The Most Human Type of Game: Negotiating the Winning Conditions

Tabletop RPGs are an interesting example of that fairly small subset of games: ones in which the players negotiate the winning conditions with each other through play.

I don't know if you've had this kind of experience, but the purest enjoyment I have ever had when playing a game of any kind is that which I used to get when playing knockabout games of football with my friends at the local playing fields after school or on weekends. Football has rules (they are actually conventionally called laws) and among them are those concerning the length of a match and how it is won, the size of the pitch, and so on. But we never abided by them. We played almost entirely in freeform - all we needed were two nominal goals ('jumpers for goalposts') - and we often didn't keep score. There were no throw-ins, no fouls, no penalties, no offsides, no real dimensions even to the pitch (we often continued the action behind the goal, like in ice hockey, with the ball remaining in play). Very often we played a game which we always called 'cuppy' (it goes by different names in different regions of the country, apparently), in which there was only one goal and one goalkeeper and the outfield players all competed against one another or in teams of 2 or 3 to try to get the ball and score. These matches could go on for hours, until somebody would stick up their hand and call out 'passing and shooting!' or 'heads and volleys!' and we'd switch to a different variant.

The salient feature of these games were that, when they started, nobody would ever specify how they would end. We'd just play. And play. And play. And eventually get bored - at which point somebody would say 'Next goal wins', and everybody else would nod their assent and that would be that; the next team or player to score would win. Or somebody would say 'Let's just do a penalty shoot-out.' Or 'Let's just take shots at the crossbar.' Or, sometimes, 'Let's just go home.' The winning conditions of the game worked themselves out as the game itself was being played - through a curious collective decision-making process that was never explicit and yet almost always reflective of the consent of everybody participating.

I can think of only a few equivalent examples of this phenomenon - long games of Monopoly or Risk resulting in deadlock, perhaps, but those are a little different in that the winning conditions were clear from the outset but simply took too long to realise, resulting in consensual cancellation between the players. Or childhood games, where the action would flow from hide-and-seek to cops-and-robbers to chariot-races to whatever else without there ever being a clear resolution to any of them. 

At any rate, table top RPG campaigns also usually have this quality, too - a defined start but no clear end, and in which the decisions as to what is the winning or ending point develops organically through the process of playing itself. Indeed, if one were being pretentious, one might say that an RPG campaign is something like a process of becoming, in which the very activity of playing the game is a way of working out how it comes to an end - such that it is only at the end that one can look back and understand what the game was about. Was it about this character getting to level 20? That character ending up being King of Saxinraxinland? These characters slaying the gold dragon under the mountain? None of that was ordained in advance; it happened as a result of choices (and dice rolls) and their consequences that took place within the game itself. Or maybe it is revealed that there was no natural conclusion, and that the whole thing was merely a bunch of stuff that happened. In a sense, you play to find out.

There is something deeply human in this, I think - the idea that, with one's friends, and some vague rules or principles, one comes through a long process of decision-making to an emergent conclusion about what you all have really been doing all this time. There's no way a computer can replicate this. I think it's something that really only we can do, and hence to be celebrated.

[I am currently running a Kickstarter for the 2nd edition of Yoon-Suin, the renowned campaign toolbox for fantasy games. You can back it here.]