Belatedly picking things back up from the first & second parts…
13.
Since it’s been a while, let’s revisit Marshall McLuhan’s expatiations on games:
Games, like institutions, are extensions of social man and of the body politic, as technologies are extensions of the animal organism. Both games and technologies are counter-irritants or ways of adjusting to the stress of the specialized actions that occur in any social group. As extensions of the popular response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the action and the reaction of whole populations in a single dynamic image…
As models, [games] are collective rather than private dramatizations of inner life. Like our vernacular tongues, all games are media of interpersonal communication, and they could have neither existence nor meaning except as extensions of our immediate inner lives. If we take a tennis racket in hand, or thirteen playing cards, we consent to being a part of a dynamic mechanism in an artificially contrived situation. Is this not the reason we enjoy those games most that mimic other situations in our work and social lives? Do not our favorite games provide a release from the monopolistic tyranny of the social machine? In a word, does not Aristotle’s idea of drama as a mimetic reenactment and relief from our besetting pressures apply perfectly to all kinds of games and dance and fun? For fun or games to be welcome, they must convey an echo of workaday life.
Again—bear in mind that McLuhan, writing in the early 1960s, encapsulates what he means by “games” by invoking the tennis racket and the Bicycle deck. Obviously tennis and bridge probably aren’t what people born after 1990 think of when they hear the word “games.” For that matter, “game” didn’t mean for McLuhan what it meant to people living two hundred years before him—before the Big Game of a professional sporting league could be broadcast to millions via radio or television, and before Milton Bradley industrialized the design and production of board games.
But to McLuhan’s point: why should activities that mimic or recapitulate the motions of life’s serious business be pleasurable? If work and play stand at opposite poles, shouldn’t they be utterly unalike?
Even though we may believe, along with Huizinga, that the Dionysian “play instinct” is aboriginal, older than civilization and language, the forms through which it finds expression depend on the material conditions and practices of the social group. The implements for play and the common capacity to use them obviously matter here: a so-called primitive tribe lacking in literacy and manufactures won’t stumble into inventing Mad Libs, while a neighborhood of pudgy professional-class New Yorkers are unlikely to get up on their horses and trot over to a wide open field for a rousing game of traditional Buzkashi on Memorial Day. But beyond that, it stands to reason that the organization and rules of conduct that define a game as such must adhere to a mold of thought familiar to the playgroup. Popular games may stand apart from economic activity, politics, household management, and all the other exigencies of life in society, but can’t but bear the imprint of their operational logic.
In the “artificially contrived” situations of play, we enact certain fragmented patterns of everyday life with the “disinterestedness” Kant ascribed to aesthetic pleasure. “Social life is endued with supra-biological forms, in the shape of play, which enhance its value,” writes Huizinga in Homo Ludens—and we may find that if we substitute the word “art” for “play,” the meaning of the statement seems to remain astonishingly similar. Likewise, when he goes on to assert that a people “expresses its interpretation of life and the world” through its play-forms, he could just as well be talking about their art-forms. Nobody doubts that an understanding of a culture’s works of art is a window into its mindset and values. The same must be said of the popular forms of structured play the members of a culture undertake during their leisure hours—and the new sorts of popular games we’ve contrived since the twentieth century’s postwar decades have much to tell us about ourselves.
14.
Even though we don’t like in a world resembling anything like Tolkien’s magnificent bricolage of tropes from Northern European folklore and epic poetry, the appeal of swords n’ sorcery narratives centered on heroic quests has persisted long into the age of mechanized industry. The symbols are potent enough to remain part of our mythic “vocabulary.” The sword may no longer serve as a practical weapon for making war or keeping peace, but we see it communicating its wielder’s strength, skill, and courage more eloquently than a firearm or a drone loaded with explosives. In popular media, spellcasting has increasingly come to dramatize the act of tapping into one’s inner resources to effect change upon the world. We will perhaps never escape from the hero’s journey as the most potent and popular symbolic framework for articulating the impactful and exciting life of a worthy individual, even if—or maybe especially if—our world retains little of the enchantment that it did for our premodern forebears. In every man’s heart of hearts, he would rather be Aragorn than an accountant or vice president of marketing.
Dungeons & Dragons, released on the heels of the 1960’s Tolkien craze, formalizes rules for open-ended tabletop roleplay as a hero in the vein of Lord of the Rings’ most memorable characters. (The game isn’t explicitly related to Lord of the Rings, but the influence is obvious.) If you’re not familiar with how it works (and I doubt anyone reading this wouldn’t be), it’s not exactly a board game: more of a rules-governed improv session that often uses game pieces as visual aids and always involves a pile of dice. A player called the Dungeon Master sits with a stack of papers, maps, and manuals behind a small divider, and acts as narrator and arbiter. Some number of players take on the roles of questing warriors, rogues, wizards, etc. In most traditional campaigns (a string of play sessions over a period of months or years) they’re on some kind of overarching quest to overthrow the evil wizard, slay the dragon that’s oppressing the kingdom, and so on. The DM presents a scenario, the players make decisions, and various dice rolls determine whether the players are able sneak past a sleeping monster without waking it up, discover the camouflaged switch that opens a secret passage, parry a blow from an orc swinging an axe, etc.
In a facile but accurate read, Dungeons & Dragons was developed as a pre-video game vehicle for playful absorption in a Tolkienian adventure fantasy that possessed both a kind of social reality (one cannot play alone) and the verisimilitude of structured unpredictability and solid consequences for one’s choices. It offers mature players an opportunity to participate in a sophisticated form of make-believe where they can act out being men and women of quality and action, pursuing the kind of heroic exploits for which the world lacked room even in Don Quixote’s time—let alone today. What imaginative teenager taking the SATs on a rainy day, and what twenty- or thirty-something sitting in traffic and working a desk job Monday through Friday wouldn’t like to slip into a fantasy scenario where they’re a gritty, stealthy rogue sallying forth to recover an amorous young noble’s stolen scepter from the witch-haunted ruins beyond the Forest of Illusion?
Prior to his career in designing tabletop games, Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax worked for an insurance company—and what his celebrated brainchild does, in essence, is gird the playful, imaginative spirit of Tom Sawyer and Joe Harper playing Robin Hood in the Missouri woods with mechanics and procedures redolent of white-collar professionalism and technocratic management. In-game operations for determining what happens during the playgroup’s exercise in improvisational role-play and collaborative storytelling are grounded in the logic of actuarial calculations: all persons in the play-world behave as bundles of attributes to which probabilities are ascribed. Players in long campaigns seek to “upskill” their characters, expanding and quantitatively improving their capacities so as to make themselves more useful to the enterprise and more capable of individual success. Special abilities or proficiencies (effectively probability modifiers) are put down on character sheets like items on a CV: I’m a detail-oriented level 4 chaotic good half-elf cleric skilled in Animal Handling, Lyre, Cartographer’s Tools, and Medicine...
It should be noted that Dungeons & Dragons hit the market in the early 1970s—the decade which marked the beginning of the switch-over from the vestiges of New Deal economics to neoliberalism. I am definitely not saying that Dungeons & Dragons was any kind of a causal factor in this, but stands to reason that we can at least partially account for its (and its derivatives’) ever-growing popularity on the basis that thinking of the social self in terms of functional categories, quantities, and aptitudes has become second nature in the last half-century. Nobody who’s tried to make a career for themselves in the last twenty years (or ever put serious effort into making a sexy LinkedIn profile) needs a character sheet explained to them in great detail.1 Gaining enough experience points to level up and augment your character sheet mirrors the requisites of advancing in one’s field: working for X number of years in a position in order to be considered for a more authoritative, more mobile, and more lucrative role involving the same essential skillset. When we abstract out the halflings and dwarves, the melee battles and magic, and the malevolent floating eyeballs, the Dungeons & Dragons campaign becomes a long-term game of imaginary progress in an occupation.
The savvy Dungeons & Dragons player who knows the rules fairly well and goes in with a plan involving their character’s race(s), class(es), feats, etc., approaches the game somewhat like the calculating, ambitious adolescent who joins the right clubs in high school, enrolls in the right university, commits to the right major, applies for the right internships, and takes the right post-graduation entry-level job to ensure their success in life. On a higher plane stands the minmaxer, who takes the McKinsey & Company approach to strategically optimizing their character sheet for peak performance on a pure mathematical level. Gaming the game.
Minmaxers are often spoken of as a problem to be handled in playgroups. In many common Dungeons & Dragons situations, they’re sort of like the neighborhood kid who, during games of make-believe played with sticks and toy weapons, announces he has an impenetrable force field, the ability to fly, and a sword that’s more magical than everyone else’s sword. Every time the minmaxer rolls the dice, he passes the check—while his peers’ characters get wounded, poisoned, lose their grip on a ledge, or die in a shipwreck. Even if they’re not reluctant to initiate an episode of table drama, other players’ protests ring hollow when the minmaxer ultimately has the written rules of the game on his side. He’s just better at the numbers than they are—and there’s no arguing with the numbers, is there?
Whether in the arena of professionals and firms or the fantasy scenario of the tabletop campaign, the advantage goes to him who knows how to work within and exploit the system. (Don’t like it? Git gud, say the financier and the minmaxer.)
15.
By the 1980s, Dungeons & Dragons’ success among educated white male nerds ensured that attempts would be made to translate the experience into another domain heavily populated by educated white male nerds: computer games. But the Dungeons & Dragons brand was more or less absent from the scene during the early years.2 Ultima and Wizardry (both released in 1981) were the trailblazers here, doing what they could with the means available at the time to replicate on a computer screen the fundamental stuff of a Dungeons & Dragons adventure—and what they could do admittedly wasn’t much by modern standards. These games are slow. They’re not much to look at. They’re clunky in every respect. But they nevertheless offered very new experiences where computer games where concerned—and they were big in Japan.
In 1986, Japanese developer Enix released Dragon Quest for the Nintendo Famicom, which promptly inspired similar titles like Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star, MOTHER, etc., inaugurating the genre of the JRPG or console RPG (contraposed to the W[estern]RPG or computer RPG). Where Dragon Quest showed its ingenuity was in how effectively it streamlined the mechanics of games like Ultima and Wizardry, and imbued them with an aesthetic charm sorely lacking in Western computer RPGs.
I don’t want to go too deep into the weeds here, but it’s worth comparing two games: Final Fantasy (1987) on the Nintendo/Famicom and Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny (1988) on the Apple II. Click the links, skip around, see what they’re about.
In their own ways, each replicates the basics of Dungeons & Dragons: character “sheets,” experience points and levels, turn-based combat relying on probability values and random number generators, the routine of shopping and gathering information in towns before hoofing it across a hazardous wilderness to visit an even more dangerous underground labyrinth, and so on. Obviously Final Fantasy looks and sounds better than Ultima V. But what you’re not seeing in the Ultima video are the player’s inputs, and the game brings the keyboard into play. There’s room for something kind of sort of like role-playing when you can press “T” to talk and “Y” to yell, and then type in what you want your character to say.3 You can press “A” to start fights with NPCs. The P key pushes and/or pulls on objects. The C key casts spells, some of which do things like tell you the coordinates of your current location, see through walls, change the wind when you’re at sea, etc.—whereas field-usable spells in Final Fantasy do nothing but brass tacks stuff like recover party members’ HP, cancel out negative statuses, and backtrack in dungeons.
This is all to say that the Western template for developing computerized RPGs left room for some degree of complexity and preserved the role-play elements of tabletop RPGs to the extent that they could—and as the technology improved, their scope for doing so widened considerably. The Japanese take on the computerized RPG, necessarily simplified for play with a gamepad instead of a keyboard, followed a different path, and had grown into something wholly other than a tabletop game simulator by the time titles like Final Fantasy VII, Valkyrie Profile, and Xenosaga were hitting the market.
From Dragon Warrior onward, the JRPG revolved around two poles: aesthetics and combat. For at least two decades, Japanese console RPGs were generally better-looking and more flavorful than their contemporaneous Western counterparts on home computers, and the stories that unfolded as players progressed through them were more spectacular. But they had comparatively little in the way of interactivity or role-play per se, and the RNG-based play mechanics were invested entirely in combat. This was a radical departure from the original Dungeons & Dragons template, where character stats and dice rolls don’t just come into play when calculating how much damage a player deals to a goblin with their bastard sword, but determine how successfully a player convinces a skeptical palace guard of a lie, gets a campfire going in bad weather, recognizes an important face in a crowd, and so on. While WRPGs of the 1980s and early 1990s couldn’t quite replicate these mechanics in-game, they did try to find ways of approximating them: fabricating procedures for disarming trapped treasure chests and jimmying locked doors, crafting rudimentary dialogue trees, and implementing a fairly wide range of field screen actions and environmental considerations, and so on. It’s hard to blame early JRPG developers for not being interested in retaining and elaborating on this stuff when much of it amounted to complication for complication’s sake.
In a game like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy (and I’m talking about the originals here, not the franchises they launched), every place outside of the world’s towns is crawling with monsters that will randomly engage you in text-window combat in which they try to reduce your character’s HP (hit points) to zero. If they succeed, it’s Game Over. But when you use the Fight and Magic commands to subtract a monster’s HP value to zero, your EXP (experience points) and gold numbers go up. When your EXP numbers reach a certain threshold, your level number goes up, and so do your HP numbers, attack power numbers, etc. When your gold numbers get high enough, you can exchange them for weapons that make it so your attacks subtract monsters’ HP numbers at a greater rate, and armor that slows the rate at which monsters subtract your HP numbers. When your numbers are sufficiently high to see you through a long walk to the next town, or allow you to get in in and out of a dungeon containing an important event switch (say, the treasure chest holding a Quest Item that makes it so the King says something different and gives you another Quest Item the next time you talk to him), before long you’ll find yourself in a different place with different monsters with bigger numbers than before. You’ll need to bump up your own numbers. You’ll need more EXP and more gold. And you increase your EXP and gold numbers by fighting more monsters in more random battles.
When playing an JRPG like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, there might be times where a difficulty spike amounts to an insurmountable wall: you arrive at a dungeon where the monsters are too tough to handle, or a boss fight in which tactical considerations are beside the point because the beast’s numbers exceed yours by too large a margin. Since early JRPGs were typically more linearly constructed than their Western counterparts, you seldom have the option for fruitful exploration elsewhere, or other items on your to-do list you can tick off in the meantime. You can’t advance in the game until your numbers go up, so it’s time to grind.
Grinding typically entails finding some place with a convenient point of egress and relatively easy-to-handle monsters that give out decent EXP and gold upon expiration. The idea is to bring your numbers quickly and with a minimum of effort and risk. You want predictable battles that don’t ask you think much about what you’re doing, and can be won by just mashing the “confirm” button to attack, attack, attack. If the process sounds repetitive and dull—well, it is. You’re Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, tightening nuts on the assembly line. But it’s also strangely satisfying, like scrubbing at a resistant stain in the bathtub until it finally disappears.4
There is always pleasure in attaining a goal and receiving some reward, even when it involves hammering away at a menial and totally artificial task. I remember feeling a powerful sense of achievement the first time I played Final Fantasy and grinded away on the plain to the east of Elfland, killing Ogre after Ogre after Ogre until I had enough cash to buy my two Fighters a pair of Silver Swords. I don’t even want to think about how much time I sank into the Northern Crater in Final Fantasy VII, grinding for EXP and AP so I could fight the optional Emerald and Ruby Weapon superbosses and win.
On at least a superficial level, it’s not hard to see why a grind-oriented franchise like Dragon Quest would have sold like gangbusters in Japan—a nation whose grueling focus on school exams and punishingly arduous salaryman culture were observed with a mixture of horror and admiration in the West. Neither is it surprising that these games (and their equally punishing WRPG counterparts) found an avid audience in America, whose national character can’t be understood without reference to the Protestant Work Ethic. It stands to reason that those conditioned to valorize Work for Work’s sake will happily play games that resemble Work: recreation that consists of literally putting in one’s time.
The original Dragon Quest draws players into an abstracted virtual office and assigns them a repetitive task that doesn’t demand much thought or skill—say, putting stamps, signatures, and checkmarks on a perpetually replenishing stack of forms in an inbox tray. An unseen supervisor docks their pay and forces them to do their work over when they screw it up, and honors good performance with more elaborate paperwork and an expanded set of stamps. We are familiar with the gamification of the office, in which RPG-like reward mechanisms incentivize white-collar employees to work with more enthusiasm. The gamification of RPGs was accomplished by involving eye-candy graphics, earworm BGMs, attractive characters, and interesting storylines in the expenditure of the player’s real time in accruing virtual numbers through rote button-presses.
Having already offhandedly mentioned an episode from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, I’m reminded of the famous incident where Tom tricks the neighborhood boys into painting a fence for him:
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.
I’m not sure our OG ludologist Huizinga would wholly agree with Twain here—but if not, it would only be on a “necessary but not sufficient” basis.
While early RPGs invented it, grinding has long since broken out and and seeped into other video game genres. I am admittedly out of the loop here; I no longer own any consoles and my computer isn’t up to playing anything but indie games. But a google search for “grindy games” has been informative. Looter shooters—like Borderlands, Destiny, and Marvel’s Avengers—are reportedly quite grindy. So are open-world survival-crafting games like Valheim, Subnautica, and Conan Exiles. Detractors of Elden Ring and other “soulslike” games complain about grinding requisites. The epochal phenomenon Minecraft definitely requires grinding to get the most out of the experience. According to some accounts, the indie hit Stardew Valley can boast of having perfected the grind: it’s all grinding, but a chill and cozy kind of grind. Like whitewashing a fence on a fine summer afternoon.
[TBC]
It was, in fact, roughly around the 1970s that the résumé approached its current standardized form as an organized list of the job applicant’s relevant skills and abilities.
Unless we count the handheld Dungeons & Dragons Computer Fantasy Game (1981) and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain (1982) for the Intellevision, and I’m inclined not to.
A blog post by a self-declared CRPG addict offers an example of how dialogue works in Ultima V. The capitalized words are the player’s inputs.
You see a quiet, solitary man. "I am called Jerone."
JOB: "Well, I used to be an adventurer!"
ADVENTURER: "Now I'm a prisoner!"
PRISONER: "I was convicted of heresy!"
HERESY: "I stated my belief that Lord British was alive!"
BELIEF: "It happened one night when I was camping out on the moors."
CAMPING: "A strange apparition arose before my fire!"
APPARITION: "It was HIM, I swear it!!! Surely thou dost believe me?"
YES: "Then surely thou must agree, there is hope! If only my brother would hurry!"
BROTHER: "He is collecting the 500 gold crowns needed for my release."
RELEASE: "He used to give me keys, but I kept getting caught!"
KEYS: "I'm sure if thou woudst ask he wouldst give thee a key. He comes by around ten each morning and evening."
BYE: "I'm sure we'll see more of each other."
Side note: if you’re old enough to have played Dragon Quest as its localized Dragon Warrior version and found all the “thou dosts” and “thou hasts” awkward and forced, it’s probably because the localizers felt it incumbent upon them to make it “sound” like a typical Western computer RPG of the time.
To be fair, Final Fantasy games got a lot less grindy as time went on. As I understand it, so did Dragon Quest. But that’s where bonus content and optional superbosses come in: even if completing a game’s main quest doesn’t necessitate much grinding, the die-hard completionists still have to put in their hours. Seems fair.
An interesting bit of miscellany is that Japan made its own tabletop RPGs (and digital adaptations of them) shaped by the local work and leisure culture. D&D had some fundamental incompatibilities with Japan; the work hours, transit system, leisure and hobby spaces, all favor one-shots and smaller self-contained paperbacks rather than months-long sessions with tons of hardcover manuals and expansions and bespoke pieces. (You don't see much strip mall sprawl in Tokyo, and most hobby shops are *much* smaller than over here...)
There were early attempts at fan-translating western tabletop RPGs, but what actually took off was a licensed import of Tunnels & Trolls in 1987. It was more accessible because it was d6-based instead of d20, and localized into a bunkobon-format book you could skim on a train. The domestically-made Sword World RPG followed a similar presentation and method. Later games like Night Wizard, Alshard, and Arianrhod, iterated on this in ways conducive to replicating the trappings of digital RPGs from their time. (There's a parallel to how D&D 4E was emulating elements of mid-aughts MMORPGs.)
I guess we might take this back to Marx's base-and-superstructure; the same economic conditions that produce a society of atomized gig workers with a lack of long-term employment and residence, also produces atomized *gamers* playing self-contained campaigns that wrap up quickly and can't sustain long story arcs. In a country where everyone has high mobility between different apartments and jobs because land doesn't accrue much value, the games are also going to prioritize a compact pick-up-and-play portable format. (I've had it on my brain for a few years now that this is the same reason Japan has such a thriving market for Trading Card Games, and the reason they've grown so explosively compared to TRPGs.)
D&D is this fundamentally suburban game, that could only be made in a nation where people will pack up their trunks with dice towers and dungeon miniatures, and drive an old beater of a car an hour to sit at a bunch of Costco tables until midnight, in a locally-owned hobby shop standing between a Chipotle and a Great Clips. The games Japan made reflect a hyper-dense highly-urbanized world; streamlining all of the needless complexity out of it was a natural consequence of needing to do more in less time.
Oh, p.s.: I love your sprite comic. I wish people still made them in 2025 -- they're a fun format!