Young's theory 101

My brain keeps exploding as I read through the theoretical pieces and positions put together by member of The Forge. So many smart people working together to hammer out what RPGs are and how they work—I know it’s old hat for some, but for me it’s amazing to behold.

M. Joseph Young summarized a lot of the thought collected on The Forge in his Theory 101 essays. If you care about this kind of thing and weren’t there when this was all being hashed out the first time, I highly recommend them (and Ron Edwards’s essays, of course--and everything they link to).

Here’s a summary of what RPGs are and how they work from Young’s “Theory 101: System and the Shared Imagined Space”

1) The play of any RPG is the creation of a Shared Imagined Space. This is the thing that we create by communicating with each other: “[T]he game is able to proceed because there is a common understanding of what is happening, a shared agreement of the events of the game.”

2) The System of any RPG is what allows us to reach that “shared agreement.” As the Lumpley Principle holds, “System (including but not limited to ‘the rules’) is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play.”

3) “What a System does, fundamentally, is apportion credibility. That is, it provides the participants with the means necessary to gauge who has the right to make what statements about the shared imagined space, and who does not.” Traditionally, of course, players have the right to say what their character does and says. We give credibility to what the player says about her own character. The GM is traditionally given credibility for whatever she says about the world, the NPCs, etc. “We call this credibility because we all agree to believe statements made by these participants when those statements are within the extent of their credibility.”

And that’s it: “In the end, a role playing game is a conversation between a group of people in which they describe to each other certain imagined events that they create as they describe them. Everything else that we see as part of the game exists to support that activity, and to determine whose statements about what happens will be accepted by everyone.”

“That is the most powerful secret of game design that has yet been uncovered, and to the degree that you can understand, support, and exploit this central concept, you can design or play a great game.”