Ultrablamtacular!

I’m thinking about the concept of “antitainment” – or should it be “exitainment”? No, that sounds too much like “exciting entertainment” when what it means is “negative entertainment.”  More specifically, something that’s supposed to be fun, but decidedly is not.

Specifically, I’m thinking about when a game you’re supposed to be engaged in to have fun becomes more like a dreary chore that must be endured. Usually, this involves non-play activities required to create or maintain the state of game artifacts. Wow. I really started writing like a nerd there. Sorry.

This doesn’t mean you can’t do any work at all without your entertainment going rotten on you. After all to play even the most prosaic of games – checkers, for instance – you have to set up the board. There’s a certain amount of investment involved, upon which you rightfully expect a certain amount of entertainment as a return. I’m talking about the point at which the entertainment value derived is not worth the effort, or rather, the percieved burden of the effort required. The bit about percieved burden is important here. I use it because how long the effort takes, how many people are involved, how much it bothers someone to engage in the effort, how complicated the effort is, and other factors are all involved in how big a drag it actually feels like. It’s like temperature (effort) vs. wind chill (percieved burden).

I’m realizing that most RPGs are filled with antitainment. There are two sources of antitainment for players (as opposed to GMs, who have their own sources of antitainment) that come to mind right away:

• Character creation
• Character progression

Everybody needs to make characters in order to play, it’s like setting up the board in checkers. But at least you get to use the characters over and over again. It would be like getting to play checkers for years once you set up the board that first time. And that’s why people have ever bothered to play – the return on creating characters is pretty high. And I can hear the counter-argument as I write this – “If there were actually antitainment in RPGs, nobody would ever play them.” And that’s true. In fact, I can think of games that nobody plays anymore – primoridal Traveller (I don’t know about newer versions), with it’s “death in character generation” exhibits antitainment. And as I said before, antitainment is compounded of numerous factors, many of which I’m sure I am still entirely unaware.

But I have good players, dedicated players, players who know the value of the fun they’ll have when we play a game. And these players, as a rule, hate character generation. My brother, who’s coming to visit next week, and will hopefully serve as my first non-gamer playtester, has said to me in more-or-less these words, “I’d be interested in playing RPGs, but I hate making characters.” That is antitainment, right there. That’s a player alienated from the hobby. Bam. Point made.

Another locus of antitainment for players is character advancement – what is known even to the non-RPGing public now as “levelling up” thanks to many zillions of video games having co-opted the D&D model. Even in games where progress is made more evenly, in smaller chunks, improving the character is something few gamers in my experience look forward to – even though they usually look forward to having the improvements themselves.

I think that what joins these two activities is a set of common characteristics:

• non-play paperwork
• looking things up in charts, tables, or in reference books
• checking prerequisites
• spending accumulated metagame currency (experience)

All of these activities are guaranteed to pull the player out of the experience of the game itself, to break the illusion everyone has gone to such lengths to share. It would be like watching a serious drama on TV and suddenly cutting to the “making of” that they were shooting for the DVD release. With no warning, the shared conceits of the show are shattered and the dreary business of making it happen takes center stage. One of my primary goals in designing this system was to minimize antitainment – I didn’t think of it as such when I started, of course, I just had the idea about antitainment now – but I did set out to make playing and running the game as easy as possible, and by lowering the barriers to fun, I think I’m lowering the chance of antitainment.

And yes, I am aware that there are people out there who like making characters and and advancing them. I like making characters myself. But I’m a systems geek (see nerdspeak above) and people who play games cannot be presumed to like the same things as people who create them. How many Monopoly players have been inspired to create their own roll-and-move boardgames? Personal preference is one of those contributing factors to the percieved burden.

I’m hoping to have all of the major mechanical issues I detailed in this post resolved by next Friday so that I can get my brother in on a playtest session. It’ll be a pretty good measure of whether my system is antitaining or not.