Sure, but to me you’re basically saying that the automobile wasn’t a big deal because we already knew how to convert potential energy into kinetic motion. As you say, we’re just in a state of fundamental disagreement about the degree/impact of innovation involved, and that’s okay. IMHO an awful lot of stuff that required a flash of true inspiration looks stupidly obvious in hindsight.
And despite all the jabbing we’re doing about the myriad qualities of D&D, I’ll quote myself above:
Well, the counter-argument to video games has been “But we play games with a deck of cards so it’s no big deal”. I’m willing to agree that other elements of what we classically consider an RPG have built upon the role playing/make believe element but, in doing so, I have to consider the differences between the AI on a modern video game and the static properties of a deck of cards in Solitaire. I don’t see D&D’s innovations as overwhelming in that case to say that RPGs are the “newest” because video game innovations don’t measure up.
I don’t feel this is true at all. When I think of video games as a new form of entertainment, I think of competitive Starcraft. Nothing about a competitive game of Starcraft (or any RTS) is like anything that came before it.
It’s not just that it’s interactive, which is in and of itself a sea change. (Note that playing cards are not interactive. You have to do all the actions.) It also combines the strategy of chess (or at least more than checkers) with the manual dexterity of a pianist. The closest thing I can come up with as a precursor to a video game would be air hockey. Or maybe pinball. When I think of video games in general, manual dexterity looms large.
Actually, maybe carnival games – with their unwinnable dexterity skill checks – is the much older precursor to video games. Hmmm…
Well, I also think LHoD is minimizing (and also pigeonholing, per my previous post) the impact of video gaming. Maybe it’s a bit harder to see since video games have grown alongside technology while RPGs have never been constrained in that way, and so all innovation in the space has been necessarily incremental.
I know I’m speaking in a pretty specific field, so by analogy, I’ll say that the automobile wasn’t as big an innovation, in some ways. We’ve spent a long time getting into wheeled vehicles and traveling farther and faster than we could under our own power. Compare that to something like the telegraph, which enabled instantaneous communication over hundreds of miles, and I’d consider the latter to be more fundamentally new.
I’m not talking about social or economic or historical impact; rather, I’m talking about folks interact with the technology.
Also, it got a bit lost in the shuffle but I’d like to again mention legacy boardgames as a really cool innovation in the gaming space. Playing Pandemic Legacy was an experience like nothing I’d ever had, and the feeling of ripping up board game components was so transgressive and taboo that I felt like a naughty child. The first handful of times the game told us to discard a component or permanently alter the board, we’d all stop and look guiltily at each other before deciding who had the ‘honor,’ and as it was happening we’d laugh and gasp at the horror of it all.
Well, that’s kind of the point I’m making. The automobile was pretty ‘simple.’ Karl Benz more or less said, “Hm, I wonder what would happen if I duct taped an internal combustion engine to a carriage.”
I looked up the Benz’s Motorwagen on Wikipedia before posting this and had no idea how much of it he’d developed personally, so my analogy falls apart altogether.
Hmm. I think some folks are still talking about impact, when I’m trying to focus on how folks interact with the technology. Video games have certainly had a greater social/historical/economic impact than TTRPGs, no doubt.
I do agree that legacy boardgames fundamentally change the way that a person interacts with the entertainment, and that’s a pretty cool recombination.
Hey now, Mad-Libs was played by one guy asking the other guy for words then writing them into the book to read back, permanently changing the page!
(Of course, (a) I suspect most people wrote the words on scratch paper rather than inscribing “Bucket of Butts” into the book forever and (b) the fact that you COULD just as effectively write on paper means that ruining the book wasn’t a core part of Mad-Libs. But I still had the immediate thought about ‘games where you ruined the materials via playing it’)
I’m not sure that modern “diceless RPGs” are really the same thing as old-style Cops-and-Robbers imaginative play. They’re certainly very similar, and more so than D&D is to C&R, but they still have formalized rules for conflict resolution, which C&R lacks. It might be a much simpler set of rules than D&D, say, rock-paper-scissors instead of dice, but that’s still a mostly-random conflict resolution.
And while a computer, like a deck of cards, is an object, it can’t rightly be called an inanimate object, at least not in the relevant sense. Computers weren’t the first animate objects used in games, either, but it’s still a significant difference between computers and cards.
Exactly! The idea of disposable entertainment wasn’t at all new. Applying it something which until then had been completely static* absolutely was. And we all had board games as kids that were missing several pieces, always to the detriment of the experience. Purposefully discarding elements was inverting one of the core rules of boardgaming - take care of the components - on its head.
*mostly static. I have a copy of of the 1979 version of Dune which includes a pad of scorecards - each player is meant to rip one off and use it each time they play. I bought the game on eBay and while it had clearly seen plenty of use, the pad itself is pristine and unused. Not even a smudge. Every person who ever owned it - and this was before it was reprinted so it probably changed hands several times - had either made photocopies or just used handwritten notes.
You don’t mess with the components. Except now, sometimes, you do. Crazy.
Also, unlike Clue or Monopoly, not only do the characters enter the game with individual skills and abilities, but they also persist between “games” or sessions. They can accrue items, skills, and experience that changes the way the next game is played.
There are no new elements to roleplaying games, and so any part of a roleplaying game can be compared to other games that existed prior to D&D, but the combination of them created something I would consider to be new.
ETA: between starting and finishing this post, I got a bit ninja’d.
Yes, but in this case the innovation of D&D is a technology, that is, a way of doing something.
My disagreement with the original post is that D&D is more innovative than other entertainment. D&D could’ve been played anytime since the invention of writing–it’s a matter of cultural happenstance that it wasn’t.
Video games are more innovative than D&D, because they make use of digital electronic computers. While automation has been around since at least Jacquard looms, generalized computational automation has not. Computers have been the biggest technological revolution since heat engines became widespread.
That said, while video games are innovative as a whole, they are not particularly innovative as games. They take existing games and automate parts of them. The automation part is fundamentally new; the game part is not. That automation part is huge, though. Gaming has become easier for individuals to play and easier for designers to create. I’d say we’re in a golden age of gaming, but I think the real golden age is yet to come.
I don’t know… Take something like Risk, and yeah, the automation is a big deal (you can play a full game in a half-hour, instead of six!), but it’s still the same game. But now, instead of Risk, look at Starcraft: The automation speeds things up so much, that now you can play a wargame in real time, instead of taking turns. That’s a fundamentally different play experience, and it only became possible with computers.
And while that’s a game for which being real-time was new, it’s still a recognizable progression from games like Risk. What were the non-computerized predecessors to something like the Mario games?
don’t