Sunday, 9 July 2023

THE LEGO PATAPHOR

UPDATED 10th July for greater clarity, thanks to feedback from Dan of Thrown of Salt
 
You might be familiar with the Lego analogy used for the design of roleplaying games.


There's memes and everything.

Image of ive lego figures from the earliest incarnation of the castkle range. They carry swords, shields, spears and polearms, and carry a cart behind them. The history of this lego is set is very disturbing, but I'm not going into it here, this is an easter egg for you to investigate yourself
Designers do some subtly disturbing shit with LEGO

..but I came across it thanks to Monkeys Paw Games:

if you buy a lego set that has a castle on the front of the box and use the lego inside to build a spaceship are you playing lego "wrong?" are you told "no, idiot, you should have bought the spaceship lego, instead!"

interesting interesting

As soon as the toy is in the hands of the child design intent goes out the window. No doubt the shiny picture on the box is what drew the child to the set in the first place, but the ultimate fate of all Lego is to join all the other bricks in the Big Box (the sandbox?) to make... to make whatever it is the child wants at a later date. In my experience—as a child and later a parent—the flashy box and instruction booklet end up lost or abandoned, surviving only as a vague impression in the child's mind, if at all.

Nonetheless, I thought the Lego analogy was an interesting starting point to explore how RPGs work, remembering Luka Rejec's post concerning toys and sandboxes. Like Lego's design team, the makers of RPG material are really only providing inspiration, and what ends up happening at the table is completely beyond their control. 

Then I saw this stretching of the metaphor, and some fairly unimpressive acrobatics to attempt to shoehorn :


Are your game mechanics LEGOS or ACTION FIGURES? left-hand chart has a picture of a pile of yellow and black Legos. - pieces aren't that interesting on their own - fun comes from how many small pieces combine together - requires effort and creativity to use their full extent - a few different building blocks can produce countless results Right-hand side has a picture of a transformer action figure - fully assembled out of the box and immediately fun - can do a couple of things really well - A full, cohesive design on its own - Not much they can do beyond what their designer intended (Alt-text by Monkeys Paw Games)
A false dichotomy

As Monkey's Paw says, this image "fundamentally misrepresents both action figures and legos [sic]"

To be clear:

...and furthermore, who says Lego pieces aren't interesting on their own? 

Now, an intermission

A Pataphor

A pataphor is an extended metaphor that develops its own context:

"Put another way, a pataphor is that which occurs when a lizard’s tail has grown so long it breaks off and grows a new lizard."
You see, words are bricks, too: we can take your crumby analogy and "instructions" and repurpose, detourner to our hearts content. Were we to apply a pataphysical transformation to the Lego analogy, here's what we'd get for an introduction to an RPG:
This book is like a Lego set, with instructions.

You can follow them... or you can attempt to assemble the model by looking at the pictures on the box.

Or can ignore the instructions entirely and assemble the pieces in whichever way you and your group feel is amenable.

Or you can grind the bricks down into a powder and snort the dust and compose spontaneous ignu high poetry. 

..and that's all I have to say on the subject. 

Links

Monkey's Paw Games

Final note

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