20. Vincent at ropecon 2013

I finally watched Vincent’s Ropecon 2013 session on Youtube called “D. Vincent Baker: the Man, Career, and Games.” He said a lot of interesting things, but I want to quote a long passage here about what some of his intentions were in the presentation of Apocalypse World:

“So this game [Apocalypse World] was a dick move."

"I designed this game to occupy conversation, to—like, I’m gonna say dominate, but I’m a tiny niche of a tiny niche. I dominated conversation for like a hundred people, like that’s what it means to dominate conversation where I am. But I designed this game on purpose to dominate conversation, and it did, and it has.”

Witness this whole collection. Anyway, a little after that, someone from the audience asked this question:

“You said that you wanted to dominate the conversation. How did you intend to do that? What was the thing you did that was meant to do that?”

Vincent answered thus:

“I did about ten things to do that. . . ."

"At the Forge we talked about how do you create a game that is playable, but we never talked about how do you create a game that will catch on. And with Apocalypse World I really set out to explore for myself—like I had a bunch of ideas about how you would create a game that would catch on based on which of my games had caught on and which hadn’t and what the conversations around my games had been in public. . . ."

"When you are selling a game, you want a really large percent—5 or 10 percent—of your target audience to hate your game so much that they can’t shut up about it, because that creates conversation in the world about your game and creates public engagement with your game. . . . "

"So in Apocalypse World I designed to alienate 10% of my audience, 5% of my audience, and it worked great. Like, I pissed people off.”

Here he read from the first paragraph under “Agenda” in the Master of Ceremonies Section.

“And saying that—‘preplan your game and you’ll end up with a boring game that makes Apocalypse World seem contrived’—like, that pisses people off. And people who I could have had as fans of the game, a small number of people I could have had as fans of the game, reach that point in the text and they get angry; they throw the book . . . and that’s great. They go on the internet; they say this game is—like, they say it’s too aggressively written, it’s stupid; they have these emotional reactions that stop them from engaging with the game, but create more widespread engagement with the game."

"This is stuff I don’t talk about to people. I can make people very angry talking about this stuff, like my fellow designers, very few designers are willing to do that. . . ."

"When you publish a game, you want a third of your audience to understand it perfectly just from reading it. And you want a third of your audience to struggle with it a little bit, to win their understanding the hard way, right? This is somebody who has to reread it and who has to have a little conversation about it in order to understand it. And you want a third of your audience to need to ask questions, and that way you create these three groups of people. And the people who can’t understand it just from the text ask questions, and these people say, ‘I can’t believe how stupid you are; here’s the answer,’ and these people say, ‘I struggled with that too; here’s the answer.’ And this creates a tremendous dialogue about your game.”

We should pause to appreciate that 1) this can be said about all art (movies, literature, etc) and 2) your game has to first be really fucking good for any of this to happen.

“These are things I did on purpose in Apocalypse World."

“I watched—do you guys know Luke Crane, Jared Sorensen? Do you know their game ‘Freemarket’? I learned from ‘Freemarket.’ I watched a conversation happening on story-games.com where somebody asked a technical rules question about ‘Freemarket’ using the game’s very particular, very precise, weird transhumanist jargon, right? . . . And then people answered using that same jargon and I watched the way it created an in-crowd and an out-crowd, and I watched the way it created anxiety in the out-crowd, right? These are people who are being now excluded from a conversation they are interested in. And that’s powerful. Shit. So I learned that there’s jargon designed to create an in-crowd and an out-crowd in Apocalypse World.”

Those are 3 of the 10 things Vincent said that he purposefully did in presenting Apocalypse World in order to create discussion about the game.

Now, being a student of literature, I know to take anything an author says about his own work with a shaker of salt, but this is something to think about when asking yourself why this passage is written this way, or why this presentation seems vague, etc. I’m one of those people who fell in love with the text right way but needed to read and reread (gladly) to piece together what was happening. This part of the video will be haunting the rest of my reading of the text, whether I say anything more about it or not.