The Medium of RPGs and ReReading Robin D. Laws's "The Hidden Art"

Recently I reread Robin D. Laws’s essay “The Hidden Art: Slouching towards a Critical Framework for RPGs,” published in Inter*Action in 1994.  In it, Laws proposes ways to approach critical analysis of RPGs by looking at how film was analyzed and criticized from the time it was a young art form to when it became a readily acknowledged artform of its own.
 
I first read the article three years ago when I was beginning my journey into RPG theoretical thought.  I hadn’t yet read much of Ron Edwards’s essays from the Forge or Vincent Baker’s “anyway” blog posts, and I was excited about what this field that was new to me would yield.  At that time, I was impressed by Laws’s writing and voice, but I didn’t get much from the essay, primarily because it didn’t discuss analysis of the sort I was interested in.  Approaching it now, however, I was struck by how insightful he is, and how he misses the central question at the heart of what he discusses.
 
Laws gets a lot right in this essay, and is at times prescient about where we have come.  His proposed political analysis of D&D is one I see people discussing (and arguing over) still today (notably without any credit to Laws):

An enterprising critic could have a field day with the way [D&D] experience point system primarily rewards killing enemies and stealing their gold.  It’s hierarchical character development system, with characters going up ‘levels’ and thereby becoming more effective at killing enemies and stealing their gold, would be further grist for the academic Marxist’s mill . . . [A] politicized critic might argue that the game is significant not for any aesthetic reasons, but because its success in the marketplace makes it a barometer of social and political attitudes, even those held on a subconscious level. (95)

Laws looks at auteur theory in film and wonders if such a thing could apply to RPG design.  Laws’s interest in auteur theory is connected to genre in film, but one could argue that there is most certainly something of an auteur belief system that grew up in the indie scene as certain game designers have unique approaches and elevated status.  Laws wonders,

Beyond this lies the question of whether we wish to study the works of particular game authors for common threads, and single out certain of them for a pantheon of achievement based on our discoveries. (94)

This kind of analysis is certainly happening now and has been going on for some years now.
 
But as much as I enjoy looking at Laws’s successes, I’m more interested at the moment in his failure in this essay.  In comparing RPG studies to film studies, Laws observes that to discuss RPGs we need to figure out what it’s language and grammar is, just as film critics needed to discover the unique language and grammar of film:

It took years for a visually oriented approach to film to develop, one that attempted to discover a new vocabulary to describe the visual grammar of film.  The artistic decision behind the making of a film was not confined to the writing of its dialogue, but also included editing, set design, shot composition, camera movement, and many other elements that had previously been considered only subliminally. (92)

What Laws lands upon as a possible grammar of RPGs are the mechanics of the games:

​One fruitful avenue of exploration would be the issue of game mechanics, and how they hamper or hinder the narrative building process.  Does a critical hit table or skill resolution roll fulfill the same sort of purpose as a camera angle?  A hard cut between scenes? A fade-out? (93)

That’s of course a clever approach, and a reasonable one.  But it misses what is the core element of RPGs, the very medium of RPGs.  Films unique medium is a two-dimensional moving visual frame.  In RPGs, that medium is not mechanics, but conversation.  RPGs exist only in the exchanging of words and thoughts between the members in the group.  Mechanics are engaged through the conversation and become the subject of conversation and in turn shape the conversation and how a game plays out at a table.
 
Obviously, the observation that conversation is the medium of RPGs is not my own insight.  I first learned it from Baker’s “anyway” blog, and the topic was central to conversation happening on the Forge.  I do not know to what extent that thought is just an accepted fact, to what extent it is disputed, and to what extent it is unknown.  I think it’s funny when I hear people talk about pbta games as though they are unique in having something central called “The Conversation,” as though the conversation is a construct created by Apocalypse World and its successors.
 
So what struck me in my reading of Laws’s essay this time through is that we now have the answer to the question, what is the medium of RPGs?  And the answer to that question allows us to launch again from where Laws brought us in his essay and think about what is the “grammar” of that conversation, as created by various RPGs.  Comparing Eisenstein’s editing to Orwell’s mise en scene has parallels in the conversation that happens at an RPG game.  How is the conversation divided?  Who introduces new information into the fiction, and how, and when?  Who can introduce backstory, and how, and when?  How often does one player talk, and for how long, and what is the nature of their statements or questions?  All the rules and procedures of the games shape and affect the conversation in the same way that camera placement, lens selection, film choice, and editing affect the visual created for a film. That analogy moves from being a merely interesting idea to a productive line of thought, or at least it does in my head.
 
Perhaps I am having revelations and thoughts that are commonplace and old hat. That happens.
 
The lesson for me in this is not to think of any piece of writing as having been “read.”  You will always be in a different place in your own head and experience each time you read a thing, so revisit and reread and rediscover.