flesh to plush

(This is the third part of a three-part entry; read Part One here and Part Two here)

A Spirited Defense of Metagaming

An astute reader may have noticed that this entire post is flirting with one of the gravest and most unforgivable sins in roleplaying: thinking about the game from a mechanics-first perspective, or what is sometimes known by the pejorative of "metagaming." And yet here, it not only works (in my most humbled of opinions), but the game arguably functions better when players are thinking about the game mechanics and how best to use them as tools to achieve the goals of play.
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"[I]n order to give a positive meaning to the idea of a 'presentiment' of what does not yet exist, it is necessary to demonstrate that what does not yet exist is already in action, in a different form than that of its existence." -Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

This article is going to talk about is the process of creating an RPG character. In this case I'm going to be using Shinobigami as the game in question, for a couple of reasons:
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First, eight billion disclaimers. ( Read more... )

This is a rhetorical question about the extent to which one media paradigm's assemblage of various traits into identifiable patterns is ever going to map comfortably onto a different media paradigm, and how the attempts to do so can potentially reveal unexamined assumptions about less obvious aspects of how we orient ourselves towards that medium in the first place. And also, I'm going to answer the rhetorical question anyway.

I mean, all four Xs do appear in one part of the game's major procedural structures or another. But even a lot of relatively popular ways of playing D&D contain some degree of at least three of the four Xs, and yet I doubt many people would jump to claiming that D&D has much in common with, for example, Masters of Orion.

Which is to say, I suspect that very few people really interact with games on a psychological level directly vis a vis the fictional activities we engage in while playing (this is also a backhanded critique of the supposed "Three Pillars" of D&D play, but that's a whole different rant). The way we view those activities is heavily influenced by the rhetorical interface of the game; for example, the role of "overseer" that we generally play in 4X games, compared to the rhetorical interface of the individual actor common to most RPGs.

But that's what makes the label of "4X" potentially more applicable to Meikyuu Kingdom than it is to other tabletop RPGs where the players/characters explore, exploit, expand, and/or exterminate. The core gimmick of Meikyuu Kingdom is the eponymous Kingdom, a communal character played by all of the players (and to which their individual characters belong), and which provides the necessary "overseer" framework that conceptualises the activities the individual characters take part in as part of the traditional 4X "loop."( Read more... )