benlehman

So Vincent asks about the state of the art in indie RPGs, by way of a set of survey questions. Chewing over my response, it doesn't fit easily into his forms, so I'll elaborate here.

It is no longer reasonable to discuss the state of the art in indie rpgs. Period. The art is expanding so much and so rapidly on so many different fronts that it's impossible for a single person to digest it all. The different discoveries which are being made -- or which could be made if they were investigated with play -- cannot be synthesized into a whole, a direction, or even a set of categories.

Even if you played every game written with interesting and novel ideas during a specific year, that would take you two or three years of constant play, at which point you'd be two or three years behind.

This doesn't mean that we should give up on trying to understand things, we should just understand that we all have a deeply incomplete picture, and there is no longer a single direction of motion in design, or even countable directions of motion in design.

I don't think that this is a particularly bad thing, mind you, and I don't want to frame it as such. It's perfectly natural. But it does mean that we're in a phase transition, and we need to understand that we can't talk about design the same way that we used to.

If I can bust out the Chinese political theory for a second (if you're allergic to this sort of thing, just stop reading here), we're fully enveloped in a fire phase right now. The whole of game design is so bursting over with creative energy that it can't be contained, observed, or measured. Previously, we were in a wood phase (which I'd mark at the publication of MLWM up until just after GenCon 2006), where we were growing, expanding, figuring out new things and building the basis that this fire is growing on. (Before that, things were more of a water phase: everyone knows everyone, a lot of games existing as ideas and thoughts and a lot of basic theory discussion.)

Eventually, when we've moved through this phase, we're going to enter an earth phase, where things will stabilize around a core of good ideas. Being enveloped in the fire phase right now, I can't imagine what that core will look like. But given that the phases seem to be about 4-5 years long, that's still a ways out. We have a ton of intensity to get out of our system first, which will be embodied in thousands upon thousands of amazing, revolutionary games which, 4 years ago, would have blown minds across the internet but now languish undeveloped for lack of attention.