RPG theory jargon is a cancer on the hobby

[zdashamber]

jhkimrpg posted this evening about dealing with character death, and in the post he referenced an article he'd previously mentioned by Meg. She suggests two possible social contracts for handling players who have lines of discomfort with some type of game event: "Nobody Gets Hurt" and "I Will Not Abandon You." Midway through the comments of that and another thread I was writing a steel-eyed "'INWAY' is fucking bullshit" post, but then 30-some comments along timfire and Joshua Kronengold and Charles finally began to point that out for me. Meg seemed to agree with them and disagree with the entire thrust of the previous INWAY-defining comments when she then wrote "Don't push when you know it's not ok."

This is the trouble with theory jargon. A concept like "Don't be a dick and then abandon the person you were a dick to" makes perfect sense. A bit of jargon like INWAY, on the other hand, has everyone leaping to attach cool meanings to it, meanings which are related to whatever the developer meant, but which are often contradictory, inflammatory, or non-sequitur. If I see someone using the term INWAY, I won't necessarily know if they a. read to the end of the thread, or if b. they did and like their own idea of the term better than Meg's anyway, or if c. they are actually using it the way Meg seems to have clarified it.

The only way to know what someone is thinking when they use a bit of jargon is to have them clarify it right there in the thread. This wastes everyone's time and though sheer weight of words makes jargon seem important. "Everyone's always talking about it... It must be worth talking about!" The other option is to go with whatever view you've absorbed of the jargon, which can easily result in "John is quoting a., a. is bullshit, your post is bullshit, John," "My post is totally not bullshit!" which leads either to 1. a participant dropping what might have been a useful discussion were it not for the distracting jargon, or 2. a clarification of the jargon (q.v. beginning of this paragraph).

Jargon, like cancer, is energy wasted for no benefit. I'm a gamer. I quote. Allow me to quote Samuel L. Jackson: ENGLISH, MOTHERFUCKER! DO-YOU-SPEAK-IT?

Comments

[pjack.livejournal.com]

It is beneficial to have clearly defined, unambiguous jargon, in any field of study. Good jargon provides a way for specialists to communicate complicated concepts between one another clearly, quickly, and accurately.

When jargon isn't well-defined, then it's just as bad as you describe. Worse, people tend to get attached to certain phrases, creating jargon by accident.

All above = twin pennies.

[tlatoani.livejournal.com]

I've pretty much been completely turned off by the online RPG theorists, so I'm not familiar with the jargon. And this is coming from someone with a freaking degree certificate in gaming and simulation who's been in the hobby forever and has a couplee writing credits. It just seems so masturbatory at times.

[tlatoani.livejournal.com]

(But all that said, I agree with pjack. Jargon, if agreed upon and clearly defined, is extremely valuable. If it isn't, it's obstructive.)

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Dude, not even the theorists themselves are familiar with the jargon. So many threads "Oh, I thought my game was Sim, but is it maybe Nar?" Can't even identify the core tenets of their philosophy! You don't even get that kind of fuzzy-headed circular thinking from astrologers.

Anyway, they make degree certificates in gaming?

[colomon.livejournal.com]

I agree completely, at least with respect to this new wave of gamer jargon. I try to read the links Arref and Ginger post occasionally, and it makes my head spin.

It's very frustrating, because I'd like to improve my GMing and playing. But I read that push and pull stuff, and half the time I think I do one and half the time I think I do the other and I can't figure out what are the positive and negative aspects of my GMing and nothing they're saying sounds quite like what I like as a player anyway...

BTW, you keep saying INWAY above -- do you mean IWNAY? Or is INWAY something different that I Will Not Abandon You?

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Hee! Whoops. Um... See, that's another thing about jargon! Since it has no meaning in the first place, it morphs to become what makes the most sense phonetically, causing confusion! Er.

Anyway, yeah, I saw you throw in a comment on the hilariously obtuse "Amber players are getting constantly dicked by their GMs--they'll leap to play my system!" thread. I haven't actually found much common ground with the big crop of Forge theorists... Used to be, sometimes there would be a useful discussion, and I'd follow it until people started spinning jargon from it or into it, and that would be the end of its usefulness.

I really enjoy talk abot the whichness of the why when it comes to roleplaying... It's so hard to find on the internet, though.

[colomon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the problem with the jargon is, I don't have any clue if I have any common ground with the Forge gang -- and since I get a headache every time I try to follow their discussions, I'm never going to know.

What I do know is, I love the Amber system precisely because it is so minimal. (Even as I frequently hate many of the details of the system as given in the rulebook.) I feel like I could GM and play for decades and not even start to exhaust the potential of simple systems like this.

[jamused.livejournal.com]

How about IWNUYIYWIRI? I Will Not Understand You If You Write In Ridiculous Initialisms? I don't know why RPG theorists are so enamored of jargon, initialisms and Excessive Capitalization Syndrome, though I have some unflattering guesses, but it makes my eyes glaze over. I agree with pjack that clear, unambiguous language helps, and that at least to some extent every field will have its specialized terms, but I don't know if they have to amount to jargon. RPGs have plenty of specialized terms that are clear and unambiguous: PC, NPC, d6, GM, HP, XP, to-hit roll, and so on. But at least those are obviously special terms, and can be defined quickly and clearly to a new reader. It's the layering on of terms that people can't agree on a definition of (like push/pull, narrativism, high-performance, dysfunctional, etc.) that I think is a problem.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Good point about the necessary explainable jargon that comes naturally with the hobby!

My suspicions about the causes of the rest of it are also unflattering.

[jhkimrpg.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It's a bad tendency that gets worse in a semi-closed group. I think spreading out from the Forge to blogs, which are more open to the world, is improving a number of people (possibly including myself).

My rant in particular would be against shifting and vague definitions; losing the references to the original; and defining jargon with other jargon. While Meg's post might remind you of other bad stuff, she doesn't use any terms in her post that she doesn't define in the same article. So unlike some, her post doesn't require you to know prior jargon to understand. It's a little vague and touchy-feely, but that's not a jargon thing.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Meg's post creates a bit of jargon, but not until nearly 40 comments in does she clarify that IWNAY includes "Don't push when you know it's not ok." Vincent's thread I linked in my post certainly didn't find that in Meg's original post, nor did any of the first 30-some comments. Thus, the definition of IWNAY shifted, or it was vague to begin with.

And that doesn't even begin to address the utter uselessness of a made-up word that confuses and excludes where a sentence or two of English could start a good discussion.

Meg's post "reminds me of other bad stuff," and it is bad in its own right. Interesting idea, craptastic method.

[jhkimrpg.livejournal.com]

?!?

I missed that in the comments, buried 40 deep. (Who knew?) OK, fair point then.

[prince-corwin.livejournal.com]

Jargon isn't a blight on the hobby, hobbyists are a blight on the jargon.

After seeing the same themes play out so many times in so many forums, going back over ten years, I came to the conclusion that gamers-- and I include myself-- are primadonnas when it comes to actually discussing the hobby and how it relates to them. Thus the constant ever finer graining of definitions leading ultimately nowhere.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

But you can't be a primadonna... You're the humblest man on the net!

Anyway, I like endless discussions of the same stuff, because I see changes in attitudes over time. And some definitions have use; the whole "munchkin/power gamer" thing was fun, at least. Because it was defined, dagnabbit! [/crochety mountain man]

[ewilen.livejournal.com]

I don't have much to add except that I agree. There's an awful lot of bad jargon flying around, and a disturbing rush to embrance new jargon whenever it appears. That one of the reasons why I explicitly discouraged people from trying to turn my commments on the concept of "immersion" into a new jargon or typing system--my purpose was to get people to speak in frigging English!

Jargon is bad when it:
• is constructed based on whimsical or idiosyncratic criteria, often dragging in emotional or ideological baggage that then gets denied (cf. "Impossible Thing Before Breakfast")
• isn't well-defined in the community that uses it (SIS, Lumpley Principle)
• is used to cover up poorly-constructed categories and structures of thought through reification ("Simulationism"--there's a word for it, so it must exist, and since it's not Narrativism, I can use my Narrativist tribal identity to explain that the stuff I hate all belongs to the "Simulationist" category)
• is used to signal adherence or submission to particular ideology
• does a bunch of other things, probably.

There's a pretty good thread over on Harnforum right now that has to do with a game that John has discussed over in his LJ. It gets absolutely nowhere while people argue about definitions of GNS vs. Threefold terms, then, amusingly, a guy who self-identifies as a Forge-type Narrativist shows up and offers advice on "running a Sim game" even though he doesn't "do Sim". Which turns out to be extremely insightful advice (in general--some of the specifics might be overdone or off the mark) once he drops the jargon and the habit of contrasting his recommendations against some putative Simulationist category of play.

On the other hand, there's some great jargon that I've seen, yes, on the Forge. It comes from first forming a useful concept and then giving a name to it. I'd point to Currency, Layering, and Resources as examples, even though they probably could be explained far better than the current spaghetti-reference style in the Forge glossary. Stances work well, although I frankly don't see the point in changing the names from what was earlier done in rec.games.frp.advocacy: the categories are the same as far as I can tell, except that one of them (Audience) was dropped going from Usenet to the Forge. Drama/Fortune/Karma is sort of useful except that it was "borrowed" from Everway and redefined without changing the terms. Everway's definitions match the commonsense meanings of the words reasonably well, while the Forge concept of "Drama" is (all-too-typically) idiosyncratic.

Quotation of Plato

[(Anonymous)]

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