A phrase I despise, “Well, that’s just semantics.”

Semantics is the study of meaning. When that phrase is used, it’s referring to lexical semantics, the meaning of words. It irritates me that semantics gets brushed off as trivial. If we can’t agree on what a word means then how do we know that we have come to any agreement on the phenomenon that we are discussing?

In the discourse about RPGs, it can be difficult to get a broad and definitive agreement on the meaning of words like “railroading” or even “role-playing game.” For those of us in the hobby of talking about RPGs online, a hobby distinct from playing RPGs, this is a massive problem.

The muddy jargon of role-playing games is also a problem for the RPG playing hobby. Professional game designers, by necessity, are a part of the discourse about games. They can’t help but bring this non-rigorous usage into their work.

Incorrect definitions can lead to games that don’t actually do what the designers intended them to do or claim they do when the games are played by customers.

Core game books, adventures, and supplements containing careless definitions have led to mainstream RPG hobbyists, i.e. gamers who have only ever played 5E, being unknowingly misinformed and unable to articulate why a certain part of their play experience is unsatisfactory.

Sincere Belief or Marketing Bullshit?

Cinematic is a word that grates on my nerves every time I hear it applied to RPGs. Some designers think they’ve designed a cinematic game and others just call their game cinematic to sell more books. It will serve as a good example of the sloppy lexicon of RPG design and theory.

Cinema is a visual medium. When you go to the cinema, you look at a screen where the events of the story unfold. What makes it cinematic is the visual presentation of the film. The cinematographer or Director of Photography on a movie set is responsible for making the film look like the director intends.

You might have some visual elements like photos or illustrations as play aids but if they aren’t moving pictures on a screen, they are not cinematic. Robin Laws and Atlas games believe (wrongly) that they have produced a cinematic role playing game called Feng Shui.

Though Feng Shui participates in the wuxia genre and may create an emotional experience similar to watching a Hong Kong action movie, the game play of the Feng Shui RPG is not cinematic.

I know, I know… that’s just semantics.

I told you in the title this was going to be pedantic. Don’t blame me, you read this far.

I’ll concede, it is easier get everyone on board with what you want to play if you just say, “We’re playing a cinematic 1980’s action hero game.” I will also concede it is effective marketing to say that Feng Shui is Hong Kong action cinema role-playing.

It would be more correct to say that Feng Shui is a RPG in the same genre as the Hong Kong action films, draws on those films for inspiration, and uses the same internal logic of those films which allows characters to do feats that would be impossible in the real world.

A slight distinction and probably not one most gamers care about one way or another. If you are a game designer or game scholar, accuracy is more important.

A thought experiment for the use of the word cinematic

Cinematic is a shorthand for games that have mechanics which allow player characters to successfully preform sensational combat maneuvers that are physically impossible for actual humans, car chases and stunts that would end in horrific fatalities in real life, and ignore ammunition tracking. That is what I think publishers mean when they call their games cinematic. I can’t be sure because they rarely if ever actually define what they mean by that word and just assume that anyone reading the product description knows.

“Cinematic RPG” is marketing bullshit.

There are many movie genres that could be used as a basis for a game but don’t fit the action movie definition of “cinematic”.

Let’s say a publisher tried to sell what they called a cinematic game inspired by the film Annie Hall. It’s based on a film, but Annie Hall the RPG would not fit what most gamers think of as “cinematic.” While one might come up with rules for a very strange role-playing game based on the movies of Woody Allen, it would be no more “cinematic” than a game based on an action movie genre.

If the only “cinematic” role-playing games are those that use the conceptual framework of an action hero movie then we are using an arbitrary definition. That makes the word useless for any sort of deeper analysis or criticism.

Using sloppy, inaccurate, imprecise words leads to wasted time and frustration. We have to spend a considerable amount of energy determining what the hell our counterpart in the conversation means when they use a particular term.

Mind the adjectives

When I am reading essays in the “talking about role-playing games” hobby, I look for adjectives like cinematic or narrative preceding the word “game” or RPG. Such adjectives can be an indicator of unstated assumptions that make any conversation unfruitful until I learn what the writer meant by that adjective.

It is also useful to look out for words like that when I’m considering the purchase of a game or supplement. A game may be in a genre I like such as grimdark fantasy but when the blurb says dramatic I become wary.

I also look at my own assumptions and the meanings of words I use to think about and describe games. It has been good mental hygiene to question my assumptions about what a sandbox campaign actually is, or what it means for a game to be “old school”. I am certain I have blind spots and stinky thinking of my own to clean up.

Simply being aware that the words we use might not mean what we think they mean can help us to avoid a classic blunder or two in our game designs or game mastering.