Role-playing Games Are Either High Art or Fanfic

I was probably making a cup of tea, as I usually am.

I just stared into the middle distance and thought “all role-playing games are either High Art or Fanfic” with a force that made me know that it was fundamentally true – which meant, on some level, it must be fundamentally false.

All dichotomies are false. You can never take this too seriously, as it’s a classic The Map Is Not The Territory trap.

However, given a certain definition of Fanfic and High Art, I think it’s can be a useful map. When I say “a certain definition” I mean “Mine.”

Or, at least, the ones I’ve stolen.

Big caveat first: both are used in a purely descriptive way, with no implication of quality. High art is not high quality. Fanfic is not low quality. Both Fanfic and High art are things I love and applaud. I am using them solely to describe what the game is trying to do.

The definition of fanfic I find most useful is one I picked up from Elizabeth Minkel – and I hope Elizabeth will excuse my flattening of a more complicated position.

In short: fanfic is literature plus community.

Specifically, community plus transformative literature – fiction that takes existing things and then does some more, in their own way, in the way they like it. There’s another caveat there, but it’s only going to come back right at the end of the essay.

The “community” aspect is important for various reasons, not least it drills down to what makes modern fanfic what it is. You can say (and I have said) that Inferno is just Dante’s Christian self-insert fic, and while that has a use and illuminates several truths, it also conceals other truths. It’s the sort of error people make when they say “superhero comics are the modern equivalent to mythology!” Yeah, it’s true, as long as you ignore all the things which make them clearly different things, using overlapping techniques, for different reasons, to different effects, in a completely different social system.

Modern fanfic is born of the proliferation of connected fan communities, the ability to share the work and corporate ownership of stories. If you just boil it down to “transformative works” it loses so much.

The point being: the vast majority of RPGs are fanfic. They start with the love of another work, that they want to make their own version thereof, and share it with a community. If fanfic is community (around a table) plus (improvised) literature, one can easily see the vast majority of what we think of as roleplaying games as fanfic.

The success of a fanfic RPG is born of the ability for players to scratch an itch. It is about a shared love and interest. It doesn’t matter if the world you’re in is originally designed. It doesn’t matter if the world is originally created by the players around the table. These games are about satisfying that fannish urge, and the design of those games about how they can best mimic and recreate the things which one loves in another piece of work.

Even if it’s actually itself. Those most successful fanfic works then become new things which create further fanfic. D&D started as a fanfic game about many other things. It became the thing which everyone’s D&D games are fanfic of.

To stress the point, fanfic is a descriptive term – in fact, a celebratory term. This is great. We all love this. In fact, the fanfic games often lead to some of the best design where they work out how best to create games that bring to games what one love in another form. The inspiration and the challenge is the point.

PBTA games and their families are especially good at this. Let’s take Brindlewood Bay by way of illustration. It’s a Murder She Wrote vs Lovecraft mash-up – immediately illustrating that a concept doesn’t need to exist in another genre to fall under fanfic. The game finds mechanics which both add creeping horror to the improvised-no-set-solution mystery system, which leads to a game which follows the structure of a genius detective inevitably solving a mystery. This is all really smart design.

I think that most roleplaying games are living fanfic. Literature we love in a community around the table who also loves it is absolutely the point and the joy. Most games are fanfic. Shout it.

“High Art” is actually simpler, and needs less detail.

The fanfic games are about a community gathering together with a game which lets them have a shared experience of akin to something they love.

High Art games are ones where the game exists to embody the perspective of a designer about something they want to communicate and share with a community who’ve gathered to have this experience. Their appeal is not derivative or transformative works. Their appeal is whatever their appeal is.

A High Art game is one where the designer has something to say, and works out how to structure a game to do whatever they want to do. You may be able to say “if you like this sort of thing, you’ll like this” but you won’t be able to say, “If you like this thing, this is what you need to play to scratch this exact itch”.

To boil it all down?

Fanfic games are primarily inspired by works of art.

High Art games are primarily inspired by the designer’s life.

Let’s do some examples from my own games.

DIE RPG is a fanfic game. Perhaps ironically, it’s a fanfic game of Stephanie and my comic, designed to try and create the experiences and dilemmas of the comic via the rituals and mechanics of the game. But fanfic of your own creation is still fanfic.

How Do Aliens Do It? is a high art game. It exists to put you in the place of teenagers who don’t know how sex works, using the fiction of aliens and the Carved By Brindlewood mechanics to do so. It’s about me trying to explain what it was like being a teenager in the 1990s.

Come Dice With Me is my ultimate fanfic game. It was written after toxic lockdown overexposure to the British Competitive Dinner party show. At one point I saw the matrix, and saw how one could get the appeal of the show into a one-off shortform game. I fear Come Dice With Me is the best design I’ve ever written.

Amble is a high art game, born of talking on the phone to friends while walking during Covid, and thinking about the strangeness of distance and seeing things the other wasn’t, and finding a way to transform that structure into a game. It’s a sleight, throwaway design, designed to do what it does and no more.

My current noodling thing, Working Title Primacy, is about historical and space-fantasy epics, rotating around using the Paragon system for scale and something new-ish to get the sense of historical biographies scale and velocity. It’s got a lot of ideas, but it is all about me trying to create a certain sensation which I know I love, and I know other people do, and wanting them to be part of it.

A thing I’ve abandoned for now, Time To Go, is an interesting one, and shows the strain of my dichotomy. It is based around me watching 2 years of TV kids show In The Night Garden. It is clearly designed to ape the structure of this specific TV show. Its rhythms are that show’s rhythms. Players narrative in simple sentences, and only speak by saying their name repeatedly. The GM – a narrator – speaks evenly, no matter what. You play archetypes inspired by the core cast. It’s surely fanfic, right?

I think it’s firmly in High Art corner.

There’s a Situationist concept called Détournement. It’s complicated, as the Situationists usually are, but the core (for me) is summed up by a quote in the above link: “turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself”. Which I’d bend a little into “turning the expressions of a capitalist system to your entire ends, with no thought to their original purpose or any appeal herein”

Basically, if you transform a media so much that its appeal is entirely separate to whatever it was, it’s probably High Art.

I originally wrote “or antagonistic to” but I think the anger implicit there actually keeps those works in the fanfic corner, the critique of the thing (not the system) being the point. To flip over to music, a cover version is fanfic. Sampling a record and wanting people to recognise the sample is probably fanfic. Sampling a record and using it in a way people will likely never spot is probably high art.

Time To Go is a game about the fact your child will never remember these early years of their life, when their imagination was feral. Its intended vibe is Toy Story meets Millencholia. You may see why I’ve left it alone for now. It’s not exactly a fun game to write.

When I told Quinns about Time To Go, he urged me to lose all that extra stuff, as folks would love the core game. Doing a toddler TV show game would be lots of fun. I agree. That sounds great. I said no, because this isn’t a game about a shared love. It’s about sharing the specific vision of the world. That’s why I’m doing it, and if you lose “why you’re doing it?” from a creative endeavour, it becomes pointless.

If there’s a point to this essay, it’s that. As I said, these tools – these maps – aren’t real, but they are lenses one can observe something and see what they reveal, both about it and you. Some of this will be post hoc – when I rejected Quinns’ fair observation, it was me knowing instinctively that it was moving a game towards the fanfic corner, and that was contrary to my goals. I don’t think I had the words to cleanly then, and I think now I do. They’re these ones.

This dichotomy is a way to question your own work, and your goals, because making a clear decision there guides everything else. Knowing if this is doing one thing or another thing lets you make choices to enhance the desired result. To know what your game’s about requires you to know what the game is about.