The OSR Should Die: An Addendum
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Critique of the Conversation Surrounding Lyric Games
"What is a lyric game?" Wouldn't we all like to know! There might not be much use in trying to define something that, for many, is best left undefined. In their recent article for Dicebreaker [1], Linda H. Codega offers the following heuristic for how to determine if a work might be considered a lyric game: While the genre often defies definition, typically lyric games embody one or more of the following aspects: a removal of the distance between the ‘player’ and the ‘character’, the gamification of everyday experiences, and the reversal of assumptions to impact play . “Lyric games” as a term was coined by John R. Harness in late 2019 but, as it was a definition meant to encompass an emergent genre, many games published before 2019 are now considered lyric. Many lyric games are sold and distributed with anti-capitalist and community-forward priorities - often there will be community copies (copies donated by the author for those experiencing marginalisation or hardship)
Thanks for pulling this together - especially for that mighty collection of influential posts.
ReplyDeleteI feel when I came upon the OSR (~2014, before its second dying) it already seemed to require a huge amount of knowledge of references, background, etc. that I bounced off it. Only when the bones were lying around ~ 2017 onwards was it possible to really pick over everything and get a grip on what was there. So, good that it 'died' for a while - it meant things were still enough that one could catch up.
i think that's a comforting way to look at it! :) after all there's so much to read, it'd probably take a couple of years to get through what's been written in one (not to mention, hindsight is 20/20 in terms of what proves influential in the long run)
DeleteThat is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even the OSR may die.
ReplyDeleteI still love what Patrick "False Machine" said: “I think the OSR as I knew it is basically a ruin, and its a strange moldering ruin in the swamp that other people from future gaming societies come to delve for its weird secrets. And they come to speak to the wizards and cackling ghouls that inhabit that ruin.”
ReplyDeletehehe i love that!!
DeleteClearly what we need is OSR 2nd Edition.
ReplyDeleteOne might also mention the "grotty" aesthetic that was shared and played with on a lot of OSR blogs in the 2010s, which had little if any precedent in Gygaxian times. It was a fun and original aesthetic created by an online social scene/workshop of ideas that identified, accurately or not, as old-school. You wouldn't mistake that stuff for anything published in 1974 or 1980.
ReplyDeleteMy feeling is that if the OSR is/was a group of creative bloggers, then it doesn't matter to me if they're no longer all following the same definitions. I always took a salad bar approach to their creations anyway, taking only what I wanted, and I'll continue to do so. If the OSR is/was an online social group, then it REALLY doesn't matter to me whether it continues as it was. There was plenty of toxicity there from the beginning (gatekeeping, bullying, picking fights with other groups, et al.). But more importantly, blogging and Google+ posts can't be more important to what the OSR is or was than actual playing of RPGs. That would be kind of silly.
And if the OSR is/was people actually playing games in an old-school style, then surely nothing about the state of these blogs can matter that much. Even the most influential and productive blogger is just a blogger, and no one needs them in order to play, to be creative, or to be old school however they see fit. For me, if anything defines old-school play, it's DIY, the old spirit of filling in a pad of blank graph paper, and that's not going anywhere.