De-geeking role-playing games

[benlehman]

This comes up, maybe, every month or so in the online conversations I follow. "role-playing games need to be less geeky!"

I just wanted to record here that I think that the entire idea is ridiculous for the following reasons:

1) Perceptions of role-playing games by our culture at large are generally positive: that they are fun, but very time-consuming and potentially obsession forming. Which is about accurate.

2) Since, oh, 1996, geeky things have been hella cool. Hello gamers? I know that you live under a rock, unexposed to the culture at large. But srsly.

I'm posting here because I don't want to have to write this same post, like, 80 times only to have it fall (again) on totally deaf ears.

Comments

[matt-rah.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's games that deal with real, "mundane," historical (but still heavy-hitting) stuff that I think are a good idea. My favorite examples are Steal Away Jordan and Grey Ranks. Note that these games are amazing whether or not they bring new blood into the hobby: they stand as works of art on their own. The fact that they deal with stuff every educated person—even non-geeks—knows about (American slavery and WWII, respectively)—is just icing on the cake.

Matt

[intimations.livejournal.com]

You think serious exploration of historically accurate settings makes a game LESS geeky?

I'd humbly submit that playing Grey Ranks or SAJ for the historical content is just as geeky as playing D&D for the orcs. In MY opinion, I'd rank it to be geekier, perhaps because I'm more into games for gaming's sake than I am into history (although I love history), and there can be a tendency to see yourself as being more mainstream.

[matt-rah.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm trying to say that one of the "barriers to entry" for well-educated but not particularly "geeky" in the traditional sense folks, isn't the purely mechanical rules of D&D, GURPS, or whatever. It's the unfamiliarity of the gameworlds and situations that presents an equally high burden. There are how many races? How many continents/planets/whatever? How many schools of magic?

GR and SAJ aren't about history, really—it's just that the setting backgrounds are things people have heard of, and that are at least reasonably easy to envision, unlike, say, DragonLance.

Although on reflection, given the popularity of LotR and Harry Potter and so on and so forth in recent years, I'll concede that the notion of being in "a fantasy world" is probably not as big a deal as it would have been in the late 90's. I still maintain that the equation "roleplaying = genre fiction" is problematic, as the two don't need to have anything to do with each other.

Matt