Glaugust 26 - A Review of COTTONMOUTH LAW, THE 400 BLOWS & KUNG FU CAPITALISM
Alex Sergeev. An illustration for workers on how to board the bus in Doha. Digital photograph. 2014.
I admit I am not a cottonmouth believer, but I do believe that TTRPGs could use more theorization like this. Most design writing in the scene stays at the level of technique (how to run a hex crawl) or narratology (dungeon as mythic underworld). This essay pulls from those sources of evidence to articulate something less common: a novel design stance.
What is that stance? Cottonmouth means writing your game mechanics as if they were the "laws" of the fictional world rather than abstract "rules" describing it. Not "Strength 18" but "strong enough to drop a tree on you." If a mechanic is stated in terms a character could recognize or interact with, or if it is indexed by such terms, then it stops eliding and starts constituting the world.
As a result, cottonmouth speaks to a particular, ecstatic fantasy of authenticity. The cottonmouth world is not just true, but must be true in a way that is tangible and coherent. Life, as a counter-example, is not like that. The bus comes by my house every 30 minutes because it is on a schedule. I can discuss this, interact with it, but the schedule is a "rule" - an abstract description of the bus route. Its actual movement is governed by a near infinitely complicated system of things I cannot perceive or interact with. The cottonmouth bus always arrives on time. I am not saying that cottonmouth is "unrealistic" (who cares?), but that its seeming matter-of-factness obscures a contestable ontological claim.
The Bad Doctor's (thought provoking!) comments on "subjective stuff, emotionality, etc." provide a useful example. They decry the fact that "narrative forces in games are considered somehow damaging to understanding the world as a physical place, when in real life, you can't experience reality outside of your narrative-making mind." The solution then is to situate those narrative forces as "real" via law in a way that supersedes other modes of producing verisimilitude. My question is why this approach and not another?
I find the proposed design approach persuasive. I think it could be fun / meaningful / hurtful to design and play a game that follows these tenets. I don't find the account of why persuasive at all. Cottonmouth argues that immediacy to the fictional world of TTRPGs is desirable, but in so doing it presupposes that world is something you can be immediate to and that textual description produces this in a way that a numerical abstraction doesn't. It does so through urgent prose and a partial reading of Jared Sinclair's "Rules Elide." (Is avoiding elision what we are after? I don't think so.) Still, I can't help but think a close reading of actual games, not for their literary merits but to identify the immediacy being produced / removed and how it contributes to an aesthetic effect, would be helpful.