Games for the Mind

[This is just something from my old blog, which I decided to dredge back up and repost here as a little salvaging operation.  It was first posted April 6, 2006.]

I recently picked up a copy of the old AD&D Players Option: Skills and Powers and you know what–there were some darn cool ideas in there. At its heart lies the effort to make character classes and races more modular, easier to tailor to different sorts of settings. In retrospect, I may prefer the simplicity of that to the direction customizability went in 3.0 and 3.5 D&D—namely, prestige classes.

This interests me because I used to go around thinking that we (myself and the gaming community as a whole) had moved beyond the ‘rudimentary’ efforts of AD&D. I came back to 3.0 with the notion that they had really fixed the game and freed it from its archaic clumsiness. In short, I accepted a very simple idea of what it meant for a game to evolve. I treated the evolution to be one directional, with all the bad things in the past and the good things in the present and future.

This is not the case. Evolution is a question of suitability and suitability always presumes an implicit ’suited to.’ Old school AD&D is suited to do certain things well, certain other things not so well. The same can be said for any game—the old games I grew up with are not archaic, the new ones aren’t ‘high tech.’ What has changed is not the inherent quality of the games but the expectations that I have for the game. The one good thing about us (as gamers) today is that we (as a community) have become more self-reflective about the relationship between expectation and rules. We appreciate that different rules better suit different premises and audiences.

Unfortunately, we now have a tendency to see products of a less self-reflective moment in our history as less valuable. We forget that many of those pioneers we disregard as ‘grognards’ are and were no less reflective. They struggles with premise and rules, experimenting with home brews and alternative mechanics. They may have been less theoried than ourselves, but they shared a commitment to rules that worked for their aims.

More importantly, though, we forget that self-reflectiveness is no guarantee of quality. It gives us a false sense of awareness and makes it easier for us to ignore biases that fall outside our well-crafted terms. We can be far worse than any of the grognards because we *believe* that we understand how things actually work.