RPG General News - Jeff Vogel: Genres are Marketing Terms

[HiddenX]

Soola spotted the newest blogpost from Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software:

Genres are Marketing Terms, and Your Advice is Bad.

Art is slippery. The firmer your grasp, the sooner it slips out of your hands.

If you really wanna go nuts, try to define what a "game" is. I mean, Hidden Object Games barely even count as an activity. And yet, we know they are games, because they have "game" in the name.
One of the great (?) things about making and writing about games for 30 years is the patterns you get to see. Arguments that come up again and again. Mistakes that keep being made.

I've found that creators and writers often have a phase where they try to come up with their hard, fast rules for art. It's a way to fail to bring soothing order to a process that is unnervingly chaotic and unpredictable.

This isn't useless. When you're new to an art form, you need to study it. Learn everything that has been done and what has worked and what didn't. Organize it into categories according to what inspires you and what doesn't. It's a healthy waypoint on the way to a productive process of shaking all old ideas of rules and categories off and doing whatever the hell you want.

The problem is when these ideas escape containment from the soothing calm of your Mind Palace and become Tweets. Then debates, then arguments. It's a process that has been going on as long as art's existed.

It's fun to argue, but when you start proclaiming, "This is the one true way to make work," or "These are the rules that define what this piece of art is," you're probably well on the way to wasting time. And time is precious. The most important debates happen inside your own head.

I have to confess at this point that I was inspired to write this by seeing multiple discussions on Twitter/X. It's a very bad idea to take seriously anything you see on Twitter/X. It's a medium designed to prevent complex thought, a pedant's paradise, and really a very very VERY small corner of human thought.

Still, these arguments happen everywhere always, and it's good to be inoculated.

[...]

More information.

 

[lackblogger]

Vogel isn't necessarily one to take too much heed from with regards to either genre definitions nor intellectulism of art.

His games, while imaginative, are not what you'd call artistic and, as he himself freely admits, the art aspect of his games is the least of his priorities.

He has original ideas, then reuses basic, perfunctory art to enable an industrious approach to production. Because he's primarily a businessman, as he himself admits regularly.

And this is why even his original ideas are often just shameful copies of what is popularly being classed as RPG at any given time.

He personally shies away from attaining definitions, because, for business, definitions don't really matter, what matters is giving the public, or the public you hope is there, what you hope they want. Because you gotta pay the bills.

There's nothing wrong with his approach, it's served him well over the years and produced plenty of enjoyable games, it's just that his approach is naturally uninterested in either art or definitions.

And this is clearly evident by his intro that challenges whether Hidden Object Games are games.

Well, if you play a rubbish one, they're not, they're just interractable wallpaper or things very old people can do to amuse themselves, like jigsaw puzzles - note, Jigsaws have never been referred to as Jigsaw games.

But a good hidden object game will have very challenging content, particularly with a very well thought out level-timer or miss-click penalty or some such.

And the definition of a game is probably the easiest of all definitions, as it's something that's inherent in the make-up of living things - to challenge oneself at an activity that is superfluous to survival. And even then, some survival activities get referred to as games, colloquially, such as "The blogging game".

 

[Carnifex]

Great article, thanks for posting it here.

 

[soola]

@lackblogger

I actually think this is one of the best arguments against how stuffy we can all be (including me) about what makes an RPG “a good RPG.” It doesn’t allow creative ideas to be implemented.

For instance: all the recent Avowed stuff we’ve been discussing: No romance and no pacifist play-through.

 

[lackblogger]

You'll have to elaborate a bit there @soola .

What is one of the best arguments?

Elements don't make RPGs good, being good makes them good, surely?

What doesn't allow creative ideas to be implemented?

How does Avowed fit into what you said previously?

 

[HiddenX]

I'm a senior software developer for information systems and databases (not RPGs).

You have to specify at some point in your development process what functions, features your program should have and which it should NOT have.

If you are an agile team you don't have to specify everything right at the start of your project, but you should have a good idea

1. what your customer really wants
2. what time/budget restrictions do you have
3. what you are capable of
4. what design features set you apart from the competition

In my experience:

• less features that are well implemented are always better than more features that are sloppy implemented (featuritis = feature creep)
• focus on things your team is good at instead of inventing the wheel over and over again
• keep it Smart and Simple (KISS principle) to save time and money and avoid bugs
• involve the customers early, but don't do everything they want, always ask if features are really necessary
• prioritizing of features helps, don't implement the bottom of the list
• a well programmed backend is always good for maintaining the project, but what the user really sees is the user interface - so always make an intuitive well designed user interface

 

[Vaelith]

The problem with places like Twitter/X is that people who engage there have the urging need for other people with different backgrounds, cultures, and social environments to agree with them, just to feel validated. What's better, XBox or PS? League of Legends or DOTA? Horde or Alliance? TB or RTwP? Controller or M+KB? To live life in the constant necessity of being in the "right" team must be exhausting, not to say incredibly unhealthy.

 

[txa1265]

It's funny - I get his newsletter and got hung up on the 'hidden object games are barely an activity' bit ... personally I reviewed some about a decade ago and fell in love - the ones with an interlaced story are actually quite well done and solid fun (value? More questionable)

 

[JDR13]

I've got a marketing term he can add to the list.

Vogeling
verb
To continually remake the same games with minimal effort or improvement.

 

[txa1265]

Vogeling
verb
To continually remake the same games with minimal effort or improvement.

I've always been a fan (I didn't start playing his games until ~2006 so missed the first round) ... but the latest game sorta broke me. I've done beta stuff for him pretty much since then, but starting this upcoming release I just ... couldn't anymore. Didn't I do this game already? Is it really that much different - and do I even WANT to play them anymore? The answer to these is the reason I won't be in the testing credits for this one ...

 

[screeg]

I've got a marketing term he can add to the list.

Vogeling
verb
To continually remake the same games with minimal effort or improvement.

To this day I don't know why anyone reads his opinions on anything. I'm willing to concede he was a game developer when he released his first game. Kind of feel like he needs to do more than keep living to be considered some wise old sage of the industry.

 

[soola]

To this day I don't know why anyone reads his opinions on anything. I'm willing to concede he was a game developer when he released his first game. Kind of feel like he needs to do more than keep living to be considered some wise old sage of the industry.

I’m not the biggest Vogel fan out there as I still have one to play in my queue.

That being said:
1. He developed his own engine.
2. He does all of his own writing.
3. He makes these games mostly all on his own.

As a software developer myself (not in the game industry), it makes a lot of sense why he re-uses story beats, software, etc. This is a common thing in the software development industry. Hell, it’s a common thing in the novel writing industry. Writing new code every time is very risky.

Any one here develop their own engine, writing, etc for 30+ years, still making money, and still successfully funding projects?

Even if I don’t end up liking his game(s), I still think it is interesting to hear what it is like for the people who make them. He’s doing something right if he’s still around…

 

[mbpopolano24]

Oh sure, the ol' good line "I'll listen when you show me your game". No, I haven't but I am good an innovative in my line of work. Jeff's first game was OK, the rest is just the same boring stuff.

 

[soola]

Oh sure, the ol' good line "I'll listen when you show me your game". No, I haven't but I am good an innovative in my line of work. Jeff's first game was OK, the rest is just the same boring stuff.

Seems like he wasn’t making his games for you then.

I guess I was hoping more people would engage with the ideas presented rather than whether Jeff Vogel is the greatest game developer of all time.

For instance: what RPG games have delighted you that typically wouldn’t be seen as a vanilla RPG? What elements could be added to an RPG that haven’t typically been seen in the genre? Do indie developers make more creative games than AAA companies?

 

[Carnifex]

Vogel and Spiderweb have certainly established a loyal audience, and you simply cannot do that without giving the consumers something. They still deliver, yeah some of it may seem repetitive and redundant yet people keep coming back to the table. They're meeting these needs, perhaps not fully yet enough to the point where folks are still parting with cash to play.

 

[mercy]

At least Jeff is lucky that he didn't invent one of the worst combat systems ever we see in Underrail.