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.
This IS an interesting bit of miscellany & insight.
The last time I played D&D was in 2004, so I'm not familiar with 4th Ed or how it borrowed elements from MMORPGs—but I'd be surprised if it *hadn't* looked to something like World of Warcraft for inspiration. I'm sure that developers of tabletop games and digital games habitually look to each other's recent best & most popular ideas with thoughts of replicating them in their own domains.
Yr notes about base, superstructure, and dungeons & dragons are absolutely on point—and "Base, Superstructure, and Dungeons & Dragons" would be a hell of a good title for something. It completely stands to reason that the differences in the social infrastructure of the US Midwest and Tokyo can account for why it gained popular currency in one milieu but not in the other.
D&D 4E was definitely adapting ideas like aggro control skills and explicit roles on top of classes (Defender/Leader/Striker instead of Tank/Healer/DPS) from video games. Matthew Colville's touched on this a bit in his videos, World of Warcraft actually became something of a boogeyman for DMs because it stole everyone's players: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADzOGFcOzUE&t=2725s
"Base, Superstructure, and Dungeons & Dragons" would be a good Cultural Studies paper, but I am not in the business of actually doing anything involving a Works Cited anymore.
Oh, thank you! Yeah, I had an ongoing strip for several years. Most of it's on the Internet Archive now, and I have no idea who's responsible. I'd feel better about sharing if there was a slightly higher ratio of "oh this is still funny" to "oh god this is embarrassing" moments in my reread.
> But it’s also strangely satisfying, like scrubbing at a resistant stain in the bathtub until it finally disappears.
Is this even a metaphor in the era of PowerWash Simulator? (which, I only learned recently, is as popular as it is in part because its distributor was... Final Fantasy creator Square-Enix) I think it's funny just how many of the big hit indie games of the last decade or so are not even pretending to be about anything other than numbers going up (including the quite literal, subtext-obliterating title "Nubby's Number Factory")
I assure you I was thinking about PowerWash Simulator, but I must have felt it was just too appallingly on the nose. To be fair though, PWS isn't as laden with abstractions and procedural hoops as something like Stardew Valley—at least it didn't seem so when I watched an old roommate playing it.
Or IS there some sort of an upgrade where you have to wash 50 walls to get the spinning nozzle that lets you get the hard-to-reach spots in the interstices between clapboards, which increases your rank and unlocks the next 20 levels where you're on suspended scaffolding spraying down high-rises, can unlock the jet pack that allows you to move on to skyscrapers after you accrue 10 silver points by hosing down the pigeons that are trying to undo your hard work? Don't tell me, I don't want to know.
Somehow completely surprised and totally unsurprised that Square Enix was the distributor. I can't say anything about the quality of the games they're making in-house these days, but they seem to be pretty savvy about picking developers to represent.
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.
This IS an interesting bit of miscellany & insight.
The last time I played D&D was in 2004, so I'm not familiar with 4th Ed or how it borrowed elements from MMORPGs—but I'd be surprised if it *hadn't* looked to something like World of Warcraft for inspiration. I'm sure that developers of tabletop games and digital games habitually look to each other's recent best & most popular ideas with thoughts of replicating them in their own domains.
Yr notes about base, superstructure, and dungeons & dragons are absolutely on point—and "Base, Superstructure, and Dungeons & Dragons" would be a hell of a good title for something. It completely stands to reason that the differences in the social infrastructure of the US Midwest and Tokyo can account for why it gained popular currency in one milieu but not in the other.
D&D 4E was definitely adapting ideas like aggro control skills and explicit roles on top of classes (Defender/Leader/Striker instead of Tank/Healer/DPS) from video games. Matthew Colville's touched on this a bit in his videos, World of Warcraft actually became something of a boogeyman for DMs because it stole everyone's players: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADzOGFcOzUE&t=2725s
"Base, Superstructure, and Dungeons & Dragons" would be a good Cultural Studies paper, but I am not in the business of actually doing anything involving a Works Cited anymore.
I was thinking it would involve a D20, an amalgamation of selections from Das Kapital and D&D 5E, miniatures, and Jenga blocks.
Oh, p.s.: I love your sprite comic. I wish people still made them in 2025 -- they're a fun format!
Oh, thank you! Yeah, I had an ongoing strip for several years. Most of it's on the Internet Archive now, and I have no idea who's responsible. I'd feel better about sharing if there was a slightly higher ratio of "oh this is still funny" to "oh god this is embarrassing" moments in my reread.
> But it’s also strangely satisfying, like scrubbing at a resistant stain in the bathtub until it finally disappears.
Is this even a metaphor in the era of PowerWash Simulator? (which, I only learned recently, is as popular as it is in part because its distributor was... Final Fantasy creator Square-Enix) I think it's funny just how many of the big hit indie games of the last decade or so are not even pretending to be about anything other than numbers going up (including the quite literal, subtext-obliterating title "Nubby's Number Factory")
I assure you I was thinking about PowerWash Simulator, but I must have felt it was just too appallingly on the nose. To be fair though, PWS isn't as laden with abstractions and procedural hoops as something like Stardew Valley—at least it didn't seem so when I watched an old roommate playing it.
Or IS there some sort of an upgrade where you have to wash 50 walls to get the spinning nozzle that lets you get the hard-to-reach spots in the interstices between clapboards, which increases your rank and unlocks the next 20 levels where you're on suspended scaffolding spraying down high-rises, can unlock the jet pack that allows you to move on to skyscrapers after you accrue 10 silver points by hosing down the pigeons that are trying to undo your hard work? Don't tell me, I don't want to know.
Somehow completely surprised and totally unsurprised that Square Enix was the distributor. I can't say anything about the quality of the games they're making in-house these days, but they seem to be pretty savvy about picking developers to represent.