I
'm designing a video game right now, which is a weird thing for someone who hates video games to do -- perhaps even an ill-advised thing to do. But I love the process of thinking through systems, I love games more generally, and I love working with my partner, N----; and if you find someone you like working with, you'll come with with any old thing just to keep at it.
Whatever it is we're making, it's going to be a role-playing game of some kind, but this term gets used in such a wide variety of contexts that I find it actually jarring at times. I come from the land of table top games, in which the very engine of the game is the human mind, mediated by speech and some rolling of dice. In many ways, it's profoundly primitive, requiring the nothing but pencil, paper, and polyhedrons. And consequently, there is always the temptation to believe that computers could perform these tasks so much better. But, as game designers have known for decades, and I am finding out first hand now, you just can't replace the mind.
There's an intractable problem here. What makes TTRPGs great, in my opinion, is the genuine creativity that is occurring; the act of generating completely unforeseen story from some simple rules and the cooperation of a few people. At first blush, it seems like something at least similar should be possible with machines. But it turns out that in order to cooperate with humans, you have to be human.
Chris Crawford, in his famous Dragon speech, explains that the goal of game designers ought to be developing truly insightful and innovative algorithms that are able to simulate human behavior, and the cause-and-effect nature of stories. If we could just get a few geniuses on the task, soon enough we would have workable, truly interactive systems that people could play with as those engaging with true pieces of art. But Crawford's speech was in 1992, and more than 30 years later, we have made barely any progress toward what I would consider true interactivity, true engagement with generative storytelling. It turns out, the human mind is doing far more work than we thought.
So instead, we find other ways of entertaining ourselves. Video game RPGs are "taking on a role" -- but these roles are inevitably shallow, at least in the sense of character and agency (they may be very sophisticated in terms of game mechanics!). C'est la vie. I'll try to make something fun, that can catch the eye and the mind for a bit; but I suspect it won't be able to hold a candle to what I've seen is possible around a friend's dinner table.