Role-playing names
I made a joke slash shitpost slash argument some years ago that is very dear to me because, while I did create it mostly to laugh at my screen, I still believe there is some truth to it. The main argument is that in videogames, there are no such things as role-playing games. Every single videogame that says it has some type of rpg "element" or "mechanic" in it actually just has level-ups in some way, shape, or form - and therefore digital role-playing games should be called Level-Up Games. LUGs, if you'd rather.
Now that's obviously a generalization, but it is factually correct makes me wonder if we should even be calling tabletop role-playing games rpgs. I've yapped about how everything you do in an rpg is role-playing-gaming in the past, but I'd like to play around that a bit. As in, rpgs are not necessarily made for playing a role. Some people (including yours truly) play an rpg to visualize and interact with fictional spaces and people1 - and some games are made just for that! The same can be said for "creating a story", "simulating a reality", "fulfilling a power fantasy", "being yourself", "being someone else", and some other things.
I guess role-playing can partially encompass most of these, but the terminology is simply too vague. Isn't Monopoly also a game where you play a role of a venture capitalist or Super Mario Bros. a game where you play a role of an abnormally athletic Italian plumber? Playing a role doesn't necessarily mean considering what the Italian plumber's moral dillemas are, it means that, through play, you are somehow representing the Italian plumber's actions - and therefore their role - in the play context. I think that means that every game that has context, that has fictional justification, is a role-playing game2. Games exempt from this are things like poker and dodgeball, where there is no role to be played except the one of the player. There is no fictional context, there is only play.
A term I find to be quite interesting however is "fiction-first game". I first read it in Blades in the Dark, I think, and it's based on the idea that every time a "game mechanic" happens, it's because a situation in the fiction, the game world, demanded it. The game world takes priority over the game rules. And while I think that's valid and helpful, I think there is a different way to look at it. Because you can still make mechanics-first decisions in a fiction-first game3, but making a fiction-only decision is possible. So I'd say the main differential that fiction-first communicates to me is that going out of the rules and solely into the game world doesn't "break" the game.
There is also the whole storygame situation, where some people call storygames ttrpgs, some people call ttrpgs storygames, some people are just weird and elitist, the works. I particularly like a thing Samuel J. said over at their blogs (or maybe it was in the NSR Discord one time?) that "storygames are when players play stories, and role-playing games are when players play characters", but it does conflict a bit with everything I've been saying so far.
Is all of this... useful? Nope! Not in practical terms at least... I think (tt)rpgs as a whole have superseded the meaning of role-playing game, etymologically speaking. An rpg is an rpg before it is a role-playing game in the collective mind4, in the same sense that for a lot of rpgs are dnds before being rpgs. There is no real point in trying to find the right word to call "that style of game", but I think there is a point in debating names and understanding where they come from, where they will go, how they help us make our tables better... Knowledge for the sake of knowledge or maybe knowledge for the sake of fun.
anb
Is this OSR? This could be OSR.↩
Through reflections of my initial joke I've arrived at something that approaches its antithesis. Neat.↩
For example, you can say things like "I'm going to Indulge Vice this Downtime because my Stress is high despite my character wanting to go investigate that rival gang" in Blades. The fiction and the mechanics are working together of course, but the mechanics took precedence. That makes sense, right?↩
I'll add a caveat here that this very much might be related to my context, and specifically a non-English-speaking context. I think I knew that rpgs where "that kind of game where people make voices and roll dice" before I knew what the acronym meant.↩