We don't know where these systems are taking us yet

 'System matters' discourse is essentially a lie. I agree with it, advocate for an understanding of design and the tailored experience over attempts to cram your great unwritten novel into 5e willy-nilly [archaic]. Still a lie though. It would be better translated as 'system is efficient'. 'System pleases me and my friends'. It  produces smooth, surgically-augmented games, designed for a particular social experience knowable to the person living in this time, this place, with our own history. Do you want an experience of doomed horror? Play Ten Candles. Do you want to be demigods in a fading Creation (what a novel experience!) without too much unfortunate crunch? Play Exalted: Essence. 'Needless to say that sometimes the games don't work as intended to produce the experience you want, and if you're sure you understand the designer's mind (conveniently descriable from our blog!) you should tweak or twist to keep things running as intended.'

 More people still play 5e. Why? Brand is an excuse, here. The audience is full of quibbles and tensions and issues. So too is the (always implicitly, often explicitly) reactionary idea that there's something fundamentally bad about 'modern game design'. The game design is good, but it exists in a competition against other forms of design. In reaching for a perfect encapsulation of experiences already had, emotions already felt, in trying to be 'a game of {romantic} {tragedy}' or 'a game about {Moby Dick} {on the moons of Jupiter}' it takes on the characteristic of a religious ritual or complex technical process: reaching for something beyond ourselves. Even if the beyond is incomprehensible or not fully perceptible to us, it is implicitly there in some stable way, and success is measured by accessing it. We are the judges in this competition.

Of course the game loses out! To want to perform the ritual you have to worship a particular already-existing ideal. System itself does not matter here - rather, it is slaved to some Platonic form of the ideal game, judged according to whether it replicates its imagined economy of pleasures and pains. If you succeed, it will be just like that one movie, only worse acted and without a set - or, at most, it will be a B-movie that would never otherwise have been made.

This is not the most these tools can do.

***

"All is folding, becoming, production, construction, contagion, performance. And there is no freedom or exit from the process, only greater or lesser counteractualisations (the actual is the brake) - agonising, euphoric withdrawals from the drabness of the present-being to which you were allotted, awakenings, transformations, and infoldings, theriological swerves, "strains and displacements which mobilise and compromise the whole body", "systematic vital movements, torsions and drifts, that only the embryo can sustain: an adult would be torn apart by them". Don't grow up for God's sake, become the egg you already are, rediscover forgotten gradients, let the coordinates of your body slip off the surface of the world like so many half-sucked gummies. Twist, twirl, pop, sizzle, squish (if that's what you wanna do). Strictly speaking, there is no outside (so there is no inside either), only as-yet-unrealised syntheses immanent to a process immune to exhaustion by mere personal biography." - Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic, Cute Accelerationism

"When does what is inside the frame become beautiful? When one knows and feels that the movement, the line withing the frame comes from elsewhere, does not begin within the limits of the frame. The line begins above the frame or next to it and traverses the frame." - Gilles Deleuze, 'Nomad Thought'

*** 

We aren't safe from art. That's a perspective you could come to from several POVs - a belief in the metaphysical outside, in some divine inspiration, all-consuming genius or a deterministic view of codes and motions like that that informs the Bay-area-rat-ish idea of infohazard. It's actually harder to find a perspective that considers it really inert. 

That said, I'm using accelerationism here (INVOCATION AGAINST MISINTERPRETATION) because it maps the value-added slightly better. What art, as any cultural product, can potentially do is deterritorialize - break down the processes that keep a cultural space stable and its borders firm, allowing us to escape into something transformational. It doesn't have to - if we see a painting as just cultural capital, say, or as a simple symbol of some concrete and comprehensible idea, then we're unlikely to feel much movement. But if you go and stare at a painting for an hour, or read a book whilst following the characters' paths through the world, you'll feel the movement.*

What, then, of art that we give rules? (principle: TTRPGs are a form of art.) Doesn't that trammel the potential? No. Both of the above examples are cases of art with rules, albeit unintentional ones; so is something like a Situationist Dérive, a rule-bound walk through a space that transforms mere human geography into art directly. In all of these cases, the more that you break the rules, the less the experience is going to reach you. Think of the homeostatic system as a current in water; the broken rule is a stone dropped in, the followed one is a continual flow from a drain. Which will disrupt the pattern more? 

Returning from that metaphor, though, consider again the examples of 'art with rules' that I've presented. Which is likely to be more powerful, more disruptive, more interesting - a set of rules that asks you to create a kind of experience (watch Raiders of the Lost Ark in stages whilst travelling to each destination shown) or one which sends you off down wholly unexpected paths? Immersion isn't nothing, but the desire to immerse yourself in something requires a pre-existing want, and it is precisely those wants which TTRPGs offer a unique opportunity to snap ourselves out of. 

The virtue of a massive, sprawling, messy, incoherent system (and latent in even the simplest, though quieter) is that it'll always do things that you don't expect. That the designer didn't expect. The system negotiates - if I can get Latourian for a second, it's a mediator rather than an intermediary. Action and intent go in, and it remakes them in its own shape, which has been made by matter and madness and statistical noise as much as by any discrete self. And when it does tell you to go wild, when somebody develops some busted build or starts asking pointed questions about transmutations and the price list or whatever... why not roll with it? Why not let the rules carry you off in a direction you were not expecting? Instead of fixing to taste, develop your taste. Instead of yearning, yield. Do what you are told. Let something new be born. It might change the game; it might change you. But really, aren't you here because you want to see where all of this is going?

To be continued.

Jago 

P.S. Around about 12 minutes into this MtG play video I was watching after writing this, a rift, a tunnel out of play emerges and is averted. A player has an ability that lets them earn valuable tokens by rolling dice; another points out that at no point does it specify that the dice must be rolled for purposes of gameplay. The first challenges them: are you just going to let me do that and win? Obviously not, and play continues. Maybe I'm just being silly now, but I'm left wondering: What would it mean if an action outside of a game could win you the game? I suspect the answer is not so simple as 'everyone goes home now.'

 * Former example from J.F. Martel on an episode of Weird Studies that I cba to find right now; second from a friend who moved into Whitechapel at the same time she started to read From Hell. Neither one of these is any kind of /acc, though Martel is a Deleuzian so that should count for something; regardless, the aforementioned parallel still functions.