Where do psyops come from? Find out in my forthcoming book STORIES ARE WEAPONS, now available for pre-order! Want a signed and/or personalized copy? Order one from the glorious Green Apple Books today! https://www.greenapplebooks.com/signed-annalee-newitz
@annaleen So exciting! It'll be REALLY useful to have a recent, updated take on this thread -- the "hidden" history of weaponized Comm & Media Studies, basically -- and your thoughts on how it's continued in recent decades!
@annaleen No, but their stuff looks super interesting. Thanks for the rec! Actually, Wolfe's books look really useful for something I'm working on right now.
When you fully accept that gamers are largely fundamentally competent at having a good time roleplaying, you realize that most design objectives OTHER THAN "save people work" and "get them excited" can be managed with a box of parts and a discussion of how to assemble them.
@LeviKornelsen Fair, but I also think the practice of roleplaying can be opaque to outsiders -- maybe less so now that there's video examples. My students, for example, tend to have difficult figuring out how to play "serious" or emotional TRPG content, rather than playing for yucks.
Last few years, I've been feeling that @megueyb + @lumpley's Apocalypse World and Avery's most recent half-dozen games (since Quiet Year) -- plus everything released since -- have left me thinking a lot about "responding to a prompt" as the micro-foundation of TRPG play.
I don't know if I can fully articulate it, or put it into a clouds-and-arrows diagram. And, in the end, it's not particularly complicated or insightful. But I think it helps reframe TRPGs (and all play?) in useful ways.
It also potentially reframes the work of game designers and players in ways that I find useful.
There is nothing about "responding to a prompt" that requires a game designer. Players can just do it by themselves. But both game designers and players are engaged in the work of figuring out how to generate interesting & appropriate prompts + interesting & appropriate responses (for whatever "interesting" and "appropriate" mean for their play goals).
These structures & processes can take the form of designed objects, certainly, but they can also be more abstract, like methods, procedures, perspectives, patterns.
Often a prompt built into the mechanics is not so much a direct provocation -- though it can be that -- as much as it is an opportunity or an affordance. Frex: drawing a card & answering one question in Quiet Year is a pretty direct prompt. But an MC or player-side move in AW is more like an opportunity -- inviting you to pick it.
Thinking more about it, I feel like the "responding to a prompt" stuff was perhaps initially made clear by stuff like Baron Munchausen, Breaking the Ice, @megueyb's 1001 Nights, etc. -- early games that avoided standard RPG design tropes in favor of structuring narrative in other ways. And that came full circle with card larps, Companion's Tale, Quiet Year, For the Queen, keepsake & solo games, etc.