A problem with RPGs: RPG developers are not well-read in myth and fantasy/sci-fi literature

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Story in games shouldn't be a focus to begin with, that's part of the overall decline in the hobby in general. Story should simply be serviceable and always there just to frame the gameplay and the systems that should be the actual focus of the project in question.

Yes, Dungeon Master is the perfect example of where story should exist in a CRPG: in the manual.

Tabletop games were first and foremost strategy and tactics games, the whole fun of them was the combat, character building and strategy, which is the appeal of cRPGs as well. Your focus when you played ToEE or Demonweb Pits was not how to portray the backstory and motives of your character, it was building a strong as fuck dude that could manage to kill his way through the module and get the cool loot without getting killed in the process. THAT is what is FUN about RPGs, and always has been.

Exploration and combat have always been the twin pillars of RPGs, and arguably exploration has always been paramount; Dungeons & Dragons itself had fairly abstract combat rules, though some players disliked this and then gravitated towards RPGs that catered to them with more tactical complexity.

It's not just a problem with RPGs. I call this the cannibalization of media: the people who write fantasy books only read fantasy books, the people who make RPGs only play RPGs, and so on. There’s no outside input, so the output ends up being the most generic shit out there. Given how most of those shit sucks, it's garbage in garbage out all the way.

The worm ouroboros

 

[octavius]

I've been going back and reading the early pulp stuff for a while, and I think one of the major barriers that a modern reader will have, is that the entire mind-set and thinking is different.

The problem I have with most modern Fantasy, is just that the characters don't feel "authentic", but more like people in an antique/medieval setting that think like modern people. I used to be annoyed by the "middle class kids on a picnic" (like Wheel of Time), but I guess it reflected the writers' inability to write more authentic characters. But nowadays it seems to be this attitude that characters in a fantasy setting have to be relatable to "a modern audience", so they have to think like modern, liberal Californians and of course they will have to be "diverse", but the diversity can never be more than skin deep. So "representation" has become more important than things that make sense anthropologically and "historical" accuracy.

 

[ropetight]

Fellas, fellas.

It was not the sports or the web.
It was slowly subverting and changing the nature of literary works until there is nothing interesting to the men.
Then, proclaiming that feminine shit is profound and more valuable than its masculine contemporaries and predecessors.
So they can rub your noses in it like dogs that did the naughty in the house.
Naughty, naughty little puppy.

Louis_Cypher mentioned Hugos and Nebulas.
In my youth, best SF novels, ones that got the awards too, were combination of the novel scientific concept and couple unexpected plot twists, with just enough exotic locations and cultures to make it unique.
Now we have emotional feministic explorations of non-binary aliens and female-identifyng AI's; outright feminist genocide/power or rape fantasies are bestsellers and declared seminal works even if they just wear skinsuit of genre.
I'm not into contemporary fantasy, but it seems to be following the same path.

And it is not the women that made this - it was always simps masquerading as rebellious voices that plant the seed of medium downfall and lead the charge of the activists.
One of the male competition strategies is that if you can't confont them directly, you must use other means to turn odds to your favor.
Basically, betas declare virtues as nothing worthy at all, while introducing some new metric for valuing men accomplishments.
So, there is always some Harlan Ellison that will sing praises about some black gay guy feverish ravings and feminist utopias while bashing giants on which shoulders he is balancing.
After that, Hellgates are wide open.

How do they do it?
Slowly, like boling proverbial frog in the pot - by dilluting symbolism and epic nature by adding more and more elements that are alien to male enjoyment of the story.
It is a fake notion of the western modernism that everything old must be wrong and thus subverted - because everything is so much better after revolution.
Japanese, on the other hand, evolved their genres so you gradually get more nuanced and truly sophisticated works, while basic tenets of genre are still left intact.
(That doesn't mean they are not prone to the modernist crap, it was just majority of their industry still produced traditional works).

Let's take the example of women participation in men fields in the fiction.

First you make women exception to the rule, so you have one woman which is equally capable to the men in your story.
This cheap trick makes your story more unexpected, original and modern.
Then, you make women more capable than men, but there is still tits&ass and epic adventures.
We still have our escapist fantasy, so who gives a fuck.
Couple of iterations and you reach The Final Stage - men are nerdy buffoons that have intrinsic value only if they unconditionally love women in the story.
Ones that are not greatest cheerleaders are only good as villains, also weak and pathetic, made that way not to encourage toxic masculinity in young, uncorrupted minds.

This approach you can apply to any story element, but common ground is - masculine (whatever men enjoy) story elements have to be rendered stupid, childish and obsolete.

This turn of the events is deeply discouraging for the men that enjoy the medium, even if they claim to have open mind and it doesn't bother them.
So, they slowly disconnect from once cherished field; some are reduced to simping and promoting The Message, like their fictional avatars they are mimicking.
Some just stop engaging with the works altogether and live in past/retro works.

It is all motivated by hatred and revenge towards men, and it is not happening by chance.
It is premediated and intentional.

 

[Vormulak]

I'll just throw my video down here

https://youtu.be/yjRFk3cYuto?list=PLVZmRXsScBedNzMlA4w4ITYS8mZK1n4FY

I've made several videos on the topic of modern games being garbage and I'm too lazy to type out the main points. Call me a shill, idc.

 

[Riddler]

Going back to the title i think it's even worse than that, they aren't merely "not well read", they're actively badly read.

Reading urban romantasy or whatever actively makes you a worse writer. It's like thinking that scrolling TikTok somehow would make kids more tech-savvy, or that men who watch a lot of porn are cinephiles because they've watched so many "movies".

The bar for reading making you a better writer isn't astronomically high but wallowing around in the shittiest gutter you can find obviously isnt helpful.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

I've been going back and reading the early pulp stuff for a while, and I think one of the major barriers that a modern reader will have, is that the entire mind-set and thinking is different.

The problem I have with most modern Fantasy , is just that the characters don't feel "authentic", but more like people in an antique/medieval setting that think like modern people. I used to be annoyed by the "middle class kids on a picnic" (like Wheel of Time), but I guess it reflected the writers' inability to write more authentic characters. But nowadays it seems to be this attitude that characters in a fantasy setting have to be relatable to "a modern audience", so they have to think like modern, liberal Californians and of course they will have to be "diverse", but the diversity can never be more than skin deep. So "representation" has become more important than things that make things anthropologically and "historical" facts.

Fantasy needs to have a mythic, symbolic, metaphysical component, or it isn't fantasy at all. The key psychological difference between modernity and ancient or medieval is the existence of a non-subjective metaphysical belief, as opposed to pure materialism or human subjectivity in modernist thinking, which is why works like The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars are fantasy, because they contain the mythic-symbolic, but some contemporary shite full of Californian psychology and dialogue isn't. The dialogue itself isn't the cause of your alienation, but only the symptom, of a contemporary psychology that cannot understand the pre-modern. Star Wars has relatively contemporary dialogue, but isn't at all contemporary in mindset, for example.

That YouTube channel a couple of pages back goes into this quite heavily, although he sees it a little differently from me. In his view, what you are detecting there in "contemporary" fantasy, is an attempt to "elevate" the genre toward naturalism, without anything symbolic, and that more balanced works of fantasy are half contemporary with relatable characters, but half mythic and symbolic. The bad examples you describe, this have almost no presence on the mythological side of the scale, so it might as well be non-fantasy fiction.

As it happens, this one star review of The Wheel of Time by someone called J G Kelly was used as an example:

Tolkien on the other hand is absolutely a mythic work. I think geeks detect this, and seek it out. But then they mis-attribute it and hit the wrong target. Gobbling up anything that looks like Tolkien, but missing the underpinning symbolic world. Like for example, maybe a weeb detects the mythic-symbolic in Japanese entertainment, lacking it in his own modernist culture, and mis-attributes it to "anything Japanese", ending up reading/watching pure slop anime/manga. Likewise a geek gobbles up any novel/game/TV series with a dragon in it, when they are actually searching for the deeper mythic and symbolic, which virtually no fantasy except Tolkien has. Smaug is an actual dragon. He is more symbol than real. Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion are just materialistic dinosaurs. But in detecting the deeper layer of say Tolkien, they mis-read it as being a component of the contingent transitory elements, and become consumers of a "fantasy" genre in which 90% of the work is non-mythical, contemporary, and might as well not be fantasy.

 

[Falksi]

This is one banging thread. I've quoted Chuck Norris's OP in several social media groups since it was posted, and I think his point really separates the men from the boys when it comes to any form of entertainment media.

 

[DannyRope]

It's hardly a secret that media literacy is dead, can't pinpoint the exact date of death but enough time have passed for the meat of its rotten carcass to have been devoured by fat flies and maggots and its bones to be bleached by the sun.
I don't necessarily see the inclusion of powerful women characters in fiction, even those generally stronger than the male characters, to be the first step in a slow but assured declive in the quality of the stories. Would the current storytelling landscape be any different if, say, the Black Company didn't have The Lady? Or Dune, the Bene Gesserit? I don't think so.

No, it's the death of media literacy, that and laziness. It's not enough to have competent female characters but because people have become poorer in reading comprehension those same female characters must be close to perfect. Writing female characters with flaws that would make them interesting and HUMAN would be decried as chauvinistic. That a predictable consequence of this are boring characters and stories is handwaved off. Worse, there's always people who will readily, and eagerly, consume slop, for whatever reason be that they're genuinely the lowest common denominator or "to own the chuds" or whatever other inane reason, so there's no motivation to improve in the craft of storytelling.

It's also a lot easier to write stupid characters, hence the stories with female characters being powerful and smart while surrounded by weak and dumb male characters. That this make the female character look not so powerful or smart eludes most of the audience. Why bother crafting complex stories with antagonists and villains, male or otherwise, that present an actual challenge to a female protagonist, which is hard, when any hack can quickly write a trash piece that would garner them praise and social cred?

 

[Storyfag]

This is one banging thread. I've quoted Chuck Norris's OP in several social media groups since it was posted, and I think his point really separates the men from the boys when it comes to any form of entertainment media.

And this year Louis_Cypher is providing heaps of quality content, keeping the thread alive and well

 

[Nifft Batuff]

The problem with modern developers it's not only that they are not well versed in literature. Before that, they are not well versed in basic math and programming.

 

[NecroLord]

He wrote Elric as an emo kid that every teenage boy can sympathize with

Right, but his intention was to write an anti Conan because Conan bad or something.

Elric is also weak and scrawny without his potions and Stormbringer.
Conan is a Chad carefully crafted by nature and life's harshness and the howling winds of rocky and bleak Cimmeria...

 

[Storyfag]

He wrote Elric as an emo kid that every teenage boy can sympathize with

Right, but his intention was to write an anti Conan because Conan bad or something.

The funny thing is that neither of them are proper rapists, which makes Cugel the Clever more chad than either of them.

Cugel is a weak and whiny con-man. Amusing though his antics may be, he is no Conan.

 

[Iucounu]

It was not the sports or the web.
It was slowly subverting and changing the nature of literary works until there is nothing interesting to the men.
Then, proclaiming that feminine shit is profound and more valuable than its masculine contemporaries and predecessors.
So they can rub your noses in it like dogs that did the naughty in the house.
Naughty, naughty little puppy.

And it is not the women that made this - it was always simps masquerading as rebellious voices that plant the seed of medium downfall and lead the charge of the activists.
One of the male competition strategies is that if you can't confont them directly, you must use other means to turn odds to your favor.
Basically, betas declare virtues as nothing worthy at all, while introducing some new metric for valuing men accomplishments.

Quite true, but what prevents the real men from keep writing good novels? Writing does not require the collaboration or permission of others. Print publishing might be a problem, but anyone can post their works on the web (you may not make money that way though, though I've often heard that writers feel a compulsion to write, and are not in it for the money).

 

[ropetight]

It was not the sports or the web.
It was slowly subverting and changing the nature of literary works until there is nothing interesting to the men.
Then, proclaiming that feminine shit is profound and more valuable than its masculine contemporaries and predecessors.
So they can rub your noses in it like dogs that did the naughty in the house.
Naughty, naughty little puppy.

And it is not the women that made this - it was always simps masquerading as rebellious voices that plant the seed of medium downfall and lead the charge of the activists.
One of the male competition strategies is that if you can't confont them directly, you must use other means to turn odds to your favor.
Basically, betas declare virtues as nothing worthy at all, while introducing some new metric for valuing men accomplishments.

Quite true, but what prevents the real men from keep writing good novels? Writing does not require the collaboration or permission of others. Print publishing might be a problem, but anyone can post their works on the web (you may not make money that way though, though I've often heard that writers feel a compulsion to write, and are not in it for the money).

You can sell some small amounts if the publishers, critics, awards-givers and journalists are against you.
Pulitzer, Booker and NYT bestsellers are controlling big chunk of the influence on the sales; Amazon reviews and scores are bot controlled from who knows when.

There is no Steam equivalent for the book publishiing that would level the field for indie publishers, as far as I know.
There are guys that make decent living from crowdsourcing and self publishing(Brandon Sanderson being the most famous), but you will know very little about their books if you don't know where to look.
Even Sanderson never won World Fantasy Award, and was nominated once, for novella, 12 years ago.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

Story in games shouldn't be a focus to begin with, that's part of the overall decline in the hobby in general. Story should simply be serviceable and always there just to frame the gameplay and the systems that should be the actual focus of the project in question. If you still had random game devs who only know how to cobble together something like "Orcs bad, you are hero, you kill them and stuff" as a narrative we would be in a much better place, instead companies now hire an entire writing staff that puts out a story significantly worse than that basic setup could ever be, and in most cases actively detracts from the enjoyment of the game. It's only made worse if the story starts taking up significant amounts of the game itself. If your game lives or dies off its story, its a bad game to begin with. The fact its emphasized at all shows how far off the focus has gotten in the industry at large as to what a good game is and should be.

It's a holistic thing IMO. Personally I have a preferance for explorefag. Things like dungeon crawlers. Obviously a game can't survive without gameplay. But when combatfag, explorefag and storyfag unite, the game is superior to one alone; so why not reach for all three. Games that get everything right are sublime. Coherent world-building in particular is something I think adds a lot, not neccecarily story per se. Say I'm exploring a game; great world-building compels you to actually pay attention to the world, trying to glean information about an enthralling setting. Learning is a form of exploration itself.

 

[NecroLord]

Story in games shouldn't be a focus to begin with, that's part of the overall decline in the hobby in general. Story should simply be serviceable and always there just to frame the gameplay and the systems that should be the actual focus of the project in question. If you still had random game devs who only know how to cobble together something like "Orcs bad, you are hero, you kill them and stuff" as a narrative we would be in a much better place, instead companies now hire an entire writing staff that puts out a story significantly worse than that basic setup could ever be, and in most cases actively detracts from the enjoyment of the game. It's only made worse if the story starts taking up significant amounts of the game itself. If your game lives or dies off its story, its a bad game to begin with. The fact its emphasized at all shows how far off the focus has gotten in the industry at large as to what a good game is and should be.

It's a holistic thing IMO. Personally I have a preferance for explorefag. Things like dungeon crawlers. Obviously a game can't survive without gameplay. But when combatfag, explorefag and storyfag unite, the game is superior to one alone; so why not reach for all three. Games that get everything right are sublime. Coherent world-building in particular is something I think adds a lot, not neccecarily story per se. Say I'm exploring a game; great world-building compels you to actually pay attention to the world, trying to glean information about an enthralling setting. Learning is a form of exploration itself.

Setting has to be compelling.
Also there has to be focus mostly on the gameplay and the combat system, which are crucial to a truly self respecting rpg.

 

[Dark Souls II]

I'll give them a benefit of doubt, and say that RPG developers are probably somehow-read in fantasy literature. The problem is they are definitely not read in the classics, history & anthropology, not up to date with archaeologic developments, and have no idea how ancient/medieval societies really looked like. And it makes me nauseous whenever a premodern-based setting is a structurally 100% exact copy of current-day society.

But then again, developers are just pussies, and they are both too stupid and too cowardly to truly depict premodern concepts in their work. Let's take for example the concept of the "age of consent". It's a nonsense concept that was invented by the jews in 1840s, and yet in most medieval-based RPG settings there are no marriable loli companions. It's a travesty. Viconia should have been a loli.

 

[NecroLord]

"age of consent"

jews

You ever read the Talmud or passages from it?

 

[The people of Duckburg]

Quite true, but what prevents the real men from keep writing good novels?

"What prevents you from making your own game if these ones are so bad?"
Sure, it's not the same thing because it's easier to write something on your own, but the idea is the same. For one thing, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle to get noticed, and if you do get noticed, you're going to be bombarded with bad reviews and accusations of various -isms. My local library is filled with rainbow flags and a overwhelming majority of new books are written by women. Essentially all books that are displayed by the entrance are about how hard life is for women or minorities, and especially women minorities. I gave some sci-fi book by a female author a try because the blurb on the back seemed vaguely interesting. Within ten pages the brown researcher woman main character had explained to me that the stupid meathead while man "probably even still thought that there were differences between ethnicities". The book had won several awards. Practically every recent book by a female author that I've tried has contained shit like that.

You can try to write your own book, but the people that decide what should and shouldn't be popular will fight to ensure that you stay unheard of, or use you as an example of what no one should be allowed to be like. I'm sure that there are good books being written by men, and even women, but those books aren't allowed to become popular. And because authors, too, like to make money or receive praise, they're increasingly likely to stop writing to do other things, or to change their books to be more appealing to the perceived modern audience.

 

[The people of Duckburg]

But then again, developers are just pussies, and they are both too stupid and too cowardly to truly depict premodern concepts in their work. Let's take for example the concept of the "age of consent". It's a nonsense concept that was invented by the jews in 1840s, and yet in most medieval-based RPG settings there are no marriable loli companions. It's a travesty. Viconia should have been a loli.

You're conflating the idea of loli, Japanese cartoon and comic girls that generally have little in common with real children anatomically or mentally, with real pedophilia. That's a common tactic used by people that want to ban drawings of cartoon girls (curiously never shota though), usually while pushing for "love is love" and portraying real pedophiles as victims. Unless your nose is longer than you want us to believe it is, you should probably reconsider.

That said, you do have a point in that modern authors do force their modern mindsets onto medieval-style societies, including AoC. If they had any backbone they would portray those civilizations as they would actually be, ideally without beating the reader over the head with the idea that this is bad, mmkay?

 

[MerchantKing]

Story in games shouldn't be a focus to begin with, that's part of the overall decline in the hobby in general. Story should simply be serviceable and always there just to frame the gameplay and the systems that should be the actual focus of the project in question.

Yes, Dungeon Master is the perfect example of where story should exist in a CRPG: in the manual.

Tabletop games were first and foremost strategy and tactics games, the whole fun of them was the combat, character building and strategy, which is the appeal of cRPGs as well. Your focus when you played ToEE or Demonweb Pits was not how to portray the backstory and motives of your character, it was building a strong as fuck dude that could manage to kill his way through the module and get the cool loot without getting killed in the process. THAT is what is FUN about RPGs, and always has been.

Exploration and combat have always been the twin pillars of RPGs, and arguably exploration has always been paramount; Dungeons & Dragons itself had fairly abstract combat rules, though some players disliked this and then gravitated towards RPGs that catered to them with more tactical complexity.

It's not just a problem with RPGs. I call this the cannibalization of media: the people who write fantasy books only read fantasy books, the people who make RPGs only play RPGs, and so on. There’s no outside input, so the output ends up being the most generic shit out there. Given how most of those shit sucks, it's garbage in garbage out all the way.

The worm ouroboros

Is Bioware at fault?

 

[Iucounu]

Quite true, but what prevents the real men from keep writing good novels?

"What prevents you from making your own game if these ones are so bad?"
Sure, it's not the same thing because it's easier to write something on your own, but the idea is the same. For one thing, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle to get noticed, and if you do get noticed, you're going to be bombarded with bad reviews and accusations of various -isms.

Still there seem to be a few good indie games still being made, despite often being bigger projects than writing.

My local library is filled with rainbow flags and a overwhelming majority of new books are written by women.

On the other hand straight male readers likely won't go to libraries anyway these days. But surely there must be other ways to find readers (MGTOW forums maybe, though I've always suspected they are for closet faggots)?

You can try to write your own book, but the people that decide what should and shouldn't be popular will fight to ensure that you stay unheard of, or use you as an example of what no one should be allowed to be like.

The latter could be used to your advantage, I'm sure some would love to write about things that make wokeists seethe...

And because authors, too, like to make money or receive praise, they're increasingly likely to stop writing to do other things, or to change their books to be more appealing to the perceived modern audience.

This might be a problem with society at large. Why would anyone want to get praise from wokeists or feminists?

 

[Iucounu]

That said, you do have a point in that modern authors do force their modern mindsets onto medieval-style societies, including AoC. If they had any backbone they would portray those civilizations as they would actually be, ideally without beating the reader over the head with the idea that this is bad, mmkay?

Not just onto older societies, I personally know at least two (non-European) women that got engaged at age 13 with men twice their age...