In Dan Olsen's recent video "Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft" he brings forward a distinction anthropologists have been digging at for years between Free Play and Instrumental Play with the primary focus being how game systems often trend towards the optimization and mass adoption of Instrumental Play. Instrumental Play is playing with an explicit purpose and optimizing towards that purpose as best possible, and free play is playing without an explicit goal in mind, usually for emergent entertainment experience.
How a self limiting role play character is often seen within these systems is usually they are the first to be scorned. This rejection of the Roleplayer is exactly what makes games like Space Station 13 so important as it's a game where being good at roleplaying is the optimization. For example, when I play as a Security Officer in that game I'm adopting the role of surveillance and control, but the important thing is that I need to be lenient and at least a little bad at my job in order for emergent gameplay storytelling to come out of it, for the antagonists to be able to bring necessary creative friction and conflict to the story. Meanwhile if I play as the occupation of a geneticist my occupation is to mess around and change the DNA of random people who want it.
This is not a write up about Space Station 13, or WoW, this is about Eco. In Eco, you are tasked with playing a 1 month long MMO experience where the primary goal is to get to a level of technology and knowledge that defeats a looming meteor within 1 month. You have to work in solidarity with at best around 30 people in a large market economy trading and selling products in order to help get your own profession. If you run into trouble with other player behaviors like for example massive deforestation, you can have representative create policy around it. This policy network is a fundamental building block that transcends the game beyond just a mundane market simulation as the coding allows for you to make ridiculous automated stimulus and taxations, and allow for for example hunters to hunt on anybodies property etc. It also gives a vector for people to express power, at least in theory.
If you can follow what I'm saying so far, and you're a long time reader who tends in agreement with me, you might notice where the friction here starts. Specifically through who gets chosen to wield this executive power, the checks and balances, but also in how non-cooperative free market economies tend to be. In order to have a large factory in the game you need to set the price for factory goods like say a Car well beyond the value it actually is, so that with said profit you can build more room for more machines. But before you can get the small room for the automobile machine, you need to attain money and materials from strangers through either spending a lot of time and labor to do so, or by selling food stuff you've gathered higher than their value. You can usually find a few people who have not priced their goods mindfully and you can usually get an advantage that way. People are also hilariously bad at regulating the economy as its often seen as 'unfair' and can turn players away, so the free market system because the default expectation which isn't ever questioned due to the fact the game is so easy that disaster states never happen.
This is fine but there's a few problems with the game as it is at the moment, the game is only difficult because you have to rely on strangers in order to do their professions to beat the meteor. Which means that people who have grouped up with different professions can actually speed through this system. If you're sharing stuff, you don't have to pay taxes for the goods you are sharing in every server except one official one called White Tiger. That means that all it takes to break the game in almost every server is a group of 5, and thus usually means the threat of the meteor isn't a threat at all, and once that conflict with the meteor is gone the server dies.
The other issue is that the wielding of power or acting in behavior that would be seen as inventing conflict is also unacceptable on most servers. The server owner is always there to basically dictate the play experience and in a mad rush to pull as much of the player base as possible, these server owners have to dictate conflict immediately rather than let it play out through the government policy systems. You can think of this as the equivalent of playing in another kids sandbox wrong and explicitly told if you don't play it right, you will be kicked out. The hard power of conformity set by these guys pretty much ruins the possible fun of the game.
Again, the official servers, including White Tiger, don't suffer from this issue, as long as you follow the minimal rules against hate speech etc. there is no overt guiding light. However, every server that isn't White Tiger still suffers from the group speedrunning trick (not to mention the difficulty as it is is way too easy anyway) since White Tiger is the only place that has systems to prevent this in place it's the only place that is worth playing. However, the amount of legal information you have to read makes it inaccessible to most of the playerbase which doesn't in itself make it mediocre, but it does mean you'd be spending a dozen hours over a month to grasp the basics of the system in a server with these Sandbox Dictators only to prepare for the 'hard mode' of Eco in 1 server where joining the Eco official discord is defacto necessary in order to play.
But here's the real issue: Due to the length of the game and the focus on tasks, Instrumental play becomes so dominant that Roleplaying withers away. There is no RP scene in Eco, and the result is that you become a clown for trying to engage in RP when everyone else is just trying to mine rocks. RP is treated with suspicion in this game as its seen pre-emptively as a set of actions and values that by themselves create conflict, its seen as rude. In Dan Olsen's video he gives the example of a barefoot dwarf that walks around everywhere which pulls the players away from working as efficiently as possible to finish the raid. This is the similar experience any Roleplayer has when trying to play games in which optimization is valued. Being someone you clearly aren't is not optimal. This becomes especially true when considering the fact that over the month less players are around and the ones that remain become increasingly tired with your shit.
The other issue, at least in my case, that being trans itself is seen as a sort of 'bad roleplaying' by most cis people (the majority of people). So I have no 'authentic' self I can retreat to that would satiate the patriarchal expectations of the much older player base (around early to mid 30s), in order to play as a man it would already be a form of roleplaying, so why not stress that falsity further for entertainment? If I were to be trans, for them, it would be going from 1 form of annoying roleplaying to another even if people aren't being openly transphobic, this is how its viewed. They want me to roleplay in a way that doesn't stress their preconceived biases. Thus I've always saw roleplaying in itself as an act that can support queer acceptance, and a safe haven for us. As it lets people get used to being around others that act far outside the scope of expectation you are used to.
The lack of RP or RP acceptance in Eco is my main issue with it, I think the main way this would be fixed by the game being more popular and advertising the game to younger people. By doing that there would be enough different players engaging with the game that there could be RP servers. This is the ultimate blueprint for an RP game in many ways but its squandered by the the player base and needless incentivization of Instrumental play. I've struggled with articulating this tension for why I spent 1000 hours playing a game I don't really like. I think I thought I could get joy from play by becoming good enough that the RP could be seen as not a detriment, but this was always a fruitless goal. This is a system built entirely for trying to reflect society, and it has effectively done that in its incredible ability to repress flamboyance. If you see people RP'ing in a game you wouldn't expect them to, you can probably guess that person is LGBT. It's free play we go to in order to almost get away from the bigotries against ourselves. That being said, I will never bother voicing or RPing in a space that clearly doesn't accept me. I despise these people and this community, the patriarchal normativity is more toxic than league by far and I have nothing but contempt for the rigidity these people abide by.
There are moments where I can shine through, but nobody wants to play on RP terms, so it just ends up an exercise in social self isolation. Just go play Space Station 13 instead.
Instances like this are exactly why I believe that games can become tools of repression and be cultivated for that reason, and why I think it's important to be so critical of them. Unlike Dan Olsen I don't just see this system as 'recreating the real drama of life' but instead the disjunction shows the failure of a system to allow for creative play. Without creative play you're left with rote compulsion loops and patriarchal normativity, and I think it's important as players and designers to move away from that as much as possible.
How a self limiting role play character is often seen within these systems is usually they are the first to be scorned. This rejection of the Roleplayer is exactly what makes games like Space Station 13 so important as it's a game where being good at roleplaying is the optimization. For example, when I play as a Security Officer in that game I'm adopting the role of surveillance and control, but the important thing is that I need to be lenient and at least a little bad at my job in order for emergent gameplay storytelling to come out of it, for the antagonists to be able to bring necessary creative friction and conflict to the story. Meanwhile if I play as the occupation of a geneticist my occupation is to mess around and change the DNA of random people who want it.
This is not a write up about Space Station 13, or WoW, this is about Eco. In Eco, you are tasked with playing a 1 month long MMO experience where the primary goal is to get to a level of technology and knowledge that defeats a looming meteor within 1 month. You have to work in solidarity with at best around 30 people in a large market economy trading and selling products in order to help get your own profession. If you run into trouble with other player behaviors like for example massive deforestation, you can have representative create policy around it. This policy network is a fundamental building block that transcends the game beyond just a mundane market simulation as the coding allows for you to make ridiculous automated stimulus and taxations, and allow for for example hunters to hunt on anybodies property etc. It also gives a vector for people to express power, at least in theory.
If you can follow what I'm saying so far, and you're a long time reader who tends in agreement with me, you might notice where the friction here starts. Specifically through who gets chosen to wield this executive power, the checks and balances, but also in how non-cooperative free market economies tend to be. In order to have a large factory in the game you need to set the price for factory goods like say a Car well beyond the value it actually is, so that with said profit you can build more room for more machines. But before you can get the small room for the automobile machine, you need to attain money and materials from strangers through either spending a lot of time and labor to do so, or by selling food stuff you've gathered higher than their value. You can usually find a few people who have not priced their goods mindfully and you can usually get an advantage that way. People are also hilariously bad at regulating the economy as its often seen as 'unfair' and can turn players away, so the free market system because the default expectation which isn't ever questioned due to the fact the game is so easy that disaster states never happen.
This is fine but there's a few problems with the game as it is at the moment, the game is only difficult because you have to rely on strangers in order to do their professions to beat the meteor. Which means that people who have grouped up with different professions can actually speed through this system. If you're sharing stuff, you don't have to pay taxes for the goods you are sharing in every server except one official one called White Tiger. That means that all it takes to break the game in almost every server is a group of 5, and thus usually means the threat of the meteor isn't a threat at all, and once that conflict with the meteor is gone the server dies.
The other issue is that the wielding of power or acting in behavior that would be seen as inventing conflict is also unacceptable on most servers. The server owner is always there to basically dictate the play experience and in a mad rush to pull as much of the player base as possible, these server owners have to dictate conflict immediately rather than let it play out through the government policy systems. You can think of this as the equivalent of playing in another kids sandbox wrong and explicitly told if you don't play it right, you will be kicked out. The hard power of conformity set by these guys pretty much ruins the possible fun of the game.
Again, the official servers, including White Tiger, don't suffer from this issue, as long as you follow the minimal rules against hate speech etc. there is no overt guiding light. However, every server that isn't White Tiger still suffers from the group speedrunning trick (not to mention the difficulty as it is is way too easy anyway) since White Tiger is the only place that has systems to prevent this in place it's the only place that is worth playing. However, the amount of legal information you have to read makes it inaccessible to most of the playerbase which doesn't in itself make it mediocre, but it does mean you'd be spending a dozen hours over a month to grasp the basics of the system in a server with these Sandbox Dictators only to prepare for the 'hard mode' of Eco in 1 server where joining the Eco official discord is defacto necessary in order to play.
But here's the real issue: Due to the length of the game and the focus on tasks, Instrumental play becomes so dominant that Roleplaying withers away. There is no RP scene in Eco, and the result is that you become a clown for trying to engage in RP when everyone else is just trying to mine rocks. RP is treated with suspicion in this game as its seen pre-emptively as a set of actions and values that by themselves create conflict, its seen as rude. In Dan Olsen's video he gives the example of a barefoot dwarf that walks around everywhere which pulls the players away from working as efficiently as possible to finish the raid. This is the similar experience any Roleplayer has when trying to play games in which optimization is valued. Being someone you clearly aren't is not optimal. This becomes especially true when considering the fact that over the month less players are around and the ones that remain become increasingly tired with your shit.
The other issue, at least in my case, that being trans itself is seen as a sort of 'bad roleplaying' by most cis people (the majority of people). So I have no 'authentic' self I can retreat to that would satiate the patriarchal expectations of the much older player base (around early to mid 30s), in order to play as a man it would already be a form of roleplaying, so why not stress that falsity further for entertainment? If I were to be trans, for them, it would be going from 1 form of annoying roleplaying to another even if people aren't being openly transphobic, this is how its viewed. They want me to roleplay in a way that doesn't stress their preconceived biases. Thus I've always saw roleplaying in itself as an act that can support queer acceptance, and a safe haven for us. As it lets people get used to being around others that act far outside the scope of expectation you are used to.
The lack of RP or RP acceptance in Eco is my main issue with it, I think the main way this would be fixed by the game being more popular and advertising the game to younger people. By doing that there would be enough different players engaging with the game that there could be RP servers. This is the ultimate blueprint for an RP game in many ways but its squandered by the the player base and needless incentivization of Instrumental play. I've struggled with articulating this tension for why I spent 1000 hours playing a game I don't really like. I think I thought I could get joy from play by becoming good enough that the RP could be seen as not a detriment, but this was always a fruitless goal. This is a system built entirely for trying to reflect society, and it has effectively done that in its incredible ability to repress flamboyance. If you see people RP'ing in a game you wouldn't expect them to, you can probably guess that person is LGBT. It's free play we go to in order to almost get away from the bigotries against ourselves. That being said, I will never bother voicing or RPing in a space that clearly doesn't accept me. I despise these people and this community, the patriarchal normativity is more toxic than league by far and I have nothing but contempt for the rigidity these people abide by.
There are moments where I can shine through, but nobody wants to play on RP terms, so it just ends up an exercise in social self isolation. Just go play Space Station 13 instead.
Instances like this are exactly why I believe that games can become tools of repression and be cultivated for that reason, and why I think it's important to be so critical of them. Unlike Dan Olsen I don't just see this system as 'recreating the real drama of life' but instead the disjunction shows the failure of a system to allow for creative play. Without creative play you're left with rote compulsion loops and patriarchal normativity, and I think it's important as players and designers to move away from that as much as possible.
8 Comments
This conflict goes back to at least D&D days, when people complained about "munchkins" (stat optimizers) vs. roleplayers. But there at least you have a personal group of people who you can discuss things with, as opposed to a server on some game with a bunch of internet strangers where there's much more pressure on the game design.
I haven't played in a couple years due to Covid and my IRL friends moving around but I do love tabletop RPGs, my core group had a mostly RP focus. D&D is kinda a crappy system for that IMO because it separates combat and non-combat too heavily and has too much combat in general. The last few games we used GURPS, it's a lot better and works especially well in realistic-type settings, but I'm sure there are other good systems out there too.
BTW Backloggd doesn't show the review on the feed unless you log the game or something, it's jank.
I haven't played in a couple years due to Covid and my IRL friends moving around but I do love tabletop RPGs, my core group had a mostly RP focus. D&D is kinda a crappy system for that IMO because it separates combat and non-combat too heavily and has too much combat in general. The last few games we used GURPS, it's a lot better and works especially well in realistic-type settings, but I'm sure there are other good systems out there too.
BTW Backloggd doesn't show the review on the feed unless you log the game or something, it's jank.
This comment was deleted
Thanks for the sage wisdom HotPocket, I'm totally with you on that and I don't mean to say that this is 'new' by any means. It's just that the technologies of computer games itself make it so that the roleplayers are often left out to dry due to the cybernetic systems of play.
The DnD reference point is interesting to because I know some people take RPing in a very wacky way that really gets on the Dungeon Masters nerves, pretty much stress testing the limits of the system and jokingly suggesting borderline out of character things. An example when I played 1 night with my dad as the DM and a few friends over is 1 of my friends wanted to sleep in a bird's nest outside town rather than in a bed and my father basically capitulated. That degree of overdoing the antic is one that I think about a lot, and I definitely think that its not black and white that the role players are just better, but rather that systems of incentivization like this will often have us responding in antagonistic ways. I didn't mention this in the core post but I would actively play into 'villain roles' and speak with a degree of heavy paranoia once I felt people were not having it. So I'm certainly no angel in that regard, but it's hard to exactly stress that the way most people play Eco is like they might as well be playing with their real name as the handle is how bad it is.
On the other point with inactivity, that's fair. I've already hit 10 likes which is well above my average so I'm happy. I'll keep that in mind but this is partially why I tend to leave comments below my own work as I think about it more, the comment pings people that I wrote shit they might have missed.
The DnD reference point is interesting to because I know some people take RPing in a very wacky way that really gets on the Dungeon Masters nerves, pretty much stress testing the limits of the system and jokingly suggesting borderline out of character things. An example when I played 1 night with my dad as the DM and a few friends over is 1 of my friends wanted to sleep in a bird's nest outside town rather than in a bed and my father basically capitulated. That degree of overdoing the antic is one that I think about a lot, and I definitely think that its not black and white that the role players are just better, but rather that systems of incentivization like this will often have us responding in antagonistic ways. I didn't mention this in the core post but I would actively play into 'villain roles' and speak with a degree of heavy paranoia once I felt people were not having it. So I'm certainly no angel in that regard, but it's hard to exactly stress that the way most people play Eco is like they might as well be playing with their real name as the handle is how bad it is.
On the other point with inactivity, that's fair. I've already hit 10 likes which is well above my average so I'm happy. I'll keep that in mind but this is partially why I tend to leave comments below my own work as I think about it more, the comment pings people that I wrote shit they might have missed.
Yeah I wasn't trying to refute anything, just adding some context about systems and RP like you said.
I gotchu, just clarifying and expanding for anybody reading I suppose. Thanks again!
Reading this was very interesting for me, mainly because I feel like I've had similar thoughts after trying to get into a "west marches" community for a TRPG (It was Lancer for anyone that's curious). From that experience I really learned a few things about the distinction between instrumental and free play. Lancer as a system is structured behind missions and the goal to every mission is to succeed, no matter what the context, which only necessitates the urge for instrumental play instead of a more open play for roleplaying. The community I was in only added more to this urge with their own rules of play, mechanical consequences for defeat and death. No matter how much Lancer and it's communities superficially places structures for roleplaying, it will always have a win state, it will always have optimal builds and tactics. It's baked into the system that the instrumental will always take precedent over the free. Systems like DnD and Lancer try in to incorporate both modes of play to increase their margin of players but it causes more conflicts between the two instead of any real synergy.
So after experiencing that I decided to accept that kind of community and its way of play is definitely not for me and stick to what I know I enjoy with my group of close friends. Which has always been a major focus on free play with our roleplaying/story telling. Because I just find it so strange to experience tabletop RPGs that's just mechanics and die rolling without any focus on characters and flow of narrative. It's like a fuckin purgatory experience that I want nothing to do with haha. I'm not trying to be ME or trader/soldier #4006. I'm trying to be a man named Isaac whos going through memory loss and a divorce.
That's what I say to people when I talk about TRPGs, "I'm just trying to roleplay a divorce."
So after experiencing that I decided to accept that kind of community and its way of play is definitely not for me and stick to what I know I enjoy with my group of close friends. Which has always been a major focus on free play with our roleplaying/story telling. Because I just find it so strange to experience tabletop RPGs that's just mechanics and die rolling without any focus on characters and flow of narrative. It's like a fuckin purgatory experience that I want nothing to do with haha. I'm not trying to be ME or trader/soldier #4006. I'm trying to be a man named Isaac whos going through memory loss and a divorce.
That's what I say to people when I talk about TRPGs, "I'm just trying to roleplay a divorce."
Love that response FemboyGenius. I'm glad it resonated with you and you were able to apply it, this is exactly why I wasted so much of my damn time writing on here not for like churning but for posts like this.
Yeah a lot of that ends up being how demographics of a community 'weight' play structures. Older, neurotypical, or heteronormative players in my view will tend to build towards these instrumental structures of play to the point that I have come to believe that what I've stated here applies just as much to the 'MMOs' of discords and social media as it does to 'videogames' in whatever way we tend to define that.
This is one of the reasons why Space Station 13 is so good, that focus is always on free play over instrumental. If you end up being traitor and just pull out a sniper rifle to gun people down in order to win immediately the mods will step in and basically say 'try harder at roleplaying next time'. At least on Goonstation etc.
Everything I've analyzed above is mostly a result of bad advertising of their own systems on the part of the Eco devs since the amount of potential 'free play' in the system is intense as it is. People don't want artificial conflict antagonisms though, they want to 'win' and 'peacekeep'. Its sad and actually makes the playerbase engage in pathetic and mean spirited behaviour. Thats not an eco specific thing but my take away is that almost any MMO system that isn't allowing a prioritization of free play needs to be treated with contempt and suspicion.
I imagine that's why we share a similar scorn about this site lmao. Taking down all the 'meta reviews' is lame. The way this site has been recently is extremely lame to me but that's ultimately a result of prioritizing instrumental play.
Yeah a lot of that ends up being how demographics of a community 'weight' play structures. Older, neurotypical, or heteronormative players in my view will tend to build towards these instrumental structures of play to the point that I have come to believe that what I've stated here applies just as much to the 'MMOs' of discords and social media as it does to 'videogames' in whatever way we tend to define that.
This is one of the reasons why Space Station 13 is so good, that focus is always on free play over instrumental. If you end up being traitor and just pull out a sniper rifle to gun people down in order to win immediately the mods will step in and basically say 'try harder at roleplaying next time'. At least on Goonstation etc.
Everything I've analyzed above is mostly a result of bad advertising of their own systems on the part of the Eco devs since the amount of potential 'free play' in the system is intense as it is. People don't want artificial conflict antagonisms though, they want to 'win' and 'peacekeep'. Its sad and actually makes the playerbase engage in pathetic and mean spirited behaviour. Thats not an eco specific thing but my take away is that almost any MMO system that isn't allowing a prioritization of free play needs to be treated with contempt and suspicion.
I imagine that's why we share a similar scorn about this site lmao. Taking down all the 'meta reviews' is lame. The way this site has been recently is extremely lame to me but that's ultimately a result of prioritizing instrumental play.
Erm, thanks again for the comment, I keep forgetting to say that part >.<
Erato_Heti
1 year ago
The issue here, for a roleplayer, is that money lending and/or representative democracy are both systems that by their very existence ordain suspicion such that a group that doesn't trust roleplaying is now 'proven' through witnessing a roleplayer engage in these systems even if they aren't doing anything overtly wrong, try to control them or regulate their behavior. Yet no other system of Roleplay is granted instead. If people don't trust you they sure as hell aint gonna vote for you. This is typically why women and queer people never make it into seats of power in the game, its quite sad.
The economic system of creative play itself is great, its great to work towards that 2nd house or try and raise funds for a racetrack etc. but because you never feel at peace with social self expression there's implicitly an ultimatum: The only way to get anywhere is to not be yourself, but in a boring conservative way.