So basically, my apologies in advance for lack of coherence. This is really an idea barf.
My journey to this point starts in Vornheim. I got Vornheim from a friend as a PDF. My instinctive impulse after first reading Vornheim was to gouge my eyes out. No wait. Grow 2 more eyes and gouge out all four.
I am a person who is struggling to build up their graphic design skills and who constantly looks at materials for inspiration. I can be sitting in a doctor's office reading a 2 year old Newsweek just looking at the layout and not the text. I "read" a ton of material this way. Ignoring the text, only focusing on the design.
That is what is important to me at this point in my life. I am trying to come up with better ways of presenting information. All my games have layouts designed with this in mind. My Aqualii Temple module is about layout and presentation innovation. My pirate game in development is all about layout and presentation innovation. I had that whole Impressionistic thing a while back that I struggled with, also layout and presentation innovation. This is the boundary that I have chosen to push as a designer.
And Vornheim has layout innovation in spades. It is all about how to structure a city in the abstract. It is about rethinking how you determine connections between locations and stuff. I listened to this great interview with Zak and James where they outlined the concepts as they see them.
But this fantastic thing is trapped in a graphic design nightmare of biblical proportions. A black borders of death distracto-tron. Every time someone looks at this layout, an angel is crushed beneath Satan's boot. This great thing is essentially unusable to me because I cannot bear to look at it.
And all of the above is Aesthetics. To each their own. Opinions are like assholes. Blah blah blah! I can't make a rational argument about this stuff. I can't shit on someone else's fun. I feel like a turd.
Lets back up a sec and look at a larger point.
I feel like there is this group of people on the fringe of RPGs. Some in the story games crowd, some in the OSR, some even in the Pathfinder/D20 side. And they have these really really great ideas. Really great. And they are trying to learn from each other. But they have RADICALLY different aesthetic tastes. And I really mean radically different. That doesn't mean anyone is doing something wrong, per se. But that they are on totally different wavelengths. And it makes communicating really really hard because we have visceral reactions to the aesthetics of the other people's work even if we can meet on a rational playing field otherwise.
Okay, back down to the Vornheim level.
So I'm sitting here thinking about how brilliant Zak is and how I wish that kind of innovation could get injected into the mainstream. Then I look at some of the things he is doing in a particular genre/setting sense and I say to myself........ that's so lame...... because I am a totally different person with totally different tastes. Yet I can look at other things he is doing (ex. Goblins that think in a really different way from humans) and say to myself..... that's so cool..... because there is just something that speaks to me about it. And I have to use these words of lame and cool because that's all I am equipped with. I am a starting character.
I feel like for most of my life thus far, I have been able to put people in pretty clear buckets of cool and lame. But as I get more and more into the aesthetics of design, I feel like increasingly things are becoming... blurry. My brain wants to use words like bizarre to describe things, but then simultaneously my brain swoops in and says "no, that word carries judgment", so then I look in my language toolkit and the box is just fucking empty.
For example, I really don't like Zak's paintings. They do not speak to me aesthetically. I want to use words to describe my feelings towards them but I lack the words to do it without making it into some kind of theoretically exercise in jargon formation. I feel like I am increasingly unable to speak coherently to the "layman" level about the things I like/dislike, yet I hate to enter a world of jargon. I want there to be a simple way to describe how I feel, but I don't think it exists. So I am frustrated.
Then on top of this I have this layer of social interaction. I don't want to criticize Zak because people will think I am a dick. But I can't express my feelings about his work without using words like bizarre and looking like a dick, or going into some meta-analysis theoryland and losing the audience. I could say that I feel Zak's work takes a cyberpunk malaise aesthetic and applies it to a medieval landscape which I feel cannot hold the social dystopia in the same way. The medieval structure is bleak, but it is bleak for environmental reasons not social ones. These social aethetics are out of place and don't dovetail with the dominant milieu. But I feel like if I write that nobody will understand what the fuck I mean. And even if they did, they would probably think I was being pretentious, which I really am not trying to be.
I think if we were not discussing art constantly (which really, when you think about it, we are), I would probably really get along swimmingly with all these folks. We would probably have no problems. I am a very sociable person in real life, quick with a humorous turn of phrase, life of the party, jokester, happy-go-lucky kind of person. Ironically, this is totally different from the version of myself that existed a decade ago. But that is another story. My point is that these differences are not really personality issues, they are aesthetic issues.
On the internet, we conflate the two in a way we probably would not in real life. Because we have this very tightly managed "face" on the internet that is different from our "face" in real life. In real life, those little oddities are mostly swept under the rug and we present amicable cooperative personalities outward. I could probably have a thousand conversations with Raggi in real life without the decision to use art with bare penises ever coming up. Let me add to that... hopefully. I'm just trying to say that we present/conceal things differently between the two mediums. And that arguments on the internet are often ridiculous (as if that needs backing up).
So in addition to the whole struggle with art and aesthetics, I am struggling with the social problems of the medium. And Zak and Vornheim is just one dude and one book that has been added to the mix. I have a constantly growing list of people are brilliant but I feel like I cannot express what exactly it is that I feel about their work, both good and bad. Raggi, Wick, Sorenson, Baker, Macklin, etc. I cannot take what is in my head from an analysis perspective and put it down onto the paper. There is not language to support what I want to do. There is no way to communicate on the level that I want to communicate.
I feel like I am stuck in some kind of analytical hell. Like I am constipated in the brain.
Does any of the above make sense?
P.S. I intentionally chose the images for this post as a juxtaposition between Zak's aesthetics and the modern Hollywood that surrounds him. Where he makes things dirty, they make them crisp and clean. I also want to illustrate that this is not limited to RPGs. Because I am forced to watch these kinds of movies over and over for my kids and I am just stuck analyzing them endlessly as a result, questioning why this and not that, how they structure the stories in ways that are incoherent from a distance but flow perfectly in the moment, and so on.
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