I am legit astonished that anyone’s tried to answer this in good faith, but there were some legit straight answers made out there.
When I woke up and freshened up on today’s question (Alexa, who was Lacan?), I had this tiny pit of dread in my stomach. What on earth? It’s my question! What am I dreading? And then, sipping my coffee with Honey Nut Cheerios leftover milk poured into it, I had an amazing flashback.
This is totally personal stuff, feel free to just bounce on this thread if you’re not feeling that.
So my flashback. It’s senior AP English and we’re doing student-written tests of books we’re reading. My bestie and I get it into our idiot teenage smart-kid heads that it’d be fucking hilarious to write an impossibly tough test. We did actual research: it was The Brothers Karamazov, so there were lots of resources available several orders more involved than Cliff’s Notes. We wrote and delivered, straight-faced, a 400-level lit crit essay test to our senior class.
I’m not sure what our endgame was, actually. I mean we had to turn something in and the students were obligated to do the test, no matter what. Were were, what, going to rip our masks off and laugh hysterically? No idea. It didn’t end well, with even the best-natured students (all acutely concerned about their AP performance because that shit is college credits and there’s real money on the line) whipped into a fury at us.
Total, epic failure at all levels. We absorbed a semester of hazing from the other students with the teacher’s tacit approval. I still grit my teeth at the memory.
I did end up with a healthy skepticism for pseudointellectualism. I mean I’m all for doing the homework, using technically specific terminology, thinking and overthinking and trying to pull in semi-related fields for additional context. Brains are awesome, smarts are sexy, etc. Pseudointellectualism is a horrible social signaling game played out in the realm of show-offy conversations (online debates these days).
The weeks where I feel the most alienated from the so-called “gaming community,” though, is when I’m faced with the very worst game of “Would You Rather?” And that’s when my choice is pseudointellectualism or anti-intellectualism.
I have no patience at all for the folks who just flat reject or deride the hard work that many of us obviously derive value from. And I guess here’s the rub: each time I try to write a sentence along the lines of “I also have no patience for the folks trying to score points with big words” I pause just a bit. Just a bit. So I guess that tips the scale ever-so-slightly for me, doesn’t it?
Anyway, I guess Lacan was a philosopher? I read the name in extreme passing at some point and it lodged itself in my head alongside bildungsroman and Campbellian and Diderot. Potentially useful ammo for a future show-offy online conversation.
I could do the research, I guess. I’m not being anti-intellectual, here! I’m confessing that I repeated my can’t-pass high school essay test joke without any sense of the endgame.
Don’t ever let anyone in gaming make you feel dumb about gaming. Not some indie asshole like me, not some trad blogger with Very Strong Opinions, not anyone with a partisan bone to pick.
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It’s going to start September 1, but to get your creative juices flowing, here’s the official Indie Game Reading Club’s list of questions to ponder.
Obviously this is needed because the #RPGaDAY list is so freighted with assumptions about RPGs that mostly it’s incomprehensible if you’re not in that scene any more.
1. When were you last deprotagonized? What happened and how did you reassert your agency?
2. What game created your most elaborate relationship map? How much of it did you actually use?
3. What’s your favorite behavioral incentive?
4. What’s your favorite perverse behavioral incentive?
5. Would you say rolling dice to have sex is hot, dirty, deprotagonizing, or all the above?
6. How many PbtA games do you own, and which one best captures its most clichéd genre tropes?
7. When did you last spend more time setting up a situation and talking about the situation after than actually playing in that situation?
8. What was your most awesome fight online about what does and does not constitute a story-game?
9. When was the last time an indie game made you feel guilty about your race, gender, or sexual identity? Were you more or less woke after you played it?
10. When did you most recently refuse to play a trad game because the central facilitation role was granted too much creative authority?
11. Best unwanted fictional input generated by procedural uncertainty?
12. Best story about waiting for players in a GMless game to finally get to the point in a scene they’ve called for but obviously had no idea why they wanted it in the first place?
13. What’s the most you’ve spent on a Kickstarter game relative to the amount of play it received?
14. What’s the most play-disruptive discovery you’ve made when you insist on playing by the actual printed rules?
15. When was the last time you unironically used the word “diegetic?”
16. GMs: abusers, control freaks or both? Best story explaining why this is so.
17. Do you buy your legal-sized paper by the ream or by the case? Do you ever try to reuse your playbooks or just start fresh every time?
18. What’s your best story about a precious snowflake character some trad player brought to the table because it was “clever?” How did you call them out?
19. What kind of shit-fit did you throw the last time someone tried to schedule your convention game in a ballroom like you’re playing fucking Pathfinder or something?
20. What’s your best story about falling all over yourself trying to rescue a bunch of awesome fiction that just got invalidated after making a fortune-at-the-end roll like some commoner?
21. What was the last OSR game you tried to play, but quit because you realized there’s literally no mechanical support for a storyline at all?
22. How many friendships have you terminated because they confessed they kind of like to play Fate games sometimes? It’s okay. Fate players have to hear the truth.
23. Tell your most scandalous story about getting X-carded.
24. What was the very saddest thing you wrote on an index card?
25. Do you like your scene framing hard, harder, or hardest? What’s the very hardest you’ve had your scene framed?
26. When you interrogate the nature of heroism in your game, do you prefer to directly or indirectly invoke Lacanianism?
27. What’s the very best playtest-stage game your friends probably haven’t heard of yet? How long ago did you play it and how much better was it than the current version?
28. What’s the most interesting period of obscure and unrelatable history you’d like to see a game set in? How would you do it?
29. What indie game tech do you most keenly miss when you play something more mainstream? And then do you denounce the game in person or do you save it for a social media rant?
30. What is your fondest memory of a game you thought was fun before you knew better?
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And then, sipping my coffee with Honey Nut Cheerios leftover milk poured into it, I had an amazing flashback.
I’m surprised you didn’t have chemtrails.
I prefer to directly invoke Conan.
Man, everytime I have a conversation like this it ends in goddamn hell fire. So many false binaries, so much status bullshit, and always just enough legit insight to keep me coming back despite the fact that 90% of the conversation is crap.
Also, Abstract Machine is fucking hysterical.
Why do you never actually answer your questions? Clearly the answer is that Lacan would be invoked directly, as it is essential that heroism cannot possibly be said to exist within the order of the Real – it is merely narrative and symbology intended to erect an ideological edifice through which brutality whitewashes itself to morally enable propagation. Trivial.
#nonemorepseudo #imtheworst #andsoonandsoon
::puts Mikael on the Bad list, faxes to Santa::
::adds Mikael Andersson to his “give half hour lecture about Lacan” list.
Brand Robins but serious question: we’re both drawn to this nonsense like moths to a bug lamp, aren’t we? WHYYYYYYY
Fills the time.
Aaaaand there’s the Pink Floyd earworm for the day. Thanks, Joe.
How about a trigger warning on that leftover cereal milk, Paul Beakley. Blark!
P-:
If you invoke Lacan, do you have to close the Key of Solomon before or after completing the spoken ritual? And the lamb’s blood goes north, east, west, south?
Timely! Elseweb I’m enjoying the Would You Rather game exactly as described. The anti-intellectuals are winning by a small margin, but I’ve got hope for the pseudointellectuals.