What's the challenge of game design? Making games that are fun. What do Magic designers talk about? What different people find fun, and why, how to make cards that appeal to those people. What do RPG designers talk about? Why my fun is better than your fun. Not all of them, mind you-- but that this conversation happens at all is a supreme waste of time.
There's another side to the "amateur" coin, though, and it's that there's a lot of RPG products and content produced by people who are doing it just because they love the game, not because they have any professional aspirations. You can do that in RPGs because the physical barriers to entry are so low, and it's a good thing-- my own RPG bookshelf certainly attests to that.
Magic has consistently higher quality than 95% of the published RPGs out there-- including and really especially the professional stuff. They have a bigger budget for everything, and they're rewarded much more for "getting it right"-- for tight design and art everywhere and good visual design and good copy-editing. People have more fun, they can measure it, they get paid.
But the most interesting stuff that Magic makes isn't near half as interesting as the most interesting stuff that's come out in RPGs-- even in just the last year. Magic doesn't do weird. They don't do specific. They do well-produced, slickly-rendered, everybody-kinda-knows fantasy with a slight Magic: the Gathering twist. This has gotten even worse in the last few years, as they've gotten more successful. One of the lessons they've said they learned from Kamigawa block, their Japanese themed world, was that they should have been less specific and less culturally accurate and stuck more to what their players "know" about Asian fantasy.
Which is fine. I enjoy what Magic does, and they do it well. But I enjoy weird and specific and particular, and it makes me sad that Magic doesn't-- can't do-- more of that. One of the advantages of RPGs relative amateur-osity, is that they can do a lot more of that.
If they can quit arguing about who's way is better long enough to just do it.
“Why my fun is better than your fun.”
ReplyDeleteI think that these conversations are really about trying to figure out what—if anything—are universally fun factors and which bits aren’t universal. Not that the people involved fully realize that.
I also think that a lot of us are constantly struggling to understand what we find fun. We think we know, but we engage in these conversations because, underneath it all, we really aren’t sure.
Or maybe I’m just an optimist trying to rationalize it. ^_^
Not that any of that invalidates your points.
"What do Magic designers talk about? What different people find fun, and why, how to make cards that appeal to those people. What do RPG designers talk about? Why my fun is better than your fun."
ReplyDeleteWell, that's because collectible card games and RPGs are very different things. A collectible card game is ALL about the game as a commodity. While RPGs are also commercial products, there is also a DIY/small press element, from which games are created for the love of playing the game, and the people involved in that overlap very heavily with the people making RPG material for pay. So while the makers of a CCG are trying to make something that sells (and you seen to equate sales with a measurement of fun, and making something that sells with professionalism*), something that they think that you would want to BUY, the writers of the vast majority of RPGs on the market are trying to make something that they and their gaming groups would want to PLAY.
*Hollowing out the definition of 'professional' to 'does something for pay', misses out on the much more useful understanding of professions as vocations and as communities.
By the way, I know you know most of this, but I think that comparing RPGs to M:tG is a bit like comparing RPGs to a fantasy themes breakfast cereal - they might share a few aesthetic qualities, but both the producers and consumers of these products are looking for entirely different things.
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