Quote from: LordVreeg;790043By my own history, and by what I have seen and read, I think the drift you mention is real, but occurred by and large much later than your commentary reads.  I really can't see the ignorance and subsequent separation back in the late seventies and early eighties; and certainly, nearly everyone I gamed with back then was fully aware of the proper usage and the way it applied to the games they played.

I'm not saying they were played in any theraputic sense, nor am I saying that the early players were aiming for deep immersion, we know that is not the case.  But the In character viewpoint was, I believe, already an important concept.  And to some degree, reflected in the use of the term.

You could act "in character" in many wargames, and this is part of what makes it so hard to draw a line in the sand where wargames stopped and role-playing began. Is it at Fight in the Skies (1968), where Mike Carr encouraged you to design a pilot and play him the way his personality dictates, rather than what you as a player believe is the best tactical course of action? Is it in the innumerable manifestations of Diplomacy from 1959 forward? In Tony Bath's UK Hyboria experiments even earlier?

The difficulty there is that you can approach any game with or without behaving "in character." You can approach Monopoly acting "in character," twist your mustache and voice the sentiments of a real-estate tycoon. But that doesn't change the fact that in Monopoly you are constrained by the rules of Monopoly, and you can't decide just because you are "in character" that you want to try to burn down that hotel on Atlantic Avenue instead of paying the rent. All you can do is roll the dice and obey what happens. That - getting back to necessary and sufficient conditions, and what the "family resemblance" amounts to - starts to help us understand which attributes the things we call role-playing games share in common. That's why chess isn't a role-playing game, and ultimately Fight in the Skies isn't either.

In terms of when exactly the drift occurred, the dating is a matter of simple historical record. People like Flying Buffalo were calling T&T a "role-playing game" in 1976, and TSR called Metamorphosis Alpha an RPG on its cover before the end of that year. To your point, they didn't mean that it was a therapeutic tool, or an operations research tool. The people that wrote that copy had probably never heard of Moreno. They were simply following a usage that became common after certain critics popularized it, with some vague sense of a prior connotation, but largely just to position these products in a bucket that consumer dollars were being thrown into. It was not, to my original point, because these titles met a set of agreed criteria attached to the definition of "role-playing game." It was just a shiny new label all the cool kids were wearing.

Quote from: increment;790019The label "role-playing" was first applied to D&D, EPT and T&T by critics who saw common elements in these games, a sort of family resemblance.

Do you have a citation for this claim?

Quote from: Bren;790053Do you have a citation for this claim?

Sorry, I guess I assumed my sig would double for my cites. Moves #23 is the earliest place I'm aware of that that we see quotes like:

QuoteThe world of fantasy seems to be getting a great deal of attention lately; both the standard hex-map format and the new boardless, role-playing systems (a la Dungeons & Dragons) are in evidence.

Berg previously used the term to apply to games other than D&D just a hair earlier, in S&T #52, for En Garde. He refers to EPT as a "massive role-playing, freeform system for the fantasy world of Tékumel" in S&T #53. Bear in mind though that in September 1975, Phil Barker in the UK also makes liberal use of the term "role player" for participants in a Hyboria-style campaign - so those uses are roughly parallel. It wasn't until April 1976 that we see a claim in the Strategic Review that The Dragon will be "devoted to gaming in Fantasy, Swords & Sorcery, Science Fiction and role-playing games." T&T, Monsters, Monsters! and ultimately Metamorphosis Alpha all followed these usages.

Quote from: increment;790050You could act "in character" in many wargames, and this is part of what makes it so hard to draw a line in the sand where wargames stopped and role-playing began. Is it at Fight in the Skies (1968), where Mike Carr encouraged you to design a pilot and play him the way his personality dictates, rather than what you as a player believe is the best tactical course of action? Is it in the innumerable manifestations of Diplomacy from 1959 forward? In Tony Bath's UK Hyboria experiments even earlier?

The difficulty there is that you can approach any game with or without behaving "in character." You can approach Monopoly acting "in character," twist your mustache and voice the sentiments of a real-estate tycoon. But that doesn't change the fact that in Monopoly you are constrained by the rules of Monopoly, and you can't decide just because you are "in character" that you want to try to burn down that hotel on Atlantic Avenue instead of paying the rent. All you can do is roll the dice and obey what happens. That - getting back to necessary and sufficient conditions, and what the "family resemblance" amounts to - starts to help us understand which attributes the things we call role-playing games share in common. That's why chess isn't a role-playing game, and ultimately Fight in the Skies isn't either.

In terms of when exactly the drift occurred, the dating is a matter of simple historical record. People like Flying Buffalo were calling T&T a "role-playing game" in 1976, and TSR called Metamorphosis Alpha an RPG on its cover before the end of that year. To your point, they didn't mean that it was a therapeutic tool, or an operations research tool. The people that wrote that copy had probably never heard of Moreno. They were simply following a usage that became common after certain critics popularized it, with some vague sense of a prior connotation, but largely just to position these products in a bucket that consumer dollars were being thrown into. It was not, to my original point, because these titles met a set of agreed criteria attached to the definition of "role-playing game." It was just a shiny new label all the cool kids were wearing.

No, they didn't use it in the theraputic sense, but every kid who had High School  Psych ran into the theories of Rogers and Rank and the use of Roleplay therapy in said therapy.   I really don't know why you keep mentioning Moreno, a very minor player in the world of Psychology and a practitioner of a very specific type of roleplay (psychodrama) when the usage in Rogerian and other Person-centric theory was all the rage in the time period we are speaking of, the mid-late 70's and early 80s.
Later on, maybe by the mid-late 80s, the term really transferred into having a real independent meaning.  But before that, the term stuck because of the actual applicability, not just random chance.

To that point, due to this very applicability, dozens if not hundreds of papers have been written studying the games we play in terms of their theraputic value due to this very similarity.  RPGtheraputics and RPGresearch.com has over 80 articles in their database, and they are just one grouping.  

I understand your research into the history of the games, but I think your completeness in that field is blinding you to the equally pertinent history and historiography of Psychology.  Your comment that it is a matter of record when the linguistic 'drift' occurred neatly ignores how messy such an event is and the actual definition, which can be reduced to, "a process of linguistic change over a period of time".  In other words, it does't just happen one day.  At the time period you mention, I don't doubt or dispute that there was a gradual shifting towards it being a shiny new term to apply, but your assumption of the ignorance to the actual meaning and applicability early on is exactly that.
The line where wargames start and RPGs begin is, as you have discovered and I trust you, a fuzzy one, of academics and critics creating pastimes and remarking on them.  I just have a lot of trouble seeing these talented and bright people as ignorant in their understanding of a term in common understanding at the time, especially as well read as they were.

John Wick has always been a pompous fucking windbag, and this article seems to be more of the same.

When you've decided EVERYONE IS USING A WORD WRONG, it's a good big honking neon sign that you've disappeared up your own anus.

On the topic of theorycrafting, the most useful stuff I've gleaned from it:

Think out your assumptions for a game. Discuss these assumptions and social contract foundations with your players ahead of time. This helps keep people on the same page and prevent trainwrecks.

Topics to consider: what are PCs expected to do/not to do (to each other, to random NPCs, to enemies). What is the feel of the game? (Game of Thrones or Xena?)
What is the relationship between GM and players? (VIKING HAT vs. I'm the computer running the sim, do whatever)
How much are you generating a 'plot' vs. farting around doing things?


The least useful stuff from theorycrafting:
Arguing cladistics to death


Seriously, I think a set-driven argument about what a game 'really' is and what it should look like divorced from real world considerations is utterly backwards and a massive distraction from anything any actual gamer should care about.

Suggest cool ways to run a game, not it's intellectual purity.

(This is the result of years of stupid on TBP and spillover from Forge)

Quote from: Will;790112John Wick has always been a pompous fucking windbag, and this article seems to be more of the same.

When you've decided EVERYONE IS USING A WORD WRONG, it's a good big honking neon sign that you've disappeared up your own anus.

When you are discussing a thing, and the actual definition of that thing is in question, it can be useful in a discussion of theory to go back to defining the thing.  And it is interesting that it is in question.

There are a lot of threads where gameplay, design, setting, etc are discussed.  This thread is not one of them.

Increment, BTW, at least on the T&T side, You seem to be right.
Ken St. Andre's comment was
"Yes, when some nongamer told me roleplaying was a psychological technique used by some mental health professionals, I had to go look it up and see what they were talking about."

I think a fundamental point many people miss is the principle that data and algorithms in an rpg handbook are NOT hard rules as in Chess. They are tools the ref can use to model things, but what is in the first place to be modelled is a PRIOR question.

The whole tempest over teacups and thumbs makes sense only in the "new school" that abjures this principle (which in Wick's case may require cognitive dissonance, given his advice in L5R for gms to ride roughshod over anything that gets in the way of enforcing their plotlines on players).

Quote from: LordVreeg;790128When you are discussing a thing, and the actual definition of that thing is in question, it can be useful in a discussion of theory to go back to defining the thing.  And it is interesting that it is in question.

And if he had SAID 'let's consider what roleplaying is' and approached it that way, he might not sound like a pompous fucking windbag.

Instead, he does the usual 'your gaming is wrong and aberrant and you are mistaken and stupid for calling it a RPG.'

Wick's "balance does not matter, spotlight does" is a false dichotomy, unless he's got some peculiar definition of balance - which he ought to specify. Jim Ward  did that ages ago in The Dragon, explaining his original "Monty Haul" dynamic; I forget what term he contrasted with balance.

Quote from: Will;790132And if he had SAID 'let's consider what roleplaying is' and approached it that way, he might not sound like a pompous fucking windbag.

Instead, he does the usual 'your gaming is wrong and aberrant and you are mistaken and stupid for calling it a RPG.'

Yeah. I do hate that.  
Hell, even I am rarely that bad.

Quote from: LordVreeg;790128Increment, BTW, at least on the T&T side, You seem to be right.
Ken St. Andre's comment was
"Yes, when some nongamer told me roleplaying was a psychological technique used by some mental health professionals, I had to go look it up and see what they were talking about."

Cool to see someone taking the time to check on the facts.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;790142Cool to see someone taking the time to check on the facts.

Don't give me too much credit, I just FB messaged him.

But it is not about being 'right', it never should be. It's about getting to the truth.

Quote from: LordVreeg;790128When you are discussing a thing, and the actual definition of that thing is in question, it can be useful in a discussion of theory to go back to defining the thing.  And it is interesting that it is in question.

There are a lot of threads where gameplay, design, setting, etc are discussed.  This thread is not one of them.

Increment, BTW, at least on the T&T side, You seem to be right.
Ken St. Andre's comment was
"Yes, when some nongamer told me roleplaying was a psychological technique used by some mental health professionals, I had to go look it up and see what they were talking about."

While I'm happy not to be contradicted by Mr. St. Andre, my method also is intentionally blind to what people recall today, especially when it comes to dates and sequences. Primary sources are much more reliable in my experience.

And I would certainly grant you that lots of people in the world back then were aware of role-playing, for psychological or even industrial purposes - I went through quite a few 1960s books about roleplaying in business and education outside of psychology. So sure, potentially someone else could have suggested that "role-playing game" applies to D&D and its ilk, it could have been a messier and more gradual drift. But looking across a very broad swath of zines of the time, all the key early uses - in Owl & Weasel, in the Strategic Review, in Metagaming ad copy for T&T and others - follow hard upon the uses in S&T. Bear in mind as well that S&T had twenty or thirty times the circulation of the largest such fan periodicals, back in 1975, so ideas appearing there reached vastly more people than virtually any other media source of the hobby at the time. The term went from pretty much total disuse in the games community (again, outside the fringes of Dippy fandom) in mid-1975 to being on the cover of Metamorphosis Alpha before the end of 1976. After that, there was just no stopping it.

To circle this back to my original point, the benefit of this historical analysis is that it can show us how and why the term was adopted, which is actually more instructive than trying to build strawman definitions of the term after the fact. Tracing the chain of influence reveals how the community reacted to the presence in the marketplace of imitators to D&D, and the commercial, critical and even legal needs for new terms that motivated the adoption of "role-playing games." With this perspective, it is easy to understand why we as a group are easily troubled by questions of the form, "is X a role-playing game?" We think there should be some bedrock beneath the term we can all point to so these questions can satisfactorily be resolved. But there just isn't. Instead there is a loose cluster of qualities that various RPGs instantiate to a greater or lesser extent - a family resemblance, as I said.

Family resemblances? My Wittgenstein sense is tingling!