He Delivers Us

[Eero Tuovinen]

I had skimmed TSoY when Clinton first put it up, but hadn't otherwise taken time for Anvilwerks yet. I also knew that Clinton had plans to do Creative Commons with other games as well.

Well, I just noticed that Paladin is freely available. A great game! I don't usually buy PDF games (lack of credit card, mainly), so this was the first time I got the opportunity to look at the game. However, reading Paladin, I came to wonder...

How could you do it? You must be the f***ing Christ to give your games out for free, wouldn't you? I dig transhumanism (as in: new conceptions of social reality) as much as anyone, but talking about it is a quite different thing from doing it, which is still different from taking a finished product and going "backwards" into freeing it, when the work of commercializing is already done. I could see giving out a work for free when I'd conceived it as such a project from the start, but I think I'd fail this test in the case of a respected and successful commercial title. Like giving away my arm.

The above is a serious question, not a thinly veiled compliment. How could you? I think I know something about creation and the identity a writer vests into his work, and Paladin (as TSoY) is clearly a serious work. It would seem to me that much of the credibility and merit of writing an indie game would come from getting people to pay for your work. It takes some friggin' saint to set aside most of that and to associate with the kind of game design that's usually given out for free: rules mods to existing games, uninspired and bloated fan fare and such.

Or do you think that it's really time for art to set aside the commercial notions? We know that the time is coming, what with the boundaries of communication crumbling and reservoirs of history/art overflowing already with more than one person can ever comprehend. The importance of wealth as the prestige factor of art disappears when it becomes harder and harder to get payment, while the actual expences of living a life of a creator get less and less. Clinton: do you think that this is so already?

I can see the creator getting satisfaction and prestige from the quality of his work, acknowledged by his peers and referenced/integrated in the grand flow of the artform, but only in a world really oriented towards that by habit and networking. In the current climate it would seem to me that giving the work out for free actually lessens it's prestige considerably; a free game is not a distinct product, it's just some part of the enormous flow of crap that's the Internet.

Anyway, a design question about Paladin suits this juncture pretty well: I noticed that the game lacks any rules for determining when, actually, the character has transgressed against the laws of his order. Will the player make the call, or the GM, or what? I would imagine that this particular situation ("Can I save my love's life without disobeying my father?" soon becomes "Was the interpretation I gave to my father's wish disobeying him?") is absolutely central to the game, when the characters start skirting the borders of the laws. I could see pretty awful disagreements sprouting when one player insists on getting away with it, while another wants to see the character get his due...

Now, it seems Urge is available as well, I'll have to check it out next...