https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html
The Six Cultures is currently a hot topic of discussion again this week after Alexander Macris posted a "manifest" of sorts entitled "In Defense of Simulationism", which Macris describes as a "Seventh Culture". I may discuss Macris's essay at a later time, but for now I want to address the claims made in the original article, which is, unfortunately, like many RPG theories before it, an absolute mess.
1) Classic Play
"Classic play is oriented around the linked progressive development of challenges and PC power, with the rules existing to help keep those in rough proportion to one another and adjudicate the interactions of the two "fairly". This is explicit in the AD&D 1e DMG's advice to dungeon masters, but recurs in a number of other places, perhaps most obviously in tournament modules, especially the R-series put out by the RPGA in its first three years of operation, which emphasise periodic resets between sections of the adventure to create a "fair" experience for players as they cycle around from tournament table to tournament table playing the sections."
The author appears to be describing Tournament Play culture, but what I find interesting is that the sources he cites to justify this as "the way Gygax and Co. played" equally contradict these assertions. This may to a large degree result from their earliest cited source being the AD&D 1st Edition Dungeon Masters Guide, a publication coming 5 years after the hobby had reached the mainstream.
There is a lot to say about the writing of the DMG (most of which has been done much better and more comprehensively by Jon Peterson), but the long and short of it is that while I think Tournament play certainly arose during the time period he describes, I also have good reason to believe that it was never Gygax's actual playstyle - at least not according to any firsthand source I've ever read. Gygax was publishing rules because the market wanted rules, and he was framing those in terms of the game and balance, certainly. But I think the author is confusing Gygax the businessman with Gygax the gamer.
Moreover, and more to the point, TRA completely skips over the Arnesian style of gaming, the foundational playstyle of the hobby, and most certainly how Gygax himself first learned to play.
In the end, Tournament Play was only ever a very small minority of hobby experiences when D&D was at it's peak, almost entirely absent from the playstyles developing on university campuses throughout the 70's, so assigning it the moniker "Classic" seems bizarre to me.
2) Traditional Play
"Trad holds that the primary goal of a game is to tell an emotionally satisfying narrative"
...what?
The author uses the term "Traditional" to refer to what I would call a Narrative playstyle, which is...odd, considering narrative play, while almost certainly one of many playstyles to arise out of the expansion of the hobby once it had progressed from the wargaming crowd to the mainstream, it would not be represented in published RPG products until 1984's Dragonlance modules, and even then remained largely an outlier until the 1990's, not the least because of the stigma amongst what I would call "traditional gamers" (because I know what that word means) towards "railroading." I would suggest that the first ruleset actually designed specifically to cater to narrative play was Theatrix in 1995, with even earlier games that tentatively promoted narrative play (White Wolf frex) still presented a "traditional" system (meaning utterly disconnected from narrative conceits).
Come to think of it, hence the reason Ron Edwards decried White Wolf games as "incoherent".
3) Nordic LARP
"This is again an autonym. The "Nordic" part is more about origins and mass of the player base than a true regional limitation of any sort. The "Larp" designation is part of the name for reasons that are unclear to me, even tho' its ideas started in tabletop roleplaying, and its philosophy and aspirations are realisable in tabletop games just as much as in dress-up games."
This is where TRA goes completely off the rails, babbling nonsense about things he clearly doesn't understand and couldn't even be arsed to do a google search's worth of research. It's like ..."here's 5 RPG Playstyle Cultures and one random LARP Playstyle culture thrown in because I read about the Turku Manifesto once on a forum"
LARPs aren't my area of expertise (but I at least know something about them besides the word), so I'm going to quote my friend from The Pub A Fiery Flying Roll's response here:
4) Story Games
OK well, we already had what I would call Narrative RPGs mislabelled as "Traditional", so I wonder what a Storygame is to the author if it isn't a game where "the primary goal of a game is to tell an emotionally satisfying narrative"?
Welp, according to TRA...
"Again, an autonym. Most people who dislike them call them stuff like "Forge games" or "post-Forge indies" after the Forge indie RPG forums. "Indie RPGs" was a term for these at one point as well, but I don't think it was particularly distinctive or edifying, and evidently neither did the adherents to this culture since they mostly abandoned it. Here's a post discussing the origin of the term "story game" from Across the Table.
The Big Model is notoriously obtuse and post-Forge theory has a lot of ideas I strongly disagree with, but I think a fair characterisation of their position that doesn't use their own terminology is that the ideal play experience minimises ludonarrative dissonance. A good game has a strong consonance between the desires of the people playing it, the rules themselves, and the dynamics of the those things interacting. Together, these things allow the people to achieve their desires, whatever they may be. "Incoherence" is to be avoided as creating "zilch play" or "brain damage" as Ron Edwards once called it."
So...apparently it's any game influenced by Forge theory?
Well, OK, but the issue with that is that Forge theory wasn't meant to describe one Playstyle (even if they did put more emphasis on one as Edward's personal preferences warped the theorywank more and more as time went on). And there are, in fact, Forge-influenced designs that are radically different in intended playstyle.
He tries to lump all "Indie Games" under one umbrella, but I don't think he even describes what that umbrella is, or what he intends this to mean. I think this category is sloppy and not well thought out or communicated. It seems like a dump category fr some of Ron Edwards' theorywank, with seemingly no correlation to the very concept of "story". Like, one of the most successful systems to come out of Forge Theory is the Powered by the Apocalypse family of games, which I don;t think are either accurately described as "story games" or "indy RPGs" for that matter (unless "Indy RPG just means anything that isn't D&D".
And yeah, I'm avoiding directly talking abut Forge Theory itself, because that would require it's own very long post(s) to unpack and debunk.
5) OSR
"Yes, it's this late in this chronological listing. And yes, the OSR is not "classic" play. It's a romantic reinvention, not an unbroken chain of tradition."
Yeah, but here's the thing...No?
Sure you have Nostalgia Archaeologists like James Maliszewski trying to piece together older approaches to gaming, but just as often you've got older gamers who were always playing that way and never stopped.
Anyways, TRA does correctly identify this distinction between OSR gaming and the Tournament style gaming that he misacribes to Gygax:
"An important note I will make here is to distinguish the progressive challenge-based play of the "classic" culture from the more variable challenge-based play of the OSR. The OSR mostly doesn't care about "fairness" in the context of "game balance" ...The variation in player agency across a series of decisions is far more interesting to most OSR players than it is to classic players."
I think that is a fair statement in and of itself. I think the issue is the author thinking that is a "new" or "revisionist" idea, when the OSR honestly is just the way most folks played D&D for 3 decades.
I also think that it's a common mistake by outsiders to treat the OSR as a monolith (or in TRA's case, "a Culture"), when in fact a series f multiple isolated communities focused around specific retroclones.
6)OC / Neo-trad
"OC basically agrees with trad that the goal of the game is to tell a story, but it deprioritises the authority of the DM as the creator of that story and elevates the players' roles as contributors and creators."
So...what I'd call a Storygame, unlike the weird application of that term to Forge games...or all Indy games? I dunno.
Conclusion
TRA skips entirely the culture of wargamers where Roleplaying was born (he does give a half-hearted aside to proto-Roleplayers, but this seems to be a catch-all for anything pre-1984 besides Tournament Play (which is a VAST net to cast).
TRA conflates what Gygax and TSR were promoting with what was actually happening at game tables (both Gygax's and on college campuses across the Western world). The thing is, he's presenting these as chronological shifts, but here is his first big mis-step. Once RPGs reached a wider audience than the insular wargaming community, several playstyles/cultures developed simultaneously. But he approaches this entirely from a game design paradigm perspective, using (a very selective reading of) midlife TSR gaming products as the basis for a "culture".
Then TRA completely skips the early 80s and everything else that is going on in game design and jumps straight to narrative playstyles, which he bizarrely labels Traditional, I'm assuming because he's young and mainly grew up in the 90s? If we follow the game-design paradigm instead of cultures, which he seems to be doing at this point, the Golden Age of Genre Emulation should really come next, before the advent of the railroady "games-as-stories" of Dragonlance.
Then the non-sequitor of Nordic LARP is added in, and that should just be excised entirely.
TRA jumps ahead to Forge theory based design paradigms, completely skipping over the narrative revolution of the late 90s, and the huge role Theatrix and The Story Engine would play laying the groundwork for the shift from the 90s design paradigm established by Shadowrun and White Wolf (also not really mentioned, but lumped in with narrative playstyles, despite the fact that there was no real relation).
His description of the Storygame movement, based on Forge theory is, ironically, incoherent. I think there's a germ of an idea here, that isn't really codified in any meaningful way. And it also places way more importance on the Forge than is due, completely skipping over the role that the advent of the internet had (prior to Edwards and through no influence from him and his theories despite how much credit he likes to claim) in the rise of the online indy RPG wave of the early aughts. This is also only spuriously any sort of culture - The Forge culd be considered a culture on its own, but the indy game movement wasn't anything close to centralized or monolithic enough to be described as such, and even "design-paradigm" doesn't seem to entirely work.
Then we have the OSR, where his presentation is a half-truth, and he doesn't seem to realize what design paradigm and playstyle that they are trying to recapture (probably going back to expressing no knowledge of what was going on with RPGs in the 80s).
And finally we have NeoCon, which is again ascribing a Culture to a playstyle, in this case I think even more spuriously than in prior categories.
All in all, I'd say that he 1) needs to do a lot more research and 2) pick one categorization technique (design paradigm, playstyle, or gaming culture) and follow that through logically, instead of mixing and matching incomprehensibly. Trying to apply the concept of "culture" to certain fandoms is, on the whole, a fool's errand. Even now with the broad connections of the internet, RPG players don't form a specific culture, but hundreds, maybe thousands, of distinct subcultures, and in the70s & 80s this was even more prevalent. The "Six Cultures" tries to jump between assumptions based on game design trends, propping up specific subcultures as more important than they were, and conflating rules systems with cultures.
The issue of "Cultures" aside, I think the issue with classifying playstyles is that those are points on a spectrum, and very few people actually adhere to one of the extremes, but instead are sorta swirling around in the amorphous void between them.
In other words, we can do much better...
Thirteen Paradigms of Game Design
II. Gygaxian Naturalism aka "Classic" - The hobby exits the wargamming community that birthed it and is disseminated among the populace, many approaching it without the default assumptions that informed the earliest approaches to RPGs. In response, the D&D rules become more codified and extensive. The conciets of the game thus overtake the previous conception of rules as guidelines. The development of the game is primarily influenced by two factors: the explosion of imitators and the demand for more "official" content; the combined reaction to this first wave of games that do not stray far from the D&D paradigm and the conflict between the D&D rules development and the varying playstyles developing independently.
III. The Schizm - entering the 80s, RPG design takes it's first big step away from D&D and follows several paths in design:
A. Roleplaying as Theatre
B. Roleplaying as Storytelling
C. Roleplaying as Simulation
D. Roleplaying as Emulation
E. Roleplaying as Game.
F. Roleplaying as Sport
The primary goal of Roleplaying as Theatre is to provide a chance for players to act as their characters in dramatically satisfying situations. These situations can be, but are not necessarily (nor necessitated by the rules) constructed around a narrative, and allusions to the language of stories is often used in the rules explanations, leading this design to often be confused with Roleplaying as Storytelling.
The primary goal of Roleplaying as Storytelling is for the players to be led through a satisfying narrative experience, with the GM as storyteller. This design goal is manifested primarily through adventure/module design rather than rules design at this stage in history. It becomes perjoratively refferred to as a "railroads" by those players objecting to the lack of freedom and dissatisfaction from the illusion of choice.
The primary goal of Roleplaying as Simulation is to provide a model of reality that is conceptually satisfying to the players. This is the most direct response to the Classic design paradigm represented by D&D, epitomized by Chivalry & Sorcery. "Realism" is held up as the main selling point, and rules complexity is often seen as an advantage. Sometimes perjoratively referred to as system as "Physics Engines".
The primary goal of Roleplaying as Emulation is to model in system terms the world of a specific setting or genre of fiction. Though related in approach to Roleplaying as Simulation, there is less of an emphasis on rules complexity and overall realism. Sometimes confused with Roleplaying as Storytelling, in this case the rules are not about enforcing specific events of a narrative, rather modelling the narrative conceits underlying a specific imaginary world.
The primary goal of Roleplaying as Game is to provide a satisfying interaction between the players and the rules. System balance and system mastery are seen as specific features, as is "tactical depth" defined by the application and interaction of rules systems, though balance is not emphasized as strongly as with Role-playing as Sport, and randomization often takes precedence over Equality of Outcome. Roleplaying as Game is the closest to the Classic paradigm in approach.
The primary goal of Roleplaying as Sport is to provide a balanced, competitive gameplay environment that rewards player decision-making. This is the design goal associated with Tournament play. While it shares many features with Roleplaying as Game, the primary differences are a foundational emphasis on Equality of Outcome, and an antagonistic dynamic between the player character and the setting or the GM. Roleplaying as Game is focused on system for it's own sake, while Roleplaying as Sport makes similiar demands on the system but for the purpose of providing a fair path towards a win condition. Just as with Roleplaying as Story, almost no rules sets are designed specifically with this goal in mind until much, much later in the history of the hobby.
It's important to note here that the phrase "primary goal" in these definitions is important, as it is common for systems to pursue, or at least accomodate, multiple goals. It's also important not to confuse design paths with playstyles, despite some obvious crossovers.
Moreover, it would be a mistake to conflate design goals with player preferences or player cultures, as very few roleplayers would stick to or prioritize only one type of game design, instead enjoying each game on it's own terms.
IV. STANDARDIZATION
The movement into the 90's saw the advent of a commonform hybrid of Roleplaying as Theatre and Roleplaying as Simulation expressed best by the White Wolf game system, but echoed consistently by the application of the same template to numerous other games. There got to a point where almost every design on the market, with only a few notable outliers, followed the pattern of Attributes+Skills+Advantages/Disadvantages combined with a TN-based resolution mechanic. On the one hand, it was a solid foundation, and met some minimum standard of "realism" while still emphasizing satisfying dramatic interactions as the goal. On the other hand, games often described themselves in terms of Roleplaying as Story, confounding those who desired a system delivering Narrative satisfaction. Moreover, a degree of contempt arose towards other design styles, often blatently expressed by rulebook authors.
An indirect result of this was also the rise of "RPGs as Novels" trend, wherein system design goals took a back seat to the presentation of metaplots and RPG narratives for an audience that would buy RPGs to read instead of gaming. White Wolf again led this trend, and rules were further de-emphasized over the selling of an aesthetic and attitude that appealed to their adolescent audience, fully steeped in the 90's zeitgeist of angst and dark edginess.
V. STORYGAMING ORIGINS
The author of Theatrix, a diceless RPG heavily influenced by Amber, became the first widespread apologist for Narrative-focused gaming, claiming that the Storytelling Design Goal was superior to every other design goal or playstyle. The impact of his proselytizing on Usenet in the late 90's would directly lead to the formation of GDS theory. He was, in effect, the proto-Ron Edwards, minus the proprietary forum and cult of adherents. But his influence and that of the new approach to identifying and classifying playstyles would have long-reaching consequences and lead to the publication of the Story Engine, which, while largely forgotten in online discourse today, would provide one of the foundations for the modern design parameters.
The other foundation would be found in the microlite design movement ushered in by Over the Edge. It is a combination of both of these elements that would eventually birth the Storygaming Design paradigm. But before that happened came the third and most important element...
VI. THE INDY EXPLOSION
The advent of the world wide web provided a new platform for the transmission of ideas unlike the world has ever seen before. A legitimate alternative to traditional publishing that removed almost all barriers of entry, it resulted in the largest explosion of auteur rpg systems the hobby had ever seen.
These days Edwards tries to take credit for this, despite it predating his influence in the hobby discourse by years and having little to no connection to The Forge. Simply put, anyone could, with no investment besides time, and with no practical legal restrictions (although the "you can't copyright a rules system" justification was bandied about with such frequency in those days you'd swear the RPG forums were flooded with lawyers) post their homebrew RPG rules system online and gather an audience. Combined with the trend towards Microlite gaming and a healthy-fed contempt towards Classic game design, and we ended up with a flood of concise, high-concept RPG systems, exploring every nook and cranny of dice interactions. The concept of the retro-clone was birthed here, and as time went on designs became more and more experimental, leading to a prevalent influx of Auteur Design.
The primary goal of Auteur Design is not to present a playable RPG, but to use the format of the RPG to convey the author's message (often comedic satire or ideological in nature). Earlier examples are rare but include H.O.L. and Freebase.
This is the environment in which both the Forge and the OSR were born from, following different paths. But before we talk about them we have to discuss...
THE D20 APOCALYPSE
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the OGL was simultaneously one of the best things and worste things to occur in the hobby. Everyone already knows the bad effects (though despite that I am starting to see some of the mistakes repeated with 5th edition), so there's no need to go into them in detail. Instead what is important in regards to the path of Game Design trends is the reinvigoration in interest in Classic design conventions - the "Return to the Dungeon" as it were - filtered through the Roleplay as Game approach to design becoming popular for the first time in over a decade. The OGL of cource was the primary facillitator of the OSR, but it wasn't the beginning. That was...
A. HACKMASTER
When WoTC left themselves open to litigation due to failure to pay royalties on reprints of the popular Knights of the Dinner Table comic strip, the strip's creator's siezed on the opportunity to propose an out of court settlement granting them the rights to publish their fictional version of D&D, Hackmaster. While Hackmaster was comedic and over-the-top in tone, it also was intended as an entirely playable variation on TSR-era AD&D and introduced the OOP game system to a new audience, without exactly being a retroclone.
B. MAZES & MINOTAURS
In 2002, in the midst of the Indy explosion, an RPGnet poster known as Mithras wedded the newly minted concept of the Retroclone with the simple idea - what if the first RPG had been based on Greco-Roman myth instead of Tolkienesque pseudo-medievalism? The result, Mazes & Minotaurs, was in essence the prototype for the OSR - a D&D retroclone that combined an adaption of Classic Design parameters with an alternate history of the hobby that ignited a sense of Nostalgia Archeology. In one, it combined the concept of using retrocloness to present a revision of early TSR D&D (in this case bereft of the legal protection of the OGL) along with a fascination with exploring the early history of the hobby that would define later OSR endeavours such as Grognardia. This was the first step along that path that continued in 2005 with...
C. ENCOUNTER CRITICAL
A year before OSRIC, and the first use of the term OSR, this short parody RPG ignited a flame of nostalgia for the early days of RPGs. EC wasn't meant to be a playable game, but at the same time, was bereft of the casual contempt towards Old School Design paradigms that had infected the hobby since the early 90s, and was very much a love letter to the explosion of amateur creativity in the wake of D&D's initial contact with Pop Culture.
The steps towards a movement interested in re-examining the early history of the hobby and the Game Design paradigms and playstyles that had fallen out of favour culminated with the OSR.
VII. The Forge & The OSR
Originally started by Ed Healy as an information-based site, Ron Edwards, an editorial lead, took over the Forge a few years later and refocused it as a forum devoted to RPG theory. Specifically, Edward's desire to "perfect" GDS theory. A lot has been written about Forge theory by others and myself, but besides ending up an incomprehensibly myopic morass of wank whose main contribution to the hobby seems to have been to continue to distort communication on RPG forums to this day (and I'll never forgive Vince Ventruella for attepting to introduce that same wank into wargame discourse - luckily it didn't catch on). However, for the purposes of this post what's important is the introduction of a new Design path:
Playstyle as Design Goal
The primary focus of Playstyle as Design Goal is to provide rules that focus on supporting one Playstyle at the deliberate exclusion of any other.
Meanwhile, the OSR formed with the express intention of re-introducing and re-popularizing Old School and Classical Designed games. As such, one really can't assign a specific new Design goal to the movement.
But as the OSR started building steam, in the wake of The Forge and as an offshoot of it's Playstyle as Design Goal approach, the Storygaming movement whose seeds were laid way back in the 90s, finaly took shape and we have our final, and most recent Paradigm of Game Design :
VIII. Roleplaying as Narrative
The primary goal of Roleplaying as Narrative is for the players to jointly create a satisfying narrative experience. For as similiar -sounding as it is to Roleplaying as Storytelling, in many ways it's as much a reaction to that as Roleplaying as Simulation is to Classic Design. Instead of the GM being the storyteller that leads the players through a narrative experience, Roleplaying as Narrative focuses on the players as joint storytellers and de-emphasizes and recasts the role of the GM. This is the one of the most drastic paradigm shifts in RPG design, as it reinterprets the relationship between the GM and players that formed the very foundation of Traditional gameplay and design.
And...that takes us to now, now.
To summarize, the 13 Paradigms of Game Design proposed are as follows:
0. Traditional ("Old School")
1. Gygaxian Naturalism ("Classic")
2. Roleplaying as Theatre
3. Roleplaying as Storytelling
4. Roleplaying as Simulation
5. Roleplaying as Emulation
6. Roleplaying as Game
7. Roleplaying as Sport
8. 90's Standard
9. RPGs as Novels
10. Microlite
11. Autuer Design
12. Playstyle as Design Goal
13. Roleplaying as Narrative
A final important thing to note is that the development of different Paradigms of Game Design over time is not a matter of evolution, games are not technology, and while all of us have our own preferences and dislikes, there's nothing inherently superior or inferior in any approach compared to another - in fact, that's the point - the goals are different. The only reasonable objective measure of quality is how successfully any game achieves it's individual design goals.