Saturday 3 September 2016

Historical RPG Development: QWERTY not Robot Wars

I have been watching the Robot Wars revamp for the last couple of weeks. For those who don't know the programme, you can probably guess from the name: hobbyists create robots and make them fight. They usually have punnish names ("Sir Killalot") and the creators are usually endearing eccentrics. It is great Sunday evening "I-have-to-go-to-work-tomorrow-but-at-least-I-can-have-a-few-beers-and-watch-Robot-Wars" TV.

I was probably not quite the right age when Robot Wars first came out for me to fall in love with it. It was the late 90s and I think I was in the region of 17 years old; it probably would have captured my imagination a lot more if I had been, say, 12. But I still really enjoyed it - and I'd say that if you can't enjoy a bit of Robot Wars you must have a heart made out of slate.

The most interesting thing about Robot Wars, looking back, was that when it first began you got a lot of different kinds of robots, all with different forms of attack and defence. There were no real expectations about what a "winning robot" would look like, so people tried all kinds of different tactics. It was a sort of mashing together of many different styles. But very quickly almost all robots began to develop common features. First, they have to have a low centre of gravity. Robots get knocked over a lot. And second, by the same token, they have to have a self-righting mechanism. In the early days a robot would get knocked or tossed over and that would be the end of it. Pretty soon all robots had ways of turning themselves the right way up if toppled.

And similarly the great initial variety of robots got sieved into a few basic types. There is the flipper type, which is shaped a bit like a dust pan and drives around quickly trying to wedge its way under other robots and then flip or level them over. There is the spinner type, which has a disc or similar which spins around at ludicrous speeds and does damage to other robots that way. And then there is the shoving type, which just tries to bully other robots into danger zones in the arena (like pits). Most winning robots are variants on these. You still get people who turn up with robots which have, say, a big axe or hammer or saw or whatever, but these tend not to do well. Through the process of competition you get a sort of narrowing of development into certain fairly restrictive pathways.

Let's call this the Robot Wars development model.

Not all development happens this way. Sometimes it doesn't happen through competition, but by accident. The classic example of this is the QWERTY layout for typewriter and computer keyboards. QWERTY may or may not be the best layout for a keyboard. There has been a lot of controversy about this down the decades (you can read about it on the wikipedia article or in a somewhat famous Stephen Jay Gould essay), but really it almost doesn't matter. The simple fact is that QWERTY caught hold of the workplace fairly early on, and got a significant head start on its competitors, and once that had happened, it became destiny. QWERTY is, and will likely remain, the layout for computer keyboards forever and ever and ever (or until the singularity takes over and we have nothing to do except get wheeled around having our every need taken care of, or exist in realms of pure thought, or whatever). This is not because QWERTY was tested against many different alternatives and found to be best. It was just because of fluke and then path dependence.

Let's call this the QWERTY development model.

Perhaps surprisingly, because RPGs are ostensibly in competition with each other (if I spend my pocket money on RuneQuest this month, I won't be spending it on Rolemaster), the development of RPGs leans much more closely towards the QWERTY model than the Robot Wars one. There are some competitors, so D&D does not have the utter dominance that the QWERTY layout has in the keyboard arena, but D&D came along early and established itself and has never looked back. It has been the dominant RPG ever since, and will almost certainly remain so forever and ever (until we are playing RPGs in realms of pure thought). The competitors, such as they are, are mere gadflies on the back of the elephant.

This, I think, makes the RPG industry very unusual. It is hard to think of other commercial sectors which are like that. Coca-Cola is somewhat bigger than competitors in soft drinks, and McDonald's in fast food, but do they quite capture the lingua franca role in their respective arenas that D&D has among RPG hobbyists?

18 comments:

  1. I think the reason for this is the buy-in cost to play an RPG. In order to have a game, I (or, at least one person in the group) needs to have a solid grasp on the rules, if not outright mastery. It takes a lot of investment in terms of time and effort to play these games, so once you've invested in a single game, there's resistance to branching out. A game has to be pretty exceptional to be worth the effort of learning the rules, organizing a group, and playing regularly.

    A burger, however, requires US $5 and comes with a drink and fries. It's easy to try competing burgers, to judge and compare them. Which is another issue for RPGs; how much of the fun I have playing is the group, and how much the rules?

    In my experience, the group matters far more than the rules do. So long as they don't actively harsh on our fun, they're good. And I haven't yet found the rules that can even start to compensate for a bad group.

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    1. I completely agree that rules don't really matter in comparison to the group.

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    2. One description of RPGs that I love, paraphrasing here, is that they reintroduce you to your friends. You can play really good games with people you've never met, particularly if the game is niche enough to self select people who like the same stuff as you, but there's something great about playing an rpg and seeing a different side of people you already know, and seeing all the weird characters and ideas that come out of them.

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  3. [Edited]

    Counterpoint: I'm sure you're thinking of pen-and-paper tabletop RPGs, but in the broader "RPG space," how about computer games? I wouldn't be surprised if, to the average Joe/Janet on the street these days, "RPG" summoned the image of digital games with stats, leveling, and loot more readily and often than the image of us nerds crouching around our tables seriously discussing the habits of elves.

    Even if you don't think we should count them for your purposes here, it's interesting that computer RPGs in general are following a divergent rather than convergent evolutionary path: many of the early ones were explicitly modeled on D&D, but now there's a profusion of finely-differentiated options on both mechanical and generic (as in genre) levels.

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    1. I think computer RPGs are D&D's real competition. And they're winning hands down obviously!

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    2. The CRPG's are winning is because they are more objective than DM run ones - a lot of humans run their games sans real imagination, originality, and through the filter of the DM's psychological issues - pet peeves and power trips. CRPG's are professionally written, rendered, and cut through all that jazz.

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    3. Thanks for the responses, but... I'm going to dispute the claim that CRPGs are meaningful "competition" for social RPGs. I'm sure their existence makes *some* difference in how we spend out time, but they occupy niches with limited overlap. (To put it another way: I play both, and I would never skip a social RPG session in favor of a solitary gaming session!) Instead, I'd say that CRPGs expand the scope of RPG play far beyond what it would be if it were limited to tabletop hobbyists.

      Beyond that, Mr. Bear, I don't agree with your analysis of the pros and cons. Perhaps you've had or heard of a number of bad experiences with bad GMs (Bad Masters, or BMs?). But by the same token, plenty of GMs can run a game that even the most painstakingly programmed AI for the most meticulously-storyboarded CRPG could never match. Yes, BMs can be prone to abusing their positions, but computer games can be buggy, tone-deaf, cliched, and are almost always stiflingly linear. And let me stress: I find it really weird for someone to come on to an OSR-related blog and talk about how human GMs lack "real imagination [and] originality." It's like going to Japan to complain about how animation is a marginalized medium.

      I'd say if there's an area where CRPGs "beat" tabletop games hands down, it's accessibility. You can turn on your device of choice and play your RPG of choice for as little as, say, ten minutes at a time any time you want of the day or night. In contrast, social games require scheduling and logistical time spent on travel or on getting everyone connected online. As a result, people want to play when they can be sure of getting in several hours at a go, which in turn makes scheduling even more difficult.

      TL;DR: If you compare tabletop and C RPGs, the latter are far more accessible and therefore far more widespread. That doesn't mean that the two forms of play are in direct conflict with each other, though... and claiming that a pre-programmed computer game has more "imagination" than a human GM strikes me as a complete non sequitur.

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    4. Computer games are designed by creative teams that often have more imagination than an average DM. Few DM’s can come close to Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, or Planescape:Torment as far as the settings, characters or the gaming experience.
      No computer AI or algorithm can compete with a human in storytelling, but it can compete with a DM who is a poor or non-story teller. Even an OSR DM is a story-teller in as much as the art of interpreting die rolls is story telling, and I have seen plenty of DM’s who stifle any attempt to explore the world outside the randomly rolled dungeon, because they haven’t adequately prepared for the game and lacked imagination to improvise.
      Pencil and paper role playing and computer role playing games are different animals providing similar experiences, and to me, when Baldur’s Gate first came out was a breath of fresh air compared with the mediocre roll playing I had to sit through preciously. Only about 20% of DM’s I played with were competent enough to provide a better experience than a CRPG.
      Any competition between a pencil and paper RPG and a computer RPG would be a player choosing one or the other, but that is not the case. Computer games reach a much wider audience, and pencil and paper role playing is a much smaller hobby. Computer games may try to emulate pencil and paper role playing experience, but it is the Wizards of the Coast trying to poach players from computer games, when they make their latest edition of the game a pencil and paper version of the Diablo game.

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  5. I find your assessment accurate and quite funny.

    While the QWERTY method has given us D&D and games like it, specifically Pathfinder, within the mechanics of these games it's a very different story.

    A Pathfinder character stinks unless the Robot Wars method is used to build it. If not optimized it's the cool looking robot with the hammer getting trashed by the one that flips you over.

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    1. Yes, that's true. I actually think games like Pathfinder probably work best as pseudo-wargames for that reason. You and I "build" characters and make them fight.

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  6. It's too bad Google has so many competitors.

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    1. Alright, point taken, you sarcastic bastard. ;)

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  7. It's not just D&D. D&D clearly holds that position for the international and the US market. On the German market that position is taken by DSA. And I think most people I talked with about it readily admitted that it's not a great system. It's just what everyone else is playing and has been playing for a long time, so it's what most people learn and then stick with it because it's good enough. In second place you get D&D and then for a long time nothing else.

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  8. Runaway sexual selection is how I've always thought about it. Like: peacocks tail feathers are too damn long. More than just showing how healthy the bird is, they slow the bird down and cause it to get eaten. Lady peahen sexual preference drives this trend. But even if there was a lady peahen who preferred shorter tails, her sons would have shorter tails too, and be less successful in passing on their genes. Peacock tails are LOCKED THE FUCK IN.

    Anyway, rebuttal: what about the evolution of a system? D&D can (and has) drifted in different directions since its creation, and some of those directions have been adopted and thickened by newer generations. Surely something useful can be gleaned by examining the ways the D&D has evolved since its inception.

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  9. Not a big fan of robot wars. Cheap thrills. A much more interesting challenge would have been a Robot demolition derby/cross country trek. Then you would have real challenges for designers - wheels or tracks? How to navigate water? build a car with helo rotor to jump off cliffs rather than go around? Make it a real distance to where a flying drone would run out of power. Require solar energy for the hundreds mile long trek, and you have real engineering challenges (read real brains) for the robot design teams. NAASA did something similar looking for ideas for its Mars landers, but that contest was never televised.

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