RPG Critique - A Thread

I want to discuss The Grant Howitt Incident(tm), but more than that I think its valuable to look at the context surrounding The Grant Howitt Incident(tm). I want to talk about critique, social media, tone, and how it all fits together in our small field.

Why It Matters
(a consumer approach)

A review doesnt have to engage in critical analysis. People read reviews for a variety of reasons: entertainment, staying up to date on “the conversation”, deciding how to spend their money or their time. A great review can do all of this.

Reading reviews can also teach taste, highlight best practices, pull apart where something works or doesnt, why you should care, sometimes why its popular despite being “bad”.

Lets take a Michael Bay movie. Transformers. Its not a great movie. The plot is simplistic.

It has questionable gender politics, a lack of nuance, and uses explosions in place of character development. And yet its incredibly popular, and not because “people are stupid”. One thing Michael Bay does better than almost any other director is subtly(really!) showing scale.

In almost every scene the background has multiple objects of different sizes for comparison. The framing and camera angles make things seem larger than life and then use the background to make things feel epic. Add in sweeping music and the audience is visually overwhelmed. Awe.

He purposefully and deliberately induces awe. Whether you enjoy his movies or not, his success isnt an accident. Its due to an understanding of framing.



I didnt go into today thinking Id give a passionate defense of Michael Bay, so there you go. This shame will haunt me.

But my point is: things you dont like can have value. And the flip side is, good games, great games even, can have serious flaws.

RPGs have a consumer critic problem, in that we dont have many. We have tons of reviews floating around, but most of those reviews arent critical reviews, theyre fan reviews (for the record, Im not against fan reviews). Whats the difference?

A fan review comes from a place of fandom. Its not “should you the consumer spend your time and money on this” its “here is a thing I love and heres why I love it”. Thats not a bad thing. It has value, and if I know I have similar taste to you I will likely know if I should look.

But that doesnt build an understanding of the medium. It doesnt tell me WHY a game works. It doesnt have that Michael Bay moment(yup, still feeling shame!). How many game reviews youve read recently talk about actor/director stance? Information design? Player agency, pacing?

Presentation structure and the difference between scene structure and points of interest? How about where a hexcrawl vs pointcrawl works best? The difference between product as teaching tool vs reference too? Environmental dynamism and the effects on combat? Trap foreshadowing?

How many reviews are comparative? You arent playing this in a void. If you want to play a sci fi game how does this game compare to your other options? Why would you play this one instead? Most fan reviews simply dont go into any of that, which would be fine, but…

Where are the Critics

Perhaps its the nature of the field, but we dont really have a critic class. I can think of maybe a handful of people doing critical reviews regularly. Many critical reviews I see are one offs by youtube channels or bloggers after running a campaign.

Theyre post game analysis. Or post-reading commentary while deciding the next game to run. I think the issue is that most people writing about rpgs inevitably write their own rpgs or rpg content. And then a review isnt an analysis by a critic, its criticism from a peer.

The Llama that Dramas

And finally we get back to the inciting incident. Yesterday @gshowitt wrote a thread looking at the Iron Sky rpg. It wasnt super flattering, but largely it was observational humor. Here is the thing it actually says, here is my shocked face. Laughs abound.

For my part I found it funny(judge me as you will) but there was some backlash, and I think the reasons for the backlash are far more interesting than the original thread.

Social Media, Role, Tone

Grant Howitt is rpg famous, and what fame he has comes from 3 places.

1) Designer

You’ve probably heard of Honey Heist. Or Spire. Maybe his work on Paranoia? He makes things.

2) Podcaster

Hearty Dice Friends! If you didnt like yesterdays thread, avoid. Hearty Dice Friends takes a comic look at game design. Invisible Sun look nsfw but hilarious

3) Social Media Personality

Followers trigger algorithms to surface content which brings followers. You become more and more famous for being famous.

- - -

The interesting thing to me about what happened is no one who was upset could have possibly listened to the podcast.

His role on the podcast is designer, but more its design analyst. Why do things work. Does this work in your game. Its funny, its entertaining, but also its useful. (I cannot stress enough, also super nsfw. If you get in trouble on zoom please dont blame me)

The lens yesterday was looked at was through social media power imbalance. “successful creator with thousands of followers attacks new smaller creator”

But that wasnt a personal attack, it was a game critique. A very public one made on social media. I want to interrogate that.

Back in movie land. Imagine new movie comes out that you like and someone rips it to shreds on technical grounds. Bad acting, no plot. A Michael Bay movie. Is the review ok in the abstract?

Would it be more ok or less ok if it was done with humor vs with a serious tone?

Would it matter if the review came from the New York Times or if it came from Steven Spielberg?

Would it matter if it was posted as part of a review site/column vs on social media?

Because we dont have a critic class in rpgs, every criticism made is from Spielberg on twitter.

And thats a problem. We need more critics, more analysis, more critique! But until such time as we have that we have to live in a world without social barriers. And until then everyone has to decide for themselves whats ok.

For me the question is what is being criticized. Is it the game or the creator? As long as its the game, as far as im concerned its free reign. We live in a golden age of rpgs. New things are being tried, tons of new people playing, more games than time.

The next step is to look at what works, what doesnt, but most importantly why. To take the mass of creative chaos and figure out best practices so the next round of creators dont have to start back at the beginning. To build a foundation for moving forward.

So, and this hurts me to say, go out and be a critic. Review products, talk about what works and what doesnt. Talk about how products could be better and games could be more elegant and I promise you, the industry will be better for it. Thanks as always for for reading.