The Culture: The Tribal Chief Is Still Around

Jeffro is on Substack.

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Behold an example of what he posts there.

The "folk tradition" that sprung up around D&D is not a game. It is a failure to play a game. There is of course a modest range of well established variations within the tradition. You have innocent children who play pretend while occasionally roll dies or make rough sketches of monsters and wizards. You have unimaginative adults who hide behind a screen and pretend that the players have only just barely managed to beat the big bad evil guy with their last hit point. You have paid actors that pretend to be amazed and utterly dismayed with their coworker improvises a brief soliloquy while their PC bleeds out in a pivotal scene. But these diverse manifestations of the folk tradition have one thing in common: they are not games. Some people are explicitly pretending to play a game. Others are clumsily or perhaps sometimes charmingly tinkering with and playing WITH the pieces of an actual game and occasionally dabbling with some actual procedures from a game. But the activity they are engaging with is not itself a game. Now, one might be inclined to raise any number of objections at this point. Most of us are familiar with the passages from the rules texts and the accounts from the bad old days that are appealed to in this context in order to lend an air of legitimacy to this "folk tradition". This is of course in vain. Because anyone that is committed to this activity to any degree will tell you that the first rule of this "game" is that there aren't any rules to this game. Only the most imaginative sort of people, they assure us, can look at a relatively complex game, ignore 80% of it entirely, change the rest at will, and then throw out all of the rules entirely during the heat of play because, after all, why would you want to "break immersion" and "kill the sense of dramatic tension" by pausing play in order to consult a rules manual? This is very persuasive to some, I suppose. And sure, the phrase "playing D&D" is of course today synonymous with all of the hokum and balderdash I have alluded to above. And all of the people that pretend to actually believe these things insist very loudly that they are having a great deal of fun. Nevertheless the fact remains they are not playing a game. And the disciplines of game design and game development have nothing to do with what they are doing and what they advocate for. The people that make products to sell to such people could be called any number of things, but in no world could they honestly and accurately be described as being game designers. The correct term, I think, would be "hacks".

- Jeffro Johnson

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