Book Games

I want to think for a moment about another way to talk about games, TTRPGs, and play. 

"Game" is a strange word, as it refers to a mode of engagement rather than an object in its own right. We can look at anything and produce a "game" from it if we want to. It has a lot in common with "art," which is another word whose invocation has more to do with how we engage with something rather than some quality possessed within the object itself. A rug can be art if I hang it in a museum. A rug can be a game if we use it to extrapolate rules to play with. 

A "role-playing game" has the same problem. I can role-play during any game. Sometimes, we can distinguish RPGs from other games because the narrative choices are permitted to influence the game-actions in a way we might not allow otherwise. For instance: if I'm playing Monopoly, it would be considered crass to try to invoke the "narrative" in order to explain why I should have more money. But invoking the narrative to get a tactical edge is considered normal in most TTRPG sessions. 

However, we cannot universally distinguish TTRPGs in this fashion. Last Train To Bremen, The Quiet Year, Microscope, and many other story games lack this "narrative upheaval." So to call something an RPG seems to refer to something you choose to do while playing, rather than an intrinsic property of the game.

Still, we have objects called "games," sold and marketed as such. How can this be, if "game-ness" is something we're supposed to do to the object?

That's easy — these are objects which expect those who encounter it to read game-ness onto it. These objects are normally sorted by how they've been constructed — board games contain a board, card games contain cards, computer games are played on the computer, and so on.

Well, not quite, because tabletop role-playing games exist. Now isn't that odd! A tabletop role-playing game is an object (normally a book or zine, although sometimes a board, deck of cards, PDF, etc.) that is defined solely by how we engage with it, instead of by its physical properties. It's a tabletop RPG solely to distinguish it from a genre of computer games (called RPGs), but TTRPGs are not themselves a genre — they're a medium which contains genres. 

Live-Action Roleplay (LARPs) also have this problem, by the way.

What can we learn if we reject this convention? 

Let's imagine a world where there are many games. Some of them are board games. Some of them are card games. Some of them are computer games. Some of them are book games. Many of them are mixed-media — combining a board and a deck of cards, or a book and a computer interface, and so on. Some of these games make use of roleplay "narrative upheaval" as part of their play. Some of these games don't. Some of the games that don't, such as The Quiet Year or Final Fantasy X, are still considered role-playing games.

Dungeons & Dragons can now be understood as a mixed-media (frequently book, although drawing on other mediums as needed) game that uses RP mechanically.

There are problems with this taxonomy, as there are with all taxonomies. I certainly don't want to be present for the arguments about whether a series of blog posts should count as a book game, or whether X or Y game "counts" as an RPG. The reason we live in the world we do is that the classification of artistic mediums has more to do with the history of its designers and players, rather than as the result of some divinely-inspired classification system brought down from the heavens. 

But at the same time, it's easy for game designers to get caught up in their medium. Recently I've been spending a lot of time learning from board game designers. There are a number of differences between us, in terms of technique and execution. They have different concerns about memory than I do. I make use of "narrative upheaval" as a design tool. They believe far more concretely in the shared experience-reality of the game-object. But these differences are matters of design, not medium. They could make a game in their style and present it in a book, the same way I can make a game in my style and present it with a deck of cards or a board. 

So, what happens if I do?