The Culture: Art Therapy Tools Are Not Games

The Critical Role crowd shill a product called Daggerheart. They call it a game. It is not.

For Daggerheart, these two sections just definitely cemented it's not for me. I mean, have the designers not played at a lot of TTRPG tables? The clashing personalities, the rules lawyer, the loud one taking the spotlight, the quiet person who barely speaks, the one on their… pic.twitter.com/3fGlHcWOdz

— Zuby (@MagicWithZuby) March 13, 2024

Thanks to Zuby for posting the receipts showing that this is not a game.

This is Art Therapy in the mold of all those "Powered By The Apocalypse" products are Art Therapy pretending to be games.

They are Ungames.

And, given who pushes them and why they do so, this is where the Death Cult wants to take the medium because turning anything into a propaganda tool to use as an attack vector for pozzing populations. You can already see this in the degradation of videogames from a Ludocentric medium to a Narrative centric one.

This is something I will point out for everyone to see: The Death Cult fears competency. Competency is built up, for all but a few outliers, through trial and error- what videogames calls "Rogue-like" because it builds off the D&D-inspired Rogue.

Real RPGs are all about that. You roll your man, you try, you fail (man dies), you reroll and go again. Iterative improvement in player skill is part of the hobby.

That's not in Art Therapy products, and given how nebulous the design language is (as it all revolves around "the fiction", hence The Narrative, so Narrative Tropes and Norms apply) this can easily turn into a Struggle Session given the opportunity by a nefarious Game Master.

A more throughout article on how nefarious these ungames are is now on the table for a near future date.

Don't end up like Caesar did on this day in 44 B.C.; take this warning seriously- this Art Therapy is not just a suck product, but a tell for where the Death Cult wants this medium to go.