Sexuality, Pretty Pictures, Objectification February 23, 2007
Posted by Ian in Community, Cool Links, Long but coherent, Personal Reflection.add a comment
Okay, so there is this neat discussion going on over here at Yud’s Dice. It’s spread out all over the place, though, so I wanted to come back over here and think things through a little more coherently in my own space.
This is in part a response to what is happening over there and in part a response to a conversation with my darling wife in regards to what is happening over there (hey Kim;). For that reason, I’m just going to try and break this down into ideas rather than responses to individuals.
What I like most about the post is the emphasis on the volume of examples of objectification. It isn’t deeply problematic for an occasional bit of objectification to appear and may even be ‘honest’ in the sense that, like it or not, we are bodies and sometimes it’s nice to just have that pointed out.
However, for that to become common indicates something problematic. Like Nietzsche, we ought to find something unhealthy in any thing that seems to be repeated over and over. I also want to expand a little more on what is problematic about the forms of objectification going on.
Rather than look at the Conan covers, though, I want to look at those Exalted covers, the shift from 1e to 2e. To zoom in on the Jade Exalted Brand has already highlighted is revealing. Both versions display attractive, pleasing bodies. Both even present what look to be idealized and attractive bodies.
2e, though, reinterprets that body in a profoundly sexual manner. Her clothing, her curves, all are exaggerated to emphasize sexiness pure and simple. The sidebar images just drive that home, you see things like sexy elf lady. Moreover, their bodies are positioned so that their most sexualized features dominate the composition.
Medium and message talk is pretty important here. These are roleplaying games, and these are all supposed to be exemplars for the sorts of roles players could take. That the dominant female characters are displayed with hyper-sexualized bodies therefore sends out a certain message about the sort of female characters in the game. That they are the sexy first and foremost.
The slippage that occurs between 1e and 2e is telling. Both images are aimed at a viewer, are objects for a viewer. They are objects, quite literally, meant for visual appreciation. Both are of attractive and sexy women. However, in the 2e cover, her appearance is all about her sexuality, whereas in the 1e, her sexuality is a side-effect of her overall idealized body, not her maxed out T&A action.
The 1e version is also holding out her bow in a manner that suggests she is about to *do* something with it, that she is active and capable. This is very much in keeping with traditional representations of men in the genre. To the extent that they are objectified positively, it is as active and capable.
This is a good point to drive home. Male figures are exaggerated and objectified in the genre, but so as to emphasize what they are capable of. Rogues are willowy, suggestive of their grace and sneakiness. Soldiers are huge or armored or well-armed, suggesting their toughness and power. Wizards have white beards to show they are old and knowledgeable.
What does it say when the female character who is supposed to be their equal is exaggerated primarily in a sexual fashion? Well, if you apply the same tools you applied to the male figures, then it says the female character is really about her sexiness, really about what she has to offer as an object of desire.
It isn’t even a question of whether her body is being offered up to us or not for our fantasied consumption. It is simply a question of the values that are being instantiated in the presentation of these women. Why have we zoomed in on these very narrow, sexual elements to define these female characters?
They aren’t the only beautiful bodies out there, so it can’t be because we just want to appreciate the female form. Nor is that hyper-clingy clothing the only way to accentuate a beautiful body. Sure, nothing wrong with some pictures that playfully exaggerate sexy bits, but why so few exaggerating other beautiful parts of the body? Moreover, why so little variety on the covers, which are the ‘face’ the book presents to its audience?
Mechanical ’styles’ February 21, 2007
Posted by Ian in Applied, Game Design, Personal Reflection.add a comment
There seem to be a whole bunch of ways to build different mechanics up in a game. I realize that I have some clear preferences, so I want to try and map them out a little.
Plenty of ‘traditional’ rpg’s take a pretty sprawling approach. You get a lot of different subsystems, each working along different lines. Sometimes, these look kind of similar, sometimes they look radically dissimilar.
In D&D, for example, you have a skill system with loosely related charts for things like Diplomacy, Bluffing, Disabling Device. Mechanically, they operate in a roughly identical way (roll d20, add skill, look at chart). The final result varies quite widely in the application, which is why the chart probably plays such an important role.
You then have a very different looking system when it comes to combat. Sure, you roll a D20, add a relevant modifier, then compare to an opposing value. But you also have to have this grid map with representations of the scene, where moving the characters on that grid has serious consequences for when and how you roll.
A game like TORG or True20 isn’t superficially very different in its structure. There are several subsystems, each with their own distinctive modes of operating. However, the combat subsystem is significantly simpler in both cases, which makes it easier for me to introduce my favorite sort of rules hack: generalizing the combat system to serve as a conflict system.
This often makes other sorts of conflicts a smidge more interesting, since combat systems tend to be built to produce more dynamic back and forth interactions. In general, you just need to create separate tracks for each, one for physical, one for mental, one for social/spiritual. And voila, fun!
I’m thinking if you attach some sort loot-like mechanic to the subsystems, there might be some fun to be had above and beyond. That gets you out of always having to give the player a cool gun, perhaps instead giving them the chance to learn the subtle trick of the ’suggestive voice.’ A little more colorful, if naught else.
[Which is, of course, exactly what TSOY does from the get go. There is basically one system that governs most anything and all that needs be determined is which track(s) the scene engages. It strips things down right to the core I like. It's debt to things like FUDGE shows pretty clearly in that regard.]
I’m wondering, though, if there might be a way to make that process even more freeform, like having just a single conflict mechanic which can be instantiated into any particular conflict type.
The biggest problem is, of course, character generation. Players want to know what sort of conflicts they will encounter so they can design their character around them, thinking of the ways they can meet them, using that to shape concept.
I might just be after a game in which character, world, and system creation are more tightly wedded, developing alongside each other, in which creation is already playing. In which the first handful of sessions establish the shape of the rules that will define the subsequent games. Something fairly responsive, light, that isn’t too distracting, doesn’t feel too game-y.
And I want a unicorn pony that I can ride to the fair in the clouds.
Working Mechanics February 21, 2007
Posted by Ian in Applied, Game Design, Methodological, Theory.add a comment
This is me thinking about game design itself, the process, the sorts of decisions that characterize it. As I watch a game go through different design stages (my own fiddling and then design reports of others), I see a couple running trends.
Early on, you often see a number of different mechanics in competition with each other for being the ‘right’ one. Individually, several of these mechanics could function in a complete game, but don’t function well together. The primary determination for which mechanic(s) make it to later stages in the design process largely depends upon a couple different factors.
There is feedback from others, which ones garner the most interest from commentators. There is also a question as to which one seems to work best with other mechanics being developed. These two factors tend to be related since the mechanics garnering the most feedback are also the ones for which people suggest supplementary mechanics.
It’s important to remember, though, that many of the abandoned mechanics are not inherently flawed, only problematic in relation to the family of mechanics that come to define the game. Sometimes, too, it is important to remember that a good mechanic may be underappreciated by commentators if it doesn’t look interesting superficially.
Contrariwise, it can be useful to work with a mechanic that is garnering more commentator interest even if it may not be immediately as interesting as others, because the comments often better fuel the creation of good supplementary mechanics.
For every actual game produced, I would bet there is a small family of games that could have been produced. Each member of that family just requires a different range of supplementary mechanics to get functional and would likely look quite different as final products despite their shared genealogical origins.
The time it takes to develop one game is substantial, so I don’t mean this as some sort of clarion call to design games in batches or to design every possible set of games from a design process. I just want to highlight that there is a flexibility in the process, that there are many paths to a good final product, that it doesn’t make tons of sense to get worked up early on about what will be ‘perfect.’
It also changes how you think about feedback in the design process. It really does come down to deciding what mechanical elements you are most capable of developing, which ones are best suited to the project, which ones seem to be most appealing to a potential audience (which commentators potentially are).
I also want to highlight that this a darn good reason to keep track of your design process, to flag where you might have good mechanics for use in a future product.
It would also be really interesting to see what happens if a group of designers began the design process together, then each took different elements of that earlier process and developed them in parellel. To see the sort of divergences…
[Old Thoughts] GNS Considered February 9, 2007
Posted by Ian in Actual Play, Game Design, Jargon, Old Thoughts, Theory.add a comment
[I'll stop with this, really, at least for now...I just get in a digging mood and then want to repost things to look at them again. Sort of strange, I guess, but do I care, really? Originally posted March 23, 2006; lightly edited to correct typo and rearrange a paragraph break or two]
I’m taking a little break from my current Game Chef addiction to chat about the humor article in this month’s Dragon—’The Ecology of the Adventurer.’ Ok, actually I’m just going to talk about it for a second before using it to jump into an extended consideration of GNS that it made me consider. Still—it’s hilarious and I adore the way they describe each gaming style as if it were descriptive of the character and not the player. Yarr, here be intellectualizing.
Now, it is no surprise to anyone who has been reading this (are there people who do?) that I have this craft hobby horse, and that much of that centers on the difference between concept and medium, with the question of how the two inform each other rather than just dictating to each other.
So, there seems a way to apply this to the whole GNS talk (which I am always tempted to use with scare quotes, but I’ll take it ’seriously’ for this entry at least). When this happens, you get a historical and crafty perspective on the genre.
To start: Roleplaying seems to have its roots in a simulationist mindset. It is not news that the first rpg’s were essentially ‘first person shooter’ versions of tabletop wargames. People like Gygax & Arneson got curious about shifting the focus of wargaming away from units to individuals and started to add some fantasy dressing. Right away, simulationist—how do you represent a sword’s damage or how armor protects someone? Many rpg’s that followed were just as simulationist, but took as their point of departure that D&D didn’t get the simulation ‘right’—think Traveller or The Morrow Project.
Unless you start doing fullscale, hardcore re-enactments, any simulation will have to be based on rules meant to extract the ‘key’ features of ‘real’ life. In these elisions lie the space for other simulationists to make ‘better’ models—notice how bogged down sim games can get with charts, math, and so on.
The extraction also makes the gamist possible—unlike the laws of Newtonian physics which have to get back to the ‘actual’ behavior being described, game rules tend to be adopted and used without the constant harkening back to ‘reality.’ These sorts of rules relate more to each other than to the reality they first simmed, so they become susceptible to people who ‘play the rules’ rather than the simulation.
An example of the conflict between the two: I gamed with a guy who had spent some time in the military—while in the service, he played a lot of Twilight 2000. During a session, a player wants his character to jump a trench wearing a heavy pack. The GM says he can’t and the player complains that the rules say he can. The GM’s answer? He pulls together a real pack and asks the player to leap a certain distance with a running start. The GM said, in short, this game is a simulation—let’s test this rule. If it doesn’t work, we toss it. The ultimate proposition for a simulationist.
Now, narrativism comes a little later, when gamers realize that they are telling stories and that there all these cool tools for telling stories to be found in literature and cinema. This attitude isn’t absent in the early rpg’s, but it is superceded by the simulationist urges. I’ll argue that the simulationist perspective includes a latent narrativism—they want the sim to be right, because they want to believe it, because the want the story to possess a certain ‘force.’ It is just that, for them, a cool story is also a realistic story.
What happens with games like those produced by White Wolf? They suggest that we can believe a lot more than is possible, that we can use the tools of literature and cinema to expand upon our repertoire. Again, this isn’t exactly new—after all, fireballs? But the new breed stretched that even further. Thus we find a cogent appreciation for scene breaks, for climactic encounters as opposed to realistic ones, and so on. It is unfortunate that the community of gamers can be so clique driven—so we end up with Storyteller getting labeled ‘touchy feely’ crap by the old schoolers while the new schoolers start calling the old schoolers immature and socially challenged.
Ironically, the gamist perspective comes into its own just after the hey day of storytelling—3.0 D&D breaks with many of the sim conventions in order to introduce a game that is more playable, a game whose rules are easier and more enjoyable to use. Now, this gets done under the auspices of a certain kind of sim-narrativist attitude: too many rules about ‘realism’ spoil the game, make it difficult to get in character, make it difficult to believe. A really unbelievable but easily applied dynamic turns up to seem more ‘real’ sometimes than a detailed mechanic that accurately captures the ‘reality’ of a situation. This isn’t unsurprising, really—look at hardcore physics texts, do you see falling rocks, orbits, or (what is really there) strange symbols, diagrams, and formula?
