Really enjoying these videos, Amabel! Your ending question about what art could look like without the constraints of capitalism made me think of a local, modern art museum called Glenstone. It was privately funded by an incredibly wealthy couple, and it has free entry. The museum showcases lots of really thoughtful pieces, and spares no expense when using space to help convey meaning. Efficiency is not remotely their goal. And there’s no need/desire to make money from it. Kind of fascinating. We need more super rich people supporting artists!
I've been binging through your videos and I have learned so much. You have a really engaging and easy to understand way of discussing game design concepts. Motivates me to make more
What a powerful essay. Thank you so much for putting it together. To reinforce your thesis take the D&D Dragoblance saga: those books were written as a result of playing a game!
23:35 oh, "RPG" is a real weird one. What it means is "this game reminds me of D&D", and how it got that meaning is a real corker, told in full in Jon Petersen's "The Elusive Shift", but if you want the Cliff notes: the original version of D&D rules were for "fantastic medieval wargames" and barely even brought the words "role" and "play" into the same sentence, but Gygax brought it out as a clapback in some early 'zine banter as a thing that D&D _wasn't supposed to be about_. It was supposed to be about solving the puzzle of the dungeon in front of you. It wasn't about pursuing power and agency in a fantasy world, creating a role that you would enjoy playing. But after that, the phrase caught fire in the discussion community, and games whose play was intended to be a social activity like D&D would label themselves "role-playing games", and so in 1977 the first edition of Basic D&D is now for "fantastic medieval role playing". But as a socially adopted term of genre, its strike zone is just as wide as the audience it reaches. Maybe as more people play games that are social activities like D&D to explore questions of identity and foster relationships, more visual novels will be called RPGs. (Well, that's the descriptivist take, anyhow. The prescriptivist take doesn't explain why people call Pentiment an RPG, but might explain why its developers only call it "a narrative adventure": a computer RPG has elements of character identity separate from player interaction and there are interesting decisions pointed at those character elements. In Disco Elysium you're there to solve the crime, and you can make decisions to pursue that end or to define Raphael Ambrosius Costeau; Pentiment centers its narrative much more in that all the decisions you make to define your characters are part of it.)
I think to be a little pedantic I wouldn't say video games are the "only" art form with gated experiences but it's rare enough in other experiences that you could effectively use that term. For instance books in the ergodic family require effort to be fully understood and parts are gated until you gain the knowledge or material needed. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_literature
Really enjoying these videos, Amabel! Your ending question about what art could look like without the constraints of capitalism made me think of a local, modern art museum called Glenstone. It was privately funded by an incredibly wealthy couple, and it has free entry. The museum showcases lots of really thoughtful pieces, and spares no expense when using space to help convey meaning. Efficiency is not remotely their goal. And there’s no need/desire to make money from it. Kind of fascinating. We need more super rich people supporting artists!
I've been binging through your videos and I have learned so much. You have a really engaging and easy to understand way of discussing game design concepts. Motivates me to make more
What a powerful essay. Thank you so much for putting it together. To reinforce your thesis take the D&D Dragoblance saga: those books were written as a result of playing a game!
23:35 oh, "RPG" is a real weird one. What it means is "this game reminds me of D&D", and how it got that meaning is a real corker, told in full in Jon Petersen's "The Elusive Shift", but if you want the Cliff notes: the original version of D&D rules were for "fantastic medieval wargames" and barely even brought the words "role" and "play" into the same sentence, but Gygax brought it out as a clapback in some early 'zine banter as a thing that D&D _wasn't supposed to be about_. It was supposed to be about solving the puzzle of the dungeon in front of you. It wasn't about pursuing power and agency in a fantasy world, creating a role that you would enjoy playing. But after that, the phrase caught fire in the discussion community, and games whose play was intended to be a social activity like D&D would label themselves "role-playing games", and so in 1977 the first edition of Basic D&D is now for "fantastic medieval role playing". But as a socially adopted term of genre, its strike zone is just as wide as the audience it reaches.
Maybe as more people play games that are social activities like D&D to explore questions of identity and foster relationships, more visual novels will be called RPGs.
(Well, that's the descriptivist take, anyhow. The prescriptivist take doesn't explain why people call Pentiment an RPG, but might explain why its developers only call it "a narrative adventure": a computer RPG has elements of character identity separate from player interaction and there are interesting decisions pointed at those character elements. In Disco Elysium you're there to solve the crime, and you can make decisions to pursue that end or to define Raphael Ambrosius Costeau; Pentiment centers its narrative much more in that all the decisions you make to define your characters are part of it.)
Such a pleasant journey through this topic! Thanks so much for writing and assembling it!
Hey, this IS rad
Dr Pepper hell yeah
I think to be a little pedantic I wouldn't say video games are the "only" art form with gated experiences but it's rare enough in other experiences that you could effectively use that term. For instance books in the ergodic family require effort to be fully understood and parts are gated until you gain the knowledge or material needed. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_literature