perspectives or at multiple times.

I wonder what other art is out there for which I can find a new understanding.

Perception-oriented graphics

I'm going to try and express an understanding that is forming in my brain as a convergence of several interests I've expressed through the years.

Recently I've mentioned some first impressions from Vision Science: From Photons to Phenomenology. I noted that it seems like its models of visual perception mirror the way a modern graphics pipeline is structured. Reading further in, that impression remains. It's not entirely surprising - I can't imagine the designers and engineers who built up the modern pipeline were ignorant of theories and practices of computer vision, which is one of the three disciplines covered by this book (the other two are psychology and neurophysiology), and, for example, the explanation for the importance of effects like diffuse shading in a computer graphics guide I have read recently, OpenGL SuperBible, mirror those in Vision Science.

Much earlier in the year, I mentioned that I'd gotten into folklore the previous year, and specifically Edward T. Hall's The Hidden Dimension, which discussed how people from different backgrounds perceive and make use of space differently when they interact with each other, as well as how different cultures and genres express spatial information visually.

Even before that, I reflected on a talk I gave years ago about virtual reality and various types of immersion. I expressed an idiosyncratic and limited version of rejecting the immersive fallacy, the notion that the more video games are able to reproduce the sensory impressions that a real experience would provide, the more players will enjoy and be taken in by the game world.

To this let me add something I've not discussed, mostly because I don't have as much personal experience with it yet: physically-based rendering (PBR for short), which is a set of techniques on the graphics side of video games, film, and other visual media, meant to put sensory reproduction to practice by trying to approach a close physical simulation of the interaction of light with various real materials. This encourages moving towards computationally expensive techniques such as ray tracing to generate the visuals, practically expensive techniques such as photogrammetry to extract light interaction information from real materials, and then storing this information and making use of that when rendering, which tends to increase the memory and processing requirements further.

If you happen to be thinking about the next game or digital movie you're going to create, I think it's worth it to take a step back and ask: what is it that rendering is supposed to do for a video game or a movie? Its main task to provide information to a person, a player or viewer, about a virtual world; or possibly to pass along a mood. Perspective 3D rendering of a view of an environment and objects within it is one way of doing this, but it is not necessarily the best. Even in modern games and realistic visualizations, other forms are used. For example, map applications usually provide orthographic projections rather than perspective projections, because that is a better way of providing regional information in graphical form. Even in realistic modern 3d video games, a lot of information is still provided through UI and menus. What are those? Stylistic, non-perspective descriptions of information, laid over the 3D view, instead of being placed within it. And yet, after a bit of a learning curve, they are a very effective way to present information, better than if a perspective rendered substitute were required.

Making use of these non-perspective, non-simulative representations was a recurring problem for me when working on virtual reality applications. Since control of the visual field is given over to the computer, it needs to provide something close to what your own visual field provides, in terms of reactivity and the organization of information, so entirely stylized overlays, like subtitles placed at a constant place in the visual image, which work pretty well when watching a movie on a stationary display, can be jarring and even lead to simulation sickness. This results in solutions such as placing them inside of artificial objects in the environment, which leads to challenges such as making sure that they are not obscured by other elements in the environment.

But it is possible to think about this differently. Instead of starting with the idea of having a three dimensional world built towards being presented through a perspective projection (with at most a parallel orthographic projection for an automap), it should be possible to create a more sophisticated logical framework connecting them, and decide how to turn this into visual data later.

Lateral thinking about how to render still exists in contemporary game design. Take shadows, for example. Shadows require a bit of work to render, over just ignoring them. But as Vision Science explains, shadows are an important tool for the visual system to extract at least two pieces of information from the environment: their detailed spatial structure, and how far away they are from the viewer. However, these two uses of shadows don't have to be rendered the same way, and sometimes it's best not to. If you've played any modern third-person 3D platformer, you would have noticed that yes, there's naturalistic shadowcasting that is consistent with the lighting conditions, but there's also usually a small shadow right under your character, regardless of the direction of light. That's because when light is coming from above, the vertical distance between the object and the shadow gives you very good information as to where the object is in 3D space, and it also tells you where the object will fall if it were dropped. That's essential when you want your in-game avatar to perform complicated jumps, a basic problem of the platformer genre.

Instead of thinking of shadows as a physical effect that must be simulated as realistically as possible to create an immersive scene, you can think of shadows as a way of conveying information to the player. That is a creative choice. An ideal version of what I would call "perception-oriented graphics" would let you make decisions like this for the overall display of the system - whether you want to display a perspective projection of the space or an orthographic overview - as well as for individual objects or phenomena - like the question of whether to use light-reactive or drop-down shadows. Maybe some day I will have the opportunity to work on something like this.

Alienable and inalienable in creative work

For the most part I've kept this blog separate from my current career as a software engineer, as well as from my prior career as an academic. It is separated from them also in being mine - what I write here, to the best of my understanding of my situation, does belong to me, hence that copyright notice at the bottom of the page.

In my paying work, I'm used to creating things that are not my own. In graduate school, even things I wrote that were mine initially, would be assigned, often exclusively, to whoever published them. If I ever wanted to commercialize anything I came up with, however unlikely that would be as a theoretician, it would have to go through a department of my university, with them receiving a significant share of any subsequent revenue. As a software engineer, the code I write as part of my job is "work for hire", meaning that I don't own it - my employer does. There was a brief respite where I created an indie game that was mine and that I sold a handful of copies of, but that was the exception.

This puts me in a position that is different from that of many of the people who create the things I talk about in this blog. Many fiction authors retain control over the work they write, and of how it may be used, and role-playing game designers, especially the indie ones, also are dealing with intellectual property that they own, and their control over it is foundational to their ability to continue making money off of it, and to their prestige as designers. Most of my colleagues and I, on the other hand, are paid money to create something for someone else. Our creation is explicitly alienated from us not just in the basic sense that anything is alienated when we put it outside ourselves as a means to an end, but in the sense that we relinquish control over it pretty much as soon as it leaves our fingers. The practicality is a bit different, as software engineering does require a lot of back-and-forth, return to old code to fix or improve it, et cetera, but in terms of ownership it is one and the same if I go to my own code from six months ago to fix a bug, or to someone else's code - or, more realistically, to code I contributed a bit to six months ago and has been changed further since then.

And yet, as time goes on, something about us grows and isn't given away. It's not just the credit - assuming our names appear somewhere, more often so in academia, less often so in the software industry. It's the very fact that we've created these things, and the understanding we gained when creating them, that cannot be alienated from us. I can't sell or give away the fact that I can program, that I do have ever-increasing understanding of the programming languages and technologies I have used, and of whatever algorithms I came up with. That I have learned and discussed, and gained skills - at most I can be barred from using some or all of that in particular situations, but they can't be torn out of me the way that specific programs I've written were pulled from my grasp.

Qualifications are similar. I have a PhD. That is something that at most could be taken away from someone if fraud was discovered - but that would just mean that the fact that the PhD was achieved was never quite true. For qualifications that need to be renewed, like a legal or medical license, the situation is a bit less stable - but even then, it's not like any of us can sell our qualifications directly. I can't go to the intellectual property market and find someone willing to pay a certain amount of money, accept it, and then suddenly that person has a PhD and I don't, or maybe they have a duplicate of my PhD. We can demand payment for the use of our qualifications, effectively renting them out, but we cannot be cut out of the equation entirely without engaging in something fraudulent.

Nevertheless, there is something nice about having some creations that are alienable but still belong to me. It's easier to let people read a text than explain an understanding.

Ervingiad I - The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

After finding the application of his frame analysis model in Gary Alan Fine's Shared Fantasy to be very insightful, and subsequently that most of his books were reasonably priced in the second hand market, I went on a bit of an Erving Goffman shopping spree, and got 11 of his works, which I plan on reading in mostly chronological order, then posting some impressions.

First up is The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It's an attempt to analyze social interaction through metaphors informed by theater. The main idea is that any personal interaction is a finite, limited exchange of data which is supposed to express much a larger body of information. For example, your twenty minute experience at a clothing store is supposed to inform you that you were served by a professional and got fitting clothes at reasonable prices. Twenty minutes are not enough time for you to really perform research on the person or people helping you, make comparisons with other establishments, or evaluate the quality of what you bought. Instead, you were subjected to 20 minutes of a performance, a presentation, of competence, selection, and purchase, that left you with the impression that this is the information you received. In order to do this, the salesperson, their colleagues, and the entire environment were designed and have practiced to create the performance that gives you this impression, aside from - and possibly instead of - actually learning the competence and providing a good price.

From this starting point, Goffman builds up an elaborate theoretical framework: a team of people works together to manage impressions for an audience in a certain front stage, they have a back stage in which to do work that is necessary for the performance, from which the audience is excluded, and in which team members have conversations which establish that they are a team and united in their oppositional relationship with the audience, although the latter do collaborate sometimes to maintain the performance, especially in front of outsiders to the performance itself. The existence of colleagues - members of other teams who perform similar roles there - and other unusual team and audience members further complicate the model.

I think that frame analysis, which he developed later, streamlined this model, or reconfigured it to not feel as layered and sometimes contradictory as it reads. Nevertheless, even in this early study there are a lot of points that resonate with me. Having been in various situations where I was "performing" in this manner - for example, when working in retail - I can recognize a lot of the elements of his model as lived realities. It's interesting to see the way feeling the need to maintain this performance in front of outsiders might make people who are in other contexts antagonistic collaborate with each other. Also, on a very personal level, I've always struggled with getting into and then maintaining the discretion of staying in the backroom, that is required, beyond technical competence, to be a productive member of a team, and it puts some less than stellar experiences I've had in context.

This relatively short book is very readable. I strongly recommend it if anything here sounded interesting. Aside from more elaboration on these points, and a more thorough presentation of the model, with many examples from field work, other studies, and fiction, he makes frequent references to unpublished research by his University of Chicago colleagues, which might otherwise be hard to gain access to.

עכברון יקר - הברון מינכהאוזן ממוצר לפעילות עממית

מבוא

המעבר שלי מישראל לארה"ב על מנת להתחיל את לימודי הדוקטורט לווה בלא מעט הלם תרבותי. הפתעה אחת באה כשדיברתי עם הקולגות שלי על משחקי שתיה, וגיליתי שאף אחת מהן לא שמעה על משחק הברון, שהכרתי מתקופתי בין סטודנטיות גיקיות דוברות עברית בישראל. במקום זאת היו משחקי שתיה מבוססי זריזות, ושהיו הרבה יותר תחרותיים.

זו הייתה תקופה שבה הייתי בהפסקה ממשחקי תפקידים, אז מעבר לכך שניצלתי ביקורים בישראל על מנת להשתתף במשחק ברון מדי פעם, לא עשיתי הרבה בנידון. השנים חלפו, התעניינתי שוב בתחביב, התחלתי לקרוא ולדון גם בתיאוריה שלו, וכשבאה הזדמנות קניתי עותק של המהדורה השלישית של ספר המשחק "הרפתקאותיו המופלאות של הברון מינכהאוזן", שהבנתי כמקור למשחק שהכרתי בישראל. בהמשך התחלתי את ההתעמקות שלי בפולקלור - חקר אגדות עם ותופעות תרבותיות עממיות באופן כללי - ואז נחתה עלי ההבנה שהנה יש לי כמה רכיבים עימם להתחיל דיון על הקשר בין משחק הברון כמוצר כתוב, לבין משחק הברון כפעילות שתיה עממית בקהילה הגיקית בישראל. זה גם מתחבר לפוסט קודם שלי (באנגלית) על משחקי תפקידים שולחניים כפעילות עממית.

הפוסט הנוכחי הוא התחלה של דיון, ואולי מחקר. אני לא חוקר פולקלור מקצועי, אלא חובבן שקרא שניים וחצי ספרים בנושא, וכמה מאמרים. בנוסף, חקר פולקלור בדרך כלל דורש יותר עבודת שטח מסודרת, ואיסוף של גרסאות שונות של כל עצם תרבותי כגון אגדה או משחק, וכאן אתאר רק את הגרסה שמהנסיון שלי היא היחידה שהכרתי, למרות שמטבע הדברים סביר להניח שנחשפתי לכמה גרסאות ופשוט לא הכרתי בשונות ביניהן.

הסיבה שאני כותב בעברית ולא באנגלית היא שזו פניה לקהילה או הקהילות הגיקיות דוברות העברית בישראל, לעודד שיתוף נוסף במידע על ההיסטוריה של הפעילות שם, כמו גם על גרסאות שונות שאולי לא ניתן כבוד מספיק להבדלים המעניינים ביניהן. אני פחות מתעניין כרגע בלהפיץ את זה קקוריוז או דוגמה מאלפת עבור קהל חיצוני, למרות שאולי בסוף זה אכן יקרה.

משחק הברון העממי הישראלי

בתחילת 2006 נחשפתי למשחק שתיה עם מרכיבים של המצאת סיפורים ומשחק תפקידים בשם "הברון". "עכברון יקר" הוא הומונים של הקריאה "אך ברון יקר", או אחת מהוריאציות שלו, "אך ברונית יקרה", או "אך דוקסי היקר", שמסמלת את אחד המרכיבים המעניינים במשחק הזה - איתגור מספרת הסיפור בקושיה מוזרה שאמורה להפוך את הסיפור לאף מגוחך יותר, או להפיל את המספרת בפח ולגרום לה לשגות - תוך אזכור מאפיין סגנוני, תואר האצולה שכל משתתפת לוקחת על עצמה.

בסוף שנת 2020, בתחילת העניין התיאורטי שלי במשחקי תפקידים אבל לפני שהתעמקתי בפולקלור, פרסמתי סקר בקבוצת עניין של משחקי תפקידים שולחניים בפייסבוק, ששאל: 'האם שיחקת אי פעם במשחק סיפור בשם "ברון" או "הברון מינכאוזן", ואם כן, האם זה בא מערכה או ספר, או שמא זה הוסבר לך בעל פה?'. מתוך מי שענו ששיחקו במשחק, רוב מוחץ (כ-95%) ענו ששיחקו לפי הסבר בעל פה מבלי לראות ערכה או ספר. אם אפשר לקבל את הסקר הזה כמייצג במידה מסויימת את הקהילה הגיקית דוברת העברית בישראל, הרי שהמשחק הזה, עד כמה שהוא חלק מהתרבות של הקהילה הזו, הוא פעילות עממית העוברת באופן בלתי פורמאלי.

בנוסף, בין המגיבות לסקר הייתה איילת ברטוב, שלקחה אחריות על תרגום המשחק האמריקאי לעברית והרצתו בכנס ביגור 2 שנערך ב-2002, ותגובות נוספות גיבו את נקודת ההפצה הזו, למרות שהיו גם שאמרו ששיחקו בחו"ל, ולא ברור לאיזה כיוון זרם המידע שם.

המשחק העממי הישראלי כפי שאני מכיר אותו בנוי כך: כל מי שרוצה לשחק בוחרת תואר כלשהו שישמש על מנת להתייחס אליה במהלך המשחק, כגון "ברונית" או "אפיפיורית" או "מלכה", ודואגת שתהיה לה כוס משקה ביד, לרוב משהו חזק יותר מבירה. באופן לא מסודר עד-כדי-כך מוחלט מי תטיל את המשימה על מי. בהנחה שמי שהוטלה עליו המשימה בחר בתואר ברון, היא מנוסחת כך: "ברון יקר, ספר כיצד עשית [פעולה בלתי סבירה לחלוטין] תוך שימוש ב[שלושה רכיבים לא קשורים אחד לשני או לפעולה המדוברת]."

הברון מתחיל לספר, ובכל שלב שהוא יכולה כל חברת קהל לאתגר בנוסח כגון: "אך ברון יקר, כיצד עשית את מה שאמרת כרגע כאשר ידועה לכל [עובדה מקשה]?". אם הברון מתבלבל או לא מוצא הסבר משכנע, הוא שותה לגימה ממשקה אלכוהולי כלשהו. אם ההסבר משכנע, או אם המאתגרת סתרה ישירות משהו שכבר נקבע קודם לכן, המאתגרת שותה. אם ההסבר היה מאד מאד מצחיק אז כל הקהל (קרי, המספר, המקשה, וכל מי שמקשיבה לסיפור) שותה. כך ממשיך הסיפור, עם קושיות נוספות כאשר כאלה עולות על דעת משתתפות. אין הגבלה עקרונית על מספר הפעמים שמשתתפת מסויימת יכולה להקשות, למרות שמקובל לתת לכמה שיותר מהמשתתפות שרוצות בכך לעשות כן. אין גם מגבלת זמן מסויימת על אורך הסיפור, למרות שאני חושב שבדרך כלל סיפור היה נמשך לכל היותר עשרים דקות. בסופו של דבר הברון מסיים את הסיפור בכך שהמשימה מתבצעת עם הכלים שנתנו לו - איני זוכר אם יש חוקים למה קורה אם הברון לא מצליח בזאת. אז הקהל שותה לחיי המספר והסיפור, ואם ניתן למצוא משתתפת שלא השתכרה מכדי להמשיך במשחק, אז הברון יטיל עליה את האתגר הבא, כפי שתואר למעלה. 

המשחק בדרך כלל מחזיק לכל היותר ארבעה סיבובים לפני שהלילה נגמר או שכל המשתתפים כבר שתו יותר מדי מכדי לדבר בצורה קוהרנטית. אין נקודות או תנאי ניצחון - למרות שזה משחק עם עימותים ואתגרים, הוא לא תחרותי במהותו.

המשחק "הרפתקאותיו המופלאות של הברון מינכהאוזן", מאת ג'יימס וואליס

הספר שקראתי על מנת לתת את התיאור כאן הוא המהדורה השלישית, שפורסמה ב-2016, אבל ממה שכתוב שם מדובר בעיקר בהוספת הרחבות שונות, והמשחק בבסיסו הוא אותו המשחק שפורסם לראשונה ב-1998. לפיכך קראתי רק את החלקים התואמים למהדורה זו.

לעומת המשחק החברתי ומכוון-השתיה הישראלי, המשחק האמריקאי הכתוב הוא משחק תחרותי של ממש. יש מטבעות מזוייפים שמשתמשים בהם על מנת להתקיל את המספר, מה שמגביל תיאורטית את מידת ההתקלה. המצב המדומיין כולל שתיה, אבל שתיה היא לא חלק מהותי מהמשחק.

המשחק הכתוב המקורי מתואר כך: מספר משתתפות מחליטות לשחק, ויושבות לשתות יחדיו. כל אחת לוקחת על עצמה תואר אצולה, ומקבלת "ארנק" עם מספר מטבעות השווה למספר המשתתפות. מי שקנתה את סיבוב השתיה האחרון מציבה בפני מי שמימינה, נניח שוב ברון, שאלה במבנה כגון "ברון יקר, ספר [משהו מופרך על פניו עם תיאור קצר שיכול לבוא מהספר או שאפשר להמציא על המקום]". מי שנשאל יכול להתחיל את הסיבוב שלו, או להצהיר "גרוני יבש", לקנות סיבוב שתיה (מדומיין או אמיתי), ואז להפוך לזו שמטילה על זה שמימינה לספר סיפור.

כל מי שמספר צריך לנסות להתעלות על מי שבאה לפניו במידת האבסורד של הסיפור והכבוד שמגיע לו ממנו. על הסיפור להיות באורך של בערך חמש דקות. במהלך הסיפור, כל משתתפת יכולה להפריע, במשפט המתחיל ב"אך ברון יקר", כל עוד יש לה מטבע להניח על הכף (ובמקרה של שימוש אמיתי במשקאות אלכוהוליים, גם ריקון הכוס). הפרעה כוללת טענה המאתגרת את מה שתואר עד כה. אין להתקטנן. המספר יכול או לקבל את ההפרעה ולשלב את המכשול בסיפור (תוך קבלת המטבע שהיה מוטל על הכף לארנקו), או לשים מטבע משלו כנגד ולהתרעם על החוצפה להטיל ספק במילתו של אציל. אם המפריעה מקבלת את הדחיה הזו, היא מקבלת את המטבע שלה ואת המטבע שלו. אפשר ללכת הלוך ושוב תוך אתגור ודחית האתגר כל עוד לשני הצדדים יש מטבעות להוסיף. כניעה לאתגר או לדחית האתגר טומנת בחובה גם את קבלת כל מה שהונח על הכף עד כה.

אם במהלך הויכוח הזה אחת המשתתפות מעליבה את האמינות, המשפחה, או הטענה לתואר של המשתתף השני, זה מוביל לדו קרב - שלושה סיבובים של אבן נייר ומספריים. הצד המנצח מקבל את מלוא תכולת ארנקו של הצד המפסיד, שצריך לפרוש מהמשחק.

הסיפור מסתיים באחת משתי דרכים עיקריות: או שהמספר מסיים בהכרזה שהסיפור היה האמת וכל האמת, והזמנה לכל מי שמפקפקת בכך לדו קרב, או שאחת המשתתפות האחרות שותה לבריאות ולסיפורו של המספר (כנראה אם הסיפור מתארך יתר על המידה). או אז, מי שסיפר מטיל על מי שמימינו את הסיפור הבא.

לאחר שכל המשתתפות סיפרו סיפור, מגיע שלב ההצבעות. מי שהתחילה את המשחק מכריזה "בחיי, אני מכריזה שהסיפור על [נושא כלשהו] שסופר על ידי [אציל מסויים] הוא הסיפור המופלא ביותר ששמעתי." ואז היא נותנת את הארנק שלה למשתתף המדובר, וזה מתווסף לשלל שלו (שמוחזק בנפרד מהארנק שלו). כל משתתפת אחרת בתורה עושה כך. מי שקיבל את מספר המטבעות הגדול ביותר בשלל שלו ניצח. על המנצח לקנות סיבוב של שתיה לכל המשתתפים, ואז יוכל להטיל את הסיפור הראשון במשחק הבא.

הספר מכיל דיון על אסטרטגיות שונות שנועדו לשפר את הסיכויים לנצח במשחק, כך שלפחות לפי רוח המעצב, שאלת המנצחת חשובה למשחק.

ניתוח

להבנתי הנוכחית, בצורה גסה והדיוטית, אפשר לחלק את ההיבטים של עצם עממי שמחקר פולקלוריסטי מתעניין בו לארבע שאלות: מאין הגיע, כיצד הוא מופץ, מה צורתו, ולמה הוא משמש? כפי שכבר תיארתי למעלה, המקור של משחק הברון העממי הוא כנראה תרגום הטקסט של הברון הכתוב לעברית ב-2002, וההפצה שלו התחילה דרך הרצת המשחק בכנס הזה, ואז בכנסים נוספים ובמסיבות.

הצורה של המשחק העממי דומה למשחק הכתוב ברמה הבסיסית של הטלת משימת סיפור על משתתף בעל תואר אצולה מעושה, והפרעות באמצע המעמיסות אתגרים על המספר. המספר שלוש הוא מספר טיפולוגי נפוץ באגדות עם ומשחקים עממיים (לפחות בתחום אירופה-אסיה-אפריקה), ולכן לא מפתיע שהמשחק העממי הכניס אותו לתבנית המשימה. אבל המשחק העממי זנח לחלוטין את כל ההיבטים המגבילים והתחרותיים. אמנם לזכרוני כל מספרת ניסתה לשעשע את המאזינות, ולהתמודד בצורה טובה עם ההפרעות, אבל יש לשים לב ששילוב מוצלח של הקשיה ותגובה מביא לכך שכל הציבור שותה.

בנוסף, אין צורך להתחייב למשחק העממי באופן גורף או אפילו בכל זמן שהוא. כל מה שמישהי שנוכחת באיזור המשחק צריכה לעשות זה לנכוח בזמן שהמספר מספר ולמצוא סיבה לאתגר אותו. לאחר השתיה, היא יכולה להמשיך, או לשבת ולא להשתתף עד סוף המשחק. אין מטבעות או כל כלי אחר שתלוי בכמה משתתפות יש במשחק, או דבר אחר שצריך לעקוב אחריו תוך שתפקיד המספר עובר ממשתתפת למשתתפת, חוץ מהיכולת להמשיך ולחבר משפט למשנהו. הנצחון או ההפסד באתגר תלוי במידת ההמצאה של המעורבות, ולא בלמי יש מטבע ונכונות להטילו על הכף. לבסוף, אין צורך לזכור את כל הסיפורים עד כה על מנת להשוות ביניהם.

זה מוביל אותנו למטרה, או: למה משמש המשחק? המשחק העממי נועד לעודד סיפור סיפורים ושתיה. אפשר להשתתף בו גם בלי לשתות משקאות משכרים, אבל כל החוקים שלו מובילים את המשתתפות ואפילו את הקהל המתבונן לשתות עוד אלכוהול. נראה שזו דרך לשלב בין הרצון להענות לאתגר סיפור הסיפורים והתמודדות עם קשיים לוגיים, לבין הרצון לקחת חלק בשתיה כפעילות תרבותית. אני יכול לומר בוודאות שההשתתפות שלי במשחקים כאלה אכן גרמה לי לשתות יותר מכפי שהייתי שותה לו הייתי סתם יושב להנאתי במסיבה ומקשקש עם שאר היושבות שם באופן לא מאורגן, ואכן היה אתגר אינטלקטואלי מעניין להעלות קושיות מעניינות או להתמודד איתן.

השימוש במספר טיפולוגי על מנת לתת צורה להמשימות כך שיהיו ברורות כשרמת השכרות עולה, העובדה שאין מה לעקוב אחריו מעבר לסיפור ולצורך המיידי לשתות או לא לשתות, וסילוק כל נושא התחרות או קביעת מספר המשתתפות מראש, כל אלה משרתות היטב את הפתיחות של המשחק למשתתפות חדשות ועידודן לשתות אלכוהול, כמו גם את כל המאזינות במסיבה, גם אם לא השתתפו כלל באופן פעיל.

סיכום והמשך

אז הצגתי גרסה אחת של משחק הברון העממי, וסיכום של משחק הברון הכתוב שקדם לו, והשוויתי ביניהם. הגעתי למסקנה שלמרות שהבסיס הצורני של המשחק נשאר, חלקים אחרים שלו שונו או השתנו, באופן שהפך אותו למשחק שתיה יותר מוצלח מהמקור, ולהעביר את מוקד האתגר ליכולת האינטלקטואלית להתמודד עם מידע סותר. מה הלאה?

קודם כל, אפשר לאסוף עוד גרסאות. לא במטרה למצוא את הגרסה המקורית הכי אותנטית, או את הטובה ביותר, אלא למטרות תיאוריות, לראות כיצד משוחק המשחק הזה, ולהבין אם יש השלכות מעניינות להבדלים בין הגרסאות. רצוי גם לראיין את מי ששיחקו ולימדו גם את הגרסה הזו וגם גרסאות אחרות, על מנת לקבל יותר הבנה לגבי המטרות והמניעים מאחורי המשחק הזה. אולי גם רצוי לשבת ולשחק את המשחק בקבוצות שונות במטרה לעשות השוואות כאלה.

בהמשך, אפשר לנסות למצוא את התפוצה של משחקים דומים. מכיוון שהמשחק המקורי היה מוצר כתוב שהופץ באנגלית, סביר להניח שהמעבר למשחקים עממיים קרה פעמים נוספות, ולפחות אחת מהתגובות לסקר למעלה טענה שזה משחק נפוץ אצל קהילה יהודית באנגליה, למרות שכיוון מעבר המידע לא היה ברור. אפשר לנסות ללמוד מההבדלים, כמו גם הגורמים הנשמרים, בין העיבודים השונים. בנוסף, בהנחה שנראה שחלק ניכר מהגרסאות הן משחקי שתיה, אפשר לעשות השוואות יותר נרחבות למשחקי שתיה אחרים, ישראליים ובינלאומיים.

אם קראת ויש לך גרסה שונה ששיחקת או שמעת עליה, או טענות ותוספות לגבי ההיסטוריה של המשחק הזה, אשמח לראות זאת בתגובות - או לבלוג עצמו, או בפלטפורמות שבהן אקשר לפוסט הזה, מה שיותר נוח. אולי אכתוב לפחות עוד פוסט אחד שיכיל ריכוז של התגובות ודיון עליהן, אם יהיו מספיק.

אם זה נראה לך כמו נקודת התחלה מעניינת למחקר פולקלוריסטי יותר מקצועי מכפי שאני מסוגל לו כעת, אשמח לשמוע מה עשית עם כל זה.

TTRPGs as folklore

Last year, I wrote two posts reframing the role-playing game system as a theory - as a way of comparing subsequent play sessions. The first introduced the idea, while the second responded to criticism, and developed the framework a bit further. In this post, I'd like to take a lateral step, and incorporate my recent delving into folklore to examine play sessions in aggregate as a folk activity. I'll start by motivating this viewpoint.

Imagine the following: a small group of people, usually 3 to 6, gather together on a regular basis, somewhere between every week to a few times a month. They sit down at a table. They talk, read, write, roll dice, move figurines around, sketch for each other. They imagine a world together, and fictional characters living and interacting within it. There are rules for how this is done. Often, one of the participants is tasked with describing the world and most of the characters within it, while each of the others describes what an individual character attempts to do there, although that's not required. Whether or not a character succeeds or fails in what its player wants it to do is determined by these rules, with or without the use of dice, potentially combined with numbers and figures, whose interpretation the participants agree upon. After each session, and especially as sessions accumulate, the participants build up a set of experiences, and a collective story about those experiences, that they helped create, and for which they are, if not the only audience, then the most important one.

This is a folk activity. Folklore is notoriously hard to define, but it usually requires a set group, with creative practices that are performed by members of that group for members of that same group. Most commonly people think of folktales, but the items of folklore can be dances, pieces of pottery, jokes, barns, parables, as well as, importantly, storytelling and games. In addition, the practices are passed on traditionally, informally, rather than taught through formalized training.

And, indeed, despite repeated attempts, through the use of the tools of pedagogy, the creation of starter sets, sometimes even professional associations and after-school activities for children and young adults, I think that the vast majority of tabletop role-playing is learned and conducted through this kind of traditional, informal process. In particular, most play groups, or tables, in which one or more campaigns are played, are formed this way.

I'd go further and say that the TTRPG started as a folk activity, bridging and combining the folk activities of science fiction and fantasy fan communities on the one hand, and miniature wargamers on the other, to form a new folk genre. This was further developed by informal communities, who communicated through play and through the zine and APA scene. Due to his focus on contemporary and often informal self-documentation by participants, Jon Peterson's Playing at the World, which covers the former, and The Elusive Shift, which covers the latter, provide important material for the TTRPG folklorist. This despite giving short shrift to folk history in the sense of accepting people's recollections today of what they thought and did in the past.

Even Peterson's more business-minded The Game Wizards has something to offer. Coupled with the interviews in the indie documentary Secrets of Blackmoor, it sheds a better light on Dave Arneson's seemingly self-defeating attempt to lay claim to a portion of Dungeons & Dragons, while simultaneously arguing against the very publishable and formalizable aspects of the product that are actually respected by modern American intellectual property law. I think that he was trying to capture, using legal tools not up to the task, the fact that his practice of running Blackmoor as an informal creative process, inherently hard to document, and therefore market as a product, was foundational to the subsequently written product, D&D, as mostly formalized by Gary Gygax and other writers and designers at TSR. 

I have to wonder what a folklorist's version of The First Fantasy Campaign would look like. Not a collection of Arneson's notes, but a combination of transcripts of sessions, interviews with participants, perhaps records and insights from participation. Something that would do for Blackmoor what Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles did for Appalachian ballads.

We do know that Blackmoor and the Braunstein games that immediately precede it had enough informal cachet that they proliferated to other participants in person, as a folk activity, to the point where others were independently creating formalizations before D&D started spreading. Unfortunately, at the time, and perhaps to this day, the only form of widespread legitimacy a gaming practice like this could have was through a ruleset.

There's a conversation to be had of how the very attempt at reproduction, and the expansion in audience it entails, might change the activity, as well as the relationship between reproduction and commercialization - I hope to return to that in a future post.

Until then, I would suggest that this point of view is already illuminating about the hobby, both its history and its contemporary practice.

2021 in review - folklore

Another thing I spent quite a bit of time on in 2021 was folklore. It started with an exasperation at repeatedly running into Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey as a blueprint for all compelling stories - and how this affects writing and the expectations from role-playing game plots - but became something more.

I started with Stith Thompson's classic, The Folktale. It is an extensive study of folktales from around the world, using what's now called the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index of folktales, and the Thompson motif index of folk literature, including descriptions of the folktales and their variations, as well as the methodology of collecting and cataloguing them. While a bit outdated, and occasionally offensive - to give an example, it separates the world into "civilized" and "primitive" cultures, and when presenting folktale collection methodologies, has no problem having members of the former do their own collecting, while the latter's work is to be collected by more civilized folklorists working with local agents - it made it clear that there are a variety of story types, most of which have nothing resembling a hero's journey, that have been so engaging to various cultures, that they have been continually reproduced and adapted, often without the use of mechanical reproduction or even writing. It also presented evidence of an extent of inter-cultural permeability that isn't often taken into consideration when people discuss culture. It was also interesting to read the various categories of supernatural elements that appear in folktales, and that now live in modern fantasy in a much more restricted manner, due to their appearance in Dungeons & Dragons and in Disney movies. Jon Peterson's treatment of the medieval fantasy genre in his Playing at the World goes into the former in detail. The latter you can reflect on when you consider what first comes to mind when you hear of Snow White or The Little Mermaid.

Having finished with Thompson for now, I went on to read Barre Toelken's The Dynamics of Folklore, which tries to provide a starting point for analyzing folk life and folk creation as something living, as opposed to a pervasive attitude of relegating it to a less educated past. Toelken makes it quite clear that folklore is happening all the time, and that the actual performance of the piece of folklore is paramount - which, to me, connects very closely to how I'm starting to view role-playing games, an activity whose focus is in its performance to and for its participants, rather than something that should be compared to fiction, or cinema, or other forms of culture that involve separate stages of generation, reproduction, and consumption. There's something bigger to discuss here about the relation of canon to fan works and vice versa, and the attempts to control folklore, a creative, autonomous process, when it develops around reproducible media, with all the intellectual property consequences that entails. I will hopefully find more learned studies of this topic.

In Dynamics, Toelken pointed several times to the works of Edward T. Hall, specifically to his The Hidden Dimension, where he introduced the concept of proxemics, the study of personal and cultural perceptions of space. I took a detour to read that work, which is why I will probably only be done with Dynamics next year. While it is also a bit outdated, and has an unfortunate tendency to present animal models for human behavior uncritically, as well as to indulge in cultural stereotyping, the very fact that human perception of space is multi-sensory, can be broken up into reasonable ranges, and that people's comfort and interest in what happens when thus separated from each other can depend on their cultural context, context, as well as personal preference, was pretty insightful. Specifically, for tabletop role-playing games, this is something I will be keeping in mind as I am trying to communicate position and its emotional effect, and will contribute to my thoughts about combat systems, exploration, and other spatially-significant aspects of an imagined world. I have some more reading material in that direction - here's hoping it can bear fruit sometime next year.

Problems with Blades in the Dark

I've written quite a few play-fueled posts about Blades in the Dark, indexed here. I enjoyed the experience of running a one-shot, followed by an open table campaign lasting several weeks, but also felt extremely worn out after each session, and found myself dreading the next. At first I thought it was just down to general nerves, but this segment from a video of a conversation with Ron Edwards (of The Forge fame/infamy), titled "Constraints for consequential play" (link should start at 7:49), diagnosed a shortcoming of the system that really corresponded with my experience. I don't necessarily agree with the entirety of his views or characterization, but the main thrust feels right.

A good metaphor to extract from the video is an imagined situation where you are playing a ballgame, like soccer or basketball, and are thrown the ball, only to have it immediately empty out, so you have to fill it up again before you can continue. A lot is made of the explicit negotiation process whenever players want their characters to do anything challenging in Blades, but even once Position and Effect have been agreed upon, and an Action Rating roll is made, I've felt the same thing that Pawel bring up in the video, that I have to exercise my mind to improvise something that will implement the expected outcomes, both good and bad. Even if I have enough to work with from what has already been established, there is such a variety, from Heat, going through starting clocks, ending clocks, to actual Harm, that the game doesn't really force you to contend with what's happening now in a way that just flows into the next step without a lot of work by the gamemaster. And that's before you bring in Resistance rolls, which can downright eliminate Consequences, or mitigate them significantly.

One way I can see to fix this could be to agree in advance on certain constraints on the possible Consequences. For example, require that adversarial clocks are all introduced on Score start, and then the Consequences have to include Harm when using physical Action Ratings, in addition to potential contributions to clocks. There's discussion in the Blades book about the level of lethality that results from this kind of status quo establishing itself naturally through play, but I think setting it up in advance is a better way to address this issue. This is especially true in the context of an open table, where there isn't a consistent group to crystalize into any particular style. Contrast this with other aspects of the game which don't require this - the out-of-Score state of the PCs, Crew, NPCs, Factions, and relations between them in the world is easy to represent mechanically, as well as reassess at start of play, even with no consistent game group.

Moving beyond the context Edwards brought up, while keeping his metaphor, as I noted in my previous Blades post, another place where I felt a lack of constraints or structure is Free Play. The game book suggests that it should naturally lead towards a Score plan and an engagement roll, but in my experience, again, it requires that type of reinflation of the ball. It might be better to insist that if the players do not come up with a Score for their characters, hostile factions will act against them and they will have to react to this. Which to me suggests that a structure missing from the game is the reverse Score, namely, having the PCs have to deal with NPCs coming to cause them trouble, steal things from them, or what have you, with an appropriate adjustment to the subsequent Downtime phase.

Finally, the overabundance of variety also shows itself in the setting of Doskvol and the Shattered Isles, that the game mechanics are strongly tied to. For me, at least, it's too busy. Post-apocalypse, ghosts, crime, corruption, cults, all tied to action ratings. I understand that the fact that killing is such a big, supernatural, immediate deal (because each death is signaled by a gong, resulting in a crow coming to the scene of the crime with scary Spirit Wardens in tow) is important for forcing certain constraints on character actions, a vital counterweight to the baseline almost super-powerful things they can pull off in the fiction, but the way it's done is just too contrived for me. This is an aspect I'm not sure can be fixed without hacking things significantly, or starting from a different Forged in the Dark game entirely.

None of this is insurmountable - but I have so many other, different systems to learn, and my own adventure ideas to develop, that I will probably not be pursuing this further in the near future. Do get in touch if you have come up with solutions to these problems, or if you're inspired to test something I've suggested.

System as theory addendum - prediction

I got serious pushback on the system as theory post, the thrust of which was that I failed to establish that tabletop role-playing games systems are like scientific theories, because I didn't show how they provide predictions. 

My immediate response was very defensive: that I should probably go and revise the post significantly if it could so easily be misconstrued to mean that I'm talking about scientific theories in the sense of being able to perform exact predictions to begin with. I only brought up physics to expound on my academically-fueled view of theory, in terms of utility rather than truth, and then to apply it to theory in media studies, which I saw mostly as a tool for comparisons. I didn't use the term "prediction" at all.

But with more thought came a realization that maybe it is fruitful to think of prediction in systems as theories of play. If my system is Dungeons & Dragons, then I can predict that the games that I play will involve hit points, experience points, weapons, magic, monsters, dungeons, and all of those artifacts that comprise the interactable building blocks of the game, and that I as player and/or dungeon master will use them or be used by them in certain ways. And if it is, indeed, a session of D&D, these predictions will likely come to pass, and I will be able to make some determinations as to the quality of the participants and the way the whole thing went.

If, on the other hand, I take these D&D-laden predictions to a game of Blades in the Dark, they will run counter to what I actually experience. The classes - sorry, playbooks - won't really correspond to anything I'm familiar with, nor will the ability scores and skills - sorry, Action Ratings. What's this Harm? Is that like HP? But that should increase with level! Where are levels, and what are these separate experience tracks? Are you really only getting a handful of points each session? Why do I have contacts on my sheet? Wait, we're rolling to figure out how an adventure starts? I want to plan! Flashbacks? You mean, whenever I run into a situation I don't like I just get to make things up so it's actually fine? Where are the combat rounds? Why is the DM - sorry, GM - not rolling attacks for the enemies? Why is the GM constantly asking me questions about the world that they're supposed to answer if they know what they're doing? This is not in the ballpark of what I was expecting, of what my theory of play predicts that a session will look like.

This experience, and the way it diverges from my predictions of how a game would play, could then lead me in several directions. The simplest reaction would be to withdraw to my existing theory, chalking it up to a bad group, or bad DM, or a bad set of circumstances for this particular session. On the other hand, it might push me to revise my theory, expanding it to include forms of play like D&D and Blades as special cases.

But if we take the prediction aspect seriously, it might not even come to that. Because if somebody tells me a little bit about how a Blades session goes, it's going to be so different from anything I would expect from a successful D&D session that I might just not ever try it at all. And I think that's at the heart of why the rising tide of D&D 5th Edition is not lifting all TTRPG boats.

In my case, I was lucky: my first exposure to TTRPGs was in the 1990s, when the local gaming magazine presented D&D (then Advanced D&D 2nd Edition, for the most part) as just one of many existing TTRPGs, ranging from Rolemaster to Shadowrun. Even though most of my experiences were with AD&D 2E, my theory of play didn't hold it as the end-all and be-all of that thing we did.

Unfortunately, as D&D 5E has been presented and marketed, at least in the anglophone West, it's very easy for newcomers to the hobby to not really be exposed to other systems as real alternatives in a wider context of play. This is made worse by the Open Gaming License, which allows a certain variety of other games which nevertheless point back to D&D as their baseline, the original game with the highest production values. I think that's a real barrier to a lot of alternative games, large and small. It's also cheating the people playing D&D 5E, especially DMs, out of a wider variety of experiences, and maybe "system as theory" helps explain why they don't see it that way. I do think there's more to it than that in the specifics of the system's mechanics and (lack of) DM support, but that's for a future post.

System as theory

My academic background is in physics, so I have certain preconceptions about the term "theory". However, according to a couple of years of non-academic reading and watching of videos about media studies and critical theory, at least one form of theory in media is as a framework for comparison. The idea is that any individual artistic creation is unique, and no two can be compared on their own terms. Some form of abstraction or simplification needs to be performed in order to compare them, highlighting some aspects while downplaying others. On some level this is close to the use of theories and models in experimental physics, if you substitute "experiment" for "artistic creation". A theory or model will allow you to interpret consistencies and inconsistencies between different runs of the same experiment, or several variations of an experiment.

Classical mechanics as a theory encourages you to build models relating to masses moving in Euclidean space and interacting through forces. You can then perform experiments to explore, for example, the relation between the period and length of a pendulum, or the gravitational acceleration of differently-massed objects in a vacuum. Sometimes you conduct series of experiments that classical mechanics can't make sense of, where comparisons both with other experiments and with subsequent runs of the same experiment no longer add up, and you might be pushed to replace the theory entirely. You then think of the old theory as a more limited special case of the new one, or possibly just a limited theory, useful for a smaller set of cases. When you study modern physics you will be confronted with several seminal experiments which eventually forced significant paradigm shifts - the now somewhat out-of-date term for changing to an entirely new theory. Recent reflections on the development of theories suggest that the change was usually more gradual and piecemeal, with old concepts repurposed for new agendas.

An attitude I take from my academic background about theories is that they're not so much true or false, but rather more or less useful, given a certain situation. Classical mechanics is still very useful in a wide variety of fields, such as civil and mechanical engineering. Highly advanced quantum theories of particle interactions which ignore gravity - otherwise a very dominant force, requiring intense theoretical work in its own right - are cutting edge when it comes to understanding the limits of behavior in the highest-energy accelerators. Arguing "you shouldn't use classical mechanics because it's wrong" isn't going to get you far, even with broader theories available.

On to the topic of this post: system as theory. I suggest that the singular unit for a theory of role-playing games isn't a set of books from a certain edition of the product as sold, or a specific list of house-rules built upon such a set. The singular unit is the specific role-playing campaign, or session of play, or possibly even the individual act of play. Dungeons & Dragons is a theory of play that connects these activities, and compares and contrasts them. Call of Cthulhu is another. GNS is another, broader one. "Tabletop role-playing game" is yet another, possibly overly-broad one.

People will play D&D at different tables and make statements such as "that other dungeon master didn't know how to make the battles work, they need to get better at calculating challenge ratings and picking monster rosters for them", or "this other DM has this really interesting house-rule that makes exhaustion levels finally useful". They will sit at the same table and say "this session leaned more on combat, while last session was more about exploration. I miss social role-play!" All statements that suggest a theory of play that is highly informed by the 5th edition of D&D.

Players who have been playing the game in previous iterations might say similar statements, but also "this DM is too lenient. I miss when D&D was deadlier" or "all these characters having darkvision really ruins the dungeon crawl for me". Their theory is a wider D&D, of which play informed by the 5E books and play culture is a subset. People who have played a variety of games might say about a session of D&D "you know, this one looks like it might have worked better in RuneQuest" or "the DM is using something that reminds me of clocks from Blades in the Dark, but it's not having the same effect, because they keep them secret and aren't consistent with them." D&D is then a model of a subset of play, rather than the entirety of the theory.

Returning to the analogy with scientific theories, having people "try another game" is not just a matter of pushing against a resistance to learning new sets of rules, buying different books, or getting familiar with new settings. Instead, it requires a paradigm shift in their theory of play. They need to start placing play, their play, the games they have played and might play in future, in a broader context. And that's a very large hurdle, both for people not as invested in the whole thing, who might not want to go through the difficult mental transition, as well as for those highly invested in it, who have dedicated so much of their mental effort to improving and creating content that reflects their existing theoretical framework, playing D&D 5E well.

I do think, however, that it's an important hurdle for people to overcome. Because nobody owns the general theory of that thing we do as a tabletop role-playing game, or many of the more specific theories we could come up with. But an individual company owns D&D. And if your theory of play is D&D, everything that you do in this framework is always going to feed back into it. And you will always have that company and its commercial interests looming large in your thinking about play, and in the thinking other people bring to the table when they play with you.

Uncertainty in Games by Greg Costikyan - a review

Greg Costikyan's name came up often in Jon Peterson's The Elusive Shift. He was a prominent figure in the zine scene that formed around Dungeons & Dragons and the fledgling tabletop role-playing game community in the 1970s. A typical contribution of his to the discourse back then was Lord of the Dice, a satire on the role of randomness and rules in TTRPGs.

I was, therefore, very excited when @laurenmakegames on Twitter posted some books she was giving away, and I spotted Costikyan's name on one of them, Uncertainty in Games. I hadn't heard of this book before, but considering the name and the topic, which is dear to my heart - see my discussion of the Monty Hall problem, or the post where I formulated constructive alienation - asking for it was a no-brainer. Lauren was kind enough to send it to me, and it did make for great reading.

The book mostly focuses on video and board games, which he called "closed systems" in his early theoretical work. When tabletop role-playing games are mentioned, it's just Dungeons & Dragons, and only as an early example of potentially limitless games, and as an inspiration for massively multiplayer online games, like World of Warcraft. However, I think the framework he provides can be useful for TTRPGs, although that will have to wait for a future post.

His main argument, some caveats aside, is that the goal of games in culture is to be a safe space for confronting uncertainty, in a world where we usually attempt to reduce it as much as possible. What draws us to continue playing games is the existence of this uncertainty, and our ability to get better at addressing it. Once we accept this framework, a big question in the analysis and design of games is where their uncertainty comes from.

He goes on to analyze several games through their uncertainty, among them Super Mario Bros., The Curse of Monkey Island, Rock/Paper/Scissors, Chess, Poker, CityVille, and Civilization V. Using these games, he comes up with a list of sources of uncertainty, of which every game he cites makes use of one or two, sometimes more. I will try and formulate each as a question:

1. Performative uncertainty - can you use the controller to have Mario make that jump?
2. Solver's uncertainty - have you gathered enough witty retorts to defeat the sword master?
3. Player unpredictability - will this player put up scissors next after having done paper twice?
4. Randomness - will my phalanx defeat the enemy's chariot?
5. Analytic complexity - what is a good way to respond to the Queens' Gambit opening?
6. Hidden information - what hand did the player on my left draw?
7. Narrative anticipation - what is going to happen in the Governor's mansion?
8. Development anticipation - what new features are going to come in the next update?
9. Schedule uncertainty - can I return to the game in time to harvest my crops?
10. Uncertainty of perception - can I notice the hammer coming at me quickly enough to react?
11. Semiotic contingency - what meaning will the game have when I conclude this segment?

I think some of these are a bit of a stretch. "Narrative anticipation" seems more like a study of what kind of prior information the player has before some hidden information about the rest of the game is revealed, or maybe the results of resolving uncertainty from other sources, in the context of furthering a story. I'm also not sure that performative and perception uncertainty are really significantly separate. Semiotic contingency, which Costikyan gets from work by Thomas Malaby, doesn't really feature in any of the prior long-form analyses presented in this book, perhaps because of how few examples there are of games that actually make use of it.

The book ends with an insightful piece of advice: one way of creating a new game, or improving an existing one, is by focus on its sources of uncertainty: tuning the ones you have, adding or removing some, until the mix works for the experience or audience you're aiming for.

But I would like to jump back to an even more insightful comment made before the bulk of the book: that you should be careful using lessons from interface design in game design, and vice versa. The problem is that there are opposing goals at play: with interfaces to word processors, web browsers, spreadsheets, and other products, you want users to be certain of what happens, not uncertain. This constrains how well you can "gamify" productivity. It also goes in the opposite direction, in constraining how usable game interfaces can be made, without affecting the very uncertainty that you expect would draw people into your game and retain their interest.

An example from my experience is the existence of automaps in dungeon crawlers. Last year I spent a few months streaming playthroughs of the first two Eye of the Beholder games, first person dungeon crawlers based on the ruleset of AD&D 2nd Edition. I started by attempting to do so without automapping, as they were originally designed to be played, before getting extremely frustrated at a certain confusing point. I then restarted my gameplay using All-Seeing Eye, an extension which provides a few quality of life and outright game-editing capabilities, including automapping, which is all I used.

This did, in fact, make things easier, and I was able to beat both games. However, several of the puzzles in these games, and indeed, in the genre generally, hinge on the player's need to map by themselves, and on the uncertainty that comes from only being able to see what's right around the party of characters when making any individual decision. They become trivial to someone who can simply look at what's going on in the map and where the party is at all times. In retrospect, I'm certain that I've missed out on a lot of the experience, although on the other hand, perhaps I would have just given up due to this uncertainty and the difficulty involved in overcoming it, and never gotten any exposure to much of the content.

In total, I would recommend having a look at this short monograph, as uncertainty is a very interesting lens through which to analyze games. It's definitely staying on my shelf.

Fooled by alignment

Let's talk about alignment charts. Not just that of characters in Dungeons & Dragons -  with evil vs. good on one axis, chaos vs. law on the other - but also the types of role-playing games according to Blacow - role-playing vs. wargaming over power-gaming vs. story-telling - and the political compass in politics - authoritarian vs. libertarian over left vs. right.

There's a sense of descriptive power to them, isn't there? You're free, even more free than you would have been had you been trying to line things up on a spectrum. You can fit a lot of personalities, games, and political positions on a flat piece of paper, and maybe even capture the relations between them. But that's not all that happens. Once people accept these alignment charts, they start becoming normative. People want to stand out, so they start defining themselves based on limited combinations of the extremes, and instead of having a whole flat surface, you end up with a discrete set of possibilities. For character alignment, there are at most nine; when the Blacow typology for role-playing games came out, people soon pigeonholed themselves, as well as the games they enjoyed or wanted to design, by the extremes on the two axes - so four types of games and gamers were born. The political compass, at least when it originally came out in the 1990s, was presented online by American libertarians, as a way of explaining and justifying their singular position. What happened to the freedom, the explanatory power of two whole space dimensions? Gone. Who is going to take the time to explain that their character is actually 60% Chaotic 40% Lawful, and 80% Bad 20% Good? What do those details even signify? The original breadth of ethics or games or politics is gone, and we're left with caricatures.

And that's before we start criticizing the frameworks themselves. Are role-playing and wargaming actually at odds, or, as I argued in a previous post (where roll-playing can easily be a stand-in for wargaming), independent player interests, that can be brought together with the proper design? What if a game is decidedly detrimental to both power-gaming and story-telling, say by enforcing strict inter-character balance using mechanics that deny the possibility of creating a consistent story? It could either fail to do these things out of bad design, or it could benefit a different agenda.

With D&D character alignments, we run into different problems: who is good to everyone, or bad to everyone? Is lying to protect a friend good or bad? It's probably a difficult moral question, not easily resolved by the alignment chart. Is a loyal underling of a crime syndicate lawful for keeping their word, or chaotic for undermining the rule of law? Is an informer who keeps ratting out members of their corrupt organization lawful for upholding the rule of law, or chaotic for undermining this organization? Why are these interesting questions? We already have the drama, the tension, the focus of difficult decision-making, in the description of the person's connections to the people and society around them, the conflict between the various values they hold. Since we're already going to be pushed into the extremes, let's just accept the combinatorial explosion and revel in it. 

Many games dispense with alignment. Fate has its aspect system; most Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games describe bonds and character weaknesses explicitly, rather than trying to throw them on a two-dimensional chart; even old-school RuneQuest has you align yourself with or against several cults and guilds, groups in the world that have complicated and dynamic relations with each other, and that are not always mutually exclusive.

Alignment in its many forms is very compelling - too compelling. It becomes the subject instead of helping understand it. I think it's long past time to let it go.

Game structure oracle

Text parser adventure games, usually called interactive fiction, are video games which present you with the state of the virtual world, and expect you to type in commands which change this state, usually actions of a character which you play. Zork (playable online here) was a famous series of completely text-based parser adventure games, where the state was also presented as text. The early Quest games from Sierra (King's Quest, Space Quest, Quest for Glory, etc), while providing information in both textual and graphic form, still required you to type commands in.

Eventually most of these series culminated in games with more graphical interfaces, resulting in the genre of point and click adventure games, but there is a small community of designers who still create fully textual parser games, often using the Inform language, which is ultimately based on the language used to design the old Zork games and other Infocom interactive fictions. One of the skills you had to develop as a seasoned text parser gamer was expressing what you wanted in a way the parser would understand: which nouns must be acted upon by which verbs, based on possibilities gleaned from the textual descriptions, or from knowledge of the system itself, such as its inventory and combat features.

As a thought experiment, suppose that instead of developing these skills yourself, you had a professional parser gamer working for you: someone who knew exactly how to navigate the game and understand its description, who might even be able to peek at the video game's code or assets directly, although they'd only do so to make sure they were answering your questions correctly, rather than to give you information you shouldn't have. This person would take your descriptions of what you wanted your character to do in the virtual world, and translate them into commands that the mundane parser would be able to use; they'd then describe the new state of the world to you, using the result provided by the parser game. This person is starting to sound a little bit like a gamemaster, in the role of judge or referee, except that they wouldn't be enforcing rules, so much as translating back and forth between you, the player, and the parser game, which does the actual enforcement.

This professional parser interpreter would be acting as an oracle for the text parser adventure game. An oracle in this sense is the term used in theoretical computer science for a kind of black box which can be asked questions to which it provides answers, in ways that the questioning algorithm's designer does not have to understand. In this case, the parser sends the description of the current state to the professional parser gamer, who will eventually come back with instructions the parser can understand and act upon.

When we look at role-playing game structures like the hexcrawl, or the node-based scenario, their systems, taken at face value, could be implemented in software. You could write an Inform program to provide the backing to a hexcrawl, once you've populated it; you could change it whenever you added or removed anything. And then your job as a GM while running the game could move towards being an oracle for the program, and something role-playing-like would occur between you and the player, even if you don't go beyond that to riffing or improvising at the edges. This is an extreme version of constructive alienation, an almost complete distillation of all creative thought into the process of designing and implementing the external structure and its procedures, and then supporting the player in engaging with it as a mere interpreter.

If you limit yourself to being a game structure oracle GM, there are several ways in which you can improve. First of all, the better programmed or designed your game structures are, the more variety the players will encounter as they engage with them, and the less you will be pressured to improvise. This will make you a better systems designer - or adapter, if you decide to use an existing adventure module in this way. In fact, it may well make it easier for you to create an adventure for someone else to use - you could honestly provide them with an interesting experience to run for their players, without forcing them to improvise to cover gaps you might've otherwise left.

Another thing you can get better at is translating player intent into rules usage. If you want to better support the implied character sheet game of the RPG your system runs on, this can be very beneficial. Alternatively, you might come into conflict with player knowledge of the CSG if you're trying to hide the details from the players to improve immersion. There's a balance that's worth striking.

Since the system is limited, and we're excluding the possibility of improvisation or ad-hoc rulings, another thing you might have to get used to doing is either diplomatically saying no, rationalizing why an unsupported action won't work, or preemptively guiding the players to consider choices that are supported by the system. The latter can be done by making sure to emphasize the systematically relevant features of the environment when you're describing its state. In extreme cases, you'd be making sure that even if the system itself effectively requires pixel hunting, the players aren't required to perform it.

As I said when I was discussing the CSG, this limit of GMing isn't in line with my natural inclinations. I am far likelier to improvise, to make rulings in the moment, to run with what the players give me directly. The purpose of this exercise is to challenge myself to improve in the aspects of GMing that do not come naturally to me; hopefully, this will lead me to be more well-rounded.

Role-playing and roll-playing - incentives, peaceful coexistence, and pedagogy

Seems like many people have been reading Jon Peterson's The Elusive Shift. And that's great - the more people realize how many arguments and design considerations relating to role-playing games are just as old school as "old school", the faster we can all discuss these matters more productively now, fifty years later.

One recent blog post took a main question from discussions in fanzines, APAs, and magazines of the '70s, on the distinction between role-playing and roll-playing: that is, whether to play your character to best emulate how it would act in any given situation, or whether to play it to win - the battle, the war, the contest, treasure, whatever is achievable. The rest of that post tries to apply game theory to the question of whether to role-play or to roll-play. And I do like the idea of looking at role-playing games from the perspective of probability and decision-making, which make up game theory: one of my first posts was about the Monty Hall problem, and I've written a series of posts about the character sheet game framework, which is my attempt to condense the most mechanical and strategy-based portions of a role-playing game into a form amenable to analysis by tools from strategy game design and theory. However, I must take exception to the very framing of this problem, because as it stands, I think it's a false dichotomy.

Let me explain with an example from your favorite edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It's a class-based system, which originally supported three classes: the fighting man, the magic user, and the cleric. This did not capture every type of character anyone would want to play, so people homebrewed their own classes or variants - that's where the thief class came from.

Now you, having access to either the homebrew version of the thief, or a more official form of thief or rogue from later supplements or editions, decide to create or manage to generate such a character. The character, per the rules, is very good at sneaking around, picking locks, disarming traps, climbing sheer walls, and other such dubious activities. It is not very good at fighting directly, or at taking a lot of physical punishment. So if you decide to play this character as someone sneaky and devious, who likes to pick locks, disarm traps, and stab enemies in the back from hiding, it works. The rules encourage you, the dungeon master has an easy time setting up challenges for you, and you contribute appropriately to a team of adventurers who are also playing to their niches.

On the other hand, if you decide, with this class, that you want to play a brave warrior who charges into battle, sword drawn, you will have a harder time succeeding at the mechanical challenges. You will not hit as much as a fighter would, you will not cause as much damage, you might not even be able to use the best weapons for the job, and so you may easily find yourself killed and forced to create a new character, or you may hope to be saved by the other players` characters, or by DM fiat. Why is that? It's because you chose the wrong mechanical archetype to go with your character concept.

You may counter that you're trying to challenge yourself, that real role-playing is playing against mechanical advantage, that focusing on mechanical advantage is roll-playing, and that a good DM or GM should be able to accommodate that. Well, to that I would say that you have made a role-playing decision by choosing both this class, and this behavior that is at odds with it. So the holistic concept is what we should interrogate. Why is it important for you that your character mechanically be a sneaky thief, but have the behavior of someone who insists on charging into the fray? Is this character trying to fight its natural or trained affinity to sneaking around? That's an internal struggle it has with itself. And there are role-playing game systems where that kind of struggle can be rewarded mechanically.

Let's say that instead of using D&D, you decided to play a fantasy FATE game. You want to create this holistic concept of a sneaky conniver, who is nevertheless driven to be a strong hero, a Gray Mouser who dreams of being a Fafhrd. You could choose what is called an aspect to capture this: "a scoundrel too combative for their own good". Aspects in FATE are used in two ways: the player can invoke them to gain some kind of advantage, spending a Fate point; and another player or the gamemaster can "compel" them from the character, forcing a disadvantageous decision that is in line with them. In the latter case, either the player resists this by spending a Fate point, or they can accept it, and gain a Fate point for use later. This is why the rulebook recommends choosing aspects that are two-sided - that combine the positive with the negative - and "a scoundrel too combative for their own good" is a perfect example of that. Let's try it out!

You and your party want to steal a big diamond from the Duke's mansion. You're a scoundrel, which allows you to spend a Fate point to give you a bonus for rolling to come up with a sneaky plan to get in there, and the roll comes out very well. The plan is set in motion, and it's proceeding like clockwork - a big distraction draws most of the guards to the front gate, and you're sneaking 'round the back. There are only two guards there, and the plan calls for you to throw a rock to their left, then use a well-positioned tree to drop in behind the wall to their right. But before you can do that, the GM compels you: "now that you see the guards up close, they don't look so tough. You feel like you could just take them there and then." If you accept the compel, you gain a Fate point. If you don't, then you need to spend a Fate point, which will allow you to proceed with your plan. By penalizing you for sticking to the optimal fictional choice, while rewarding you for accepting a less promising one, the mechanics incentivize you to play into this dual aspect of your character: a competent scoundrel who nevertheless can't stop themselves from getting into fights. To get to the position where you have the Fate point needed to avoid this hiccup, you would have had to surrender to this or another compel earlier, or not to have expended the ones you start a scene with; meanwhile, this extra Fate point you get from leaning into the negative side of this aspect of your character now can be used to improve the situation later, either by making it easier for you to do something, by sacrificing this point so that you can avoid being compelled by your weakness at a more critical juncture, or otherwise to improve the prospects of the whole plan, and the overall success of the party's mission.

If you had instead been playing a thief in D&D, mechanically this would have been a problem. You would have probably failed in the combat against the two stronger, more able guards, and if nothing else, at least one of them would have been able to raise the alarm, and none of that would have intrinsically involved any advantage to you or your party, equivalent to a Fate point.

Now we come to what I think is a better question than role- vs. roll-playing, which is an issue of taste, and possibly of human psychology: does the fact that there's an extrinsic, mechanical incentive help you or hinder you from role-playing your character? Do you get what you get out of role-playing by roll-playing to this mechanic, or not? Does it instead make role-playing less compelling for you, because it overrides an intrinsic motivation you previously had for role-playing?

And how does this affect the rest of the participants in the game? If you get the same joy out of role-playing along with the mechanical incentives, this means that you can peacefully co-exist with players who are more interested in making the best of the mechanics of the system. And the GM also has an easier time, because they don't have to negotiate some kind of fudging, or fiat, or other ad-hoc methods to make sure that everything keeps merrily moving along. Instead of having to work both on preparing and running the system, as well as on intervening extra-mechanically, to avoid letting your role-playing against the mechanics interfere with the enjoyment of the roll-players, everyone can play the same game, even though they might not be playing it for the same reasons.

Finally, in addition to the question of whether this will satisfy people who are looking for role-playing, we can ask what type of system encourages people who start out thinking as roll-players to move towards role-playing, and whether that's a worthwhile goal. When introducing role-playing games to new players, this pedagogical consideration can be crucial. I have personally found that the game that most encouraged me to play in character is by some accounts (including its current marketing copy) not really a role-playing game at all, but a story-telling game: Fiasco. Despite the fact that the mechanics barely have anything to do with playing roles in themselves, as they do not correspond to adjudicating actions that would make sense to the character itself in the world, the very framing encourages you to lean into the character you play as it interacts with the characters played by others.

It is important to remember that systems are designed by people to serve functions. They are not necessarily modeling a situation that people will encounter, which is where a game-theoretic analysis would be most appropriate, to tease out how to look at a given situation as a rational actor. They can instead model genre conventions, or they can be built to encourage and reward certain behaviors, reducing and even eliminating the tension between playing to win and playing to a role.

Persistence of the ephemeral history of RPGs

Many years ago I read a collection surveying the thoughts and ideas of the pre-socratic philosophers, whose focus was on what we would now call natural philosophy, or science. They had some remarkably modern sounding ideas, including some presaging modern cosmology. And yet a large portion of the book was dedicated to explaining, for each thinker, just how little remained of their work. Some of them were only known through limited summaries of their work centuries hence. Throughout, aside from the astonishment at how relevant they present to the modern reader, there was this persistent sense of loss.

I got the same feeling when I read through some parts of Jon Peterson's Playing at the World (which I've discussed a little bit in comparison to Secrets of Blackmoor here), and especially through his latest book, The Elusive Shift, which expands on these parts - the parts that are based on fanzines, amateur press associations, variant rules and whole role-playing systems with very limited print runs, and other extremely rare ephemera. These sources came out in the era just before and after the creation of Dungeons & Dragons, and involved the communities of wargamers, science fiction and fantasy fans, Diplomacy afficionados, and ultimately, role-playing gamers and designers. Many of his sources are not widely available. In fact, a significant part of his work in both of these books was tracking them down in public archives and private collections, and sometimes even bidding on specific items in auctions to get at their contents. We are all the poorer for not having access to these discussions and arguments in full, and role-playing theory and design in the next few decades seem like they could have benefitted so much from building on them instead of reinventing the wheel.

A more recent archival catastrophe that has happened to role-playing discourse was the loss of many Google+ groups, not just as active creative spaces, but as archives of arguments, conversations, and designs. Indeed, we are fortunate that those ephemera of role-playing past that Peterson discusses were physical artifacts, booklets and sheets of paper, rather than files on the cloud. Otherwise, they, too, might have been irrevocably lost. This precarity of historical records is still a problem: Facebook groups can be shut down unilaterally by their administrators, or because some of their content violates the company's Community Standards, whether due to legitimate poor moderation of hateful content or just report bombing, taking important posts and discussions down with them. Twitter threads are hard to follow, and may also disappear or become sparse because some of the people involved either had their accounts suspended or deleted them themselves. Discord's management is entirely opaque, and the content there is not particularly well organized for archival purposes - and there is no way consistent with their current Terms of Service to back up servers.

One of the reasons I decided to start writing this blog, instead of merely engaging in the other platforms I've mentioned, is to move away from this one-point-of-failure ecosystem. It's true that Blogger is still a platform controlled by Google, but the actual framework of a blog is transferrable, and there are several competing platforms. I also back up my posts, just in case.

I think the hobby and the theoretical discourse about it would benefit from moving towards spaces that are not managed by platforms whose main focus is engagement hacking, and which are not as centralized. There is, of course, the question of moderation and dealing with bad actors, but being beholden to an all-or-nothing toolset outside of any particular user or group's control will leave us in a situation where some pieces of data are lost, others can only be found as quoted somewhere else, still others can only be known by the arguments of their detractors - just like with the pre-socratics.

Character death in games

Yesterday, it finally happened. Having indulged in some constructive alienation to set up a framework for a dungeon combat challenge for the player characters, and furthermore, committing to a certain attitude by the enemies, I ran the game as it rolled, and one of the PCs died. Even in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, it's possible to die in battle, and it happened. And it was a good death, for several reasons: it was a heroic and somewhat foolhardy press forward to engage the enemy without really waiting for backup, which fit well with the character; this somehow worked in previous iterations, but his luck ran out. The player also will have to take a break from gaming for a few months, so the out-of-game timing was good, as well. But still, it's sad for me when a character dies, and especially when that is connected to the player leaving the game, even if it's amicable.

I am reminded of a round of Betrayal at the House on the Hill I played at Who's Yer Con 2019. The game starts out with all the players cooperatively exploring a haunted house, which is generated using random tiles. Things go wrong, until one of the players moves beyond a point threshold, and becomes the betrayer. The game is paused while this player consults an entry in a book expressing the haunting, while the other players consult a corresponding explanation in the other book of how to defeat it. Play resumes, and it is now adversarial, until either the haunted player is defeated, or the other players are all killed or coopted, or whatever other end condition is achieved. In this particular instance of the game, I was the haunted one. And I slowly had to take out the other players. This was the last game of the night, so as I was taking people's characters out, they left to their hotel rooms, or to drive off. And it was really unpleasant for me to succeed at each juncture, and then to win the game. I felt like I was kicking people out of the game, rather than just challenging them inside its rules.

In a single-player video game, the situation is often very different. If you run into a challenge, and your character dies, you can just reload and try again. Even without saves or continues, even if you have to restart the game every time, you're ultimately able to confront the same challenge - or type of challenge, if it's procedurally generated - over and over again, until you tire of it, or until you overcome it. Death is a signal to you that you have failed, and an invitation to try again. In games made for the arcades, it is also a way to push you to spend more money. But I think games have moved more and more towards focusing on the specific challenge at hand. Instead of having to start games over, there are saves, or checkpoints; some games automatically restart you at the beginning of the latest challenge, allowing you to retry it over and over. Some games will adjust the difficulty of the challenge down, so that you are not stuck in one area due to missing out on a particular skill or capability. And of course, there are many games where death isn't really a possibility; it's just a matter of which of a variety of endings you get to when the game ends. I personally find a lot of the older games a bit frustrating these days, although certain retro and retro-style indie games have captured my interest.

So my experience with death in games leans towards the negative. I don't like getting characters killed, as a role-player, as a gamemaster, or as a board game player, and I find video game deaths frustrating when they require me to redo a lot of progress. But when thinking about gamemastering, game design, and theory, I'm trying to avoid just focusing on what I like. So let's discuss some parameters for lethality in role-playing games.

Many old school games were very lethal, or could be made to be. Original D&D did not provide characters with many hit points, or quick ways of replenishing them, monsters were deadly, as were traps and poisons, some of which would kill immediately. It was also very easy to build a new character - I recently played an OD&D game, and even with checking up on whatever houserules were in place, it took me about half an hour the first time, and would probably not take me more than ten minutes if I wanted to do so again with the same table. Another important aspect of early versions of D&D is that it expected adventures which did not really dig into character backgrounds and motivations. You crawled a dungeon with other players to look for treasure. The constant threat of death motivated you to be careful as you crawled, although combat did often happen, as did falling into pits. If your character survived, it might develop a larger narrative, especially if it ended up taking its funds to settle outside, but it could easily perish, and you would write up a short memorial and start again from scratch.

As I noted above, meanwhile, D&D 5E makes it very hard to die, or rather, makes it very easy for a PC to survive brushes with death. Your character gets to revive some of your hit points with an hour's rest, or all of your hit points on a night's rest. Once taken to zero hit points, a character needs to roll 10 or lower three times with a d20 (or two if one of the rolls was a 1) before rolling three 11s or above to die permanently. Moreover, a critical success (a 20) has the character at 1 hit point and ready to get back into the fray - or flee, likely the more prudent option, albeit made difficult by the system's punishing combat movement system. Correspondingly, character creation is a much more arduous task than in the original edition. It is usually recommended that the party and the DM take up the equivalent of a whole session to build characters together, to make sure that they mesh well and that their backgrounds can be tied into the plot properly. The adventures are expected to be long-term affairs, with meaningful participation of the characters at each step, so a character's death can really mess with the process. But other things can happen when you play: allies and enemies can win or fail, you can alienate former allies, befriend former enemies. Your character's choices can have a lot to do with how that changes.

I think this leads to a bigger discussion of what stakes you are playing for. The stakes can be the life of your character. But if the character is easy to generate and is expected to be easily killed, what are you losing when it dies? The string of successes you've had with it against a hostile world? Definitely not time out of the game. Meanwhile, if a character is difficult to create and adapt to the world at hand, you're not only losing all that starting investment, you are also probably losing a significant amount of participation with the game as you are taken out of it to restart this process. And if the game involved a lot of social relations with other parties to the game, both player and non-player characters, then all of that is lost, too. Meanwhile, you can lose some of these connections due to poor judgment or failures without killing the character. So your experience of the game with the other participants continues, even though you have suffered setbacks, setbacks that can be significant for you, if you have become invested in the world and the people in it. It can be a meaningful experience even if it is not lethal for your character individually.

That being said, if there is combat in the game, there is no greater proof of how important it is to do it well than the death of a party member, with all that entails. If there is a dungeon, death by trap is the best way to show that it is vital to tread carefully. If there is a despotic society you must navigate in, there is no better proof that you have to watch your actions very carefully than a summary execution.

And on that positive note, rest in peace, 2020.