Something very interesting has emerged from the conversation about my post on fuck-you design:

“Fuck-you” isn’t a design concept.

Rather, it has to do with the writing strategies employed in communicating the structure of the game, and the assumptions encoded about the reader’s familiarity with the game’s context and subtext.

For instance, in response to my calling out Cairn’s advancement guidance, its author Yochai Gal pointed out that this guidance may be more obvious to the storygaming communities from which he emerged.

Rather, I am beginning to suspect the thing I single out as “fuck-you” design, wherein a game text frames something that is neither obvious nor intuitive as obvious and straightforward, is a product of decisions about a) what an imagined reader already knows and b) what is necessary to explain to such a reader. In other words, it is a product of communicative strategies, not game design strategies.

(Someone in the comments on the last post seemed to be vigorously affirming that FKR does not believe game design to be important. I think this probably speaks to different understandings of what constitutes game design.)

While I think acknowledging this distinction is a useful one, it leaves me wondering how, in RPGs specifically, you can meaningfully distinguish between game design and game writing.

A second but equally important consideration, for me, is how to make such a distinction without claiming to know the mind of the designer – a tenuous position at best that I am not comfortable assuming.1

  1. I am aware that some have taken my use of the phrase “fuck-you” as an ascription of an attitude or intent to the author; I assure you I am, in a chilling demonstration of my own concept, merely a sloppy writer. ↩