That's right, JB. You're being that guy. The one who hears someone shout "Hey, dickhead!" and assumes it's about him.
When you have a look at the
associated text (scroll down), it becomes clearer that he's addressing just about everyone.
There are several factors that come together to make this a common form of play and a recurring model in the hobby.
Social
Socially, a big part of this model is the classic Geek Social Fallacies, which are naturally codependant and non-communicative practices. "We HAVE to stick together" is not unlike the rationalization of people staying in abusive relationships.
And, like an abusive relationship, you also have lots of conditional love/friendship being thrown around, shame of being ostracized, and rationalization.
Check out that bottom block upon which it all balances- that's exactly the social behaviors of abuse and manipulation.
By Design?
It seems pretty crazy that anything so extreme can come out of a hobby, of all things. But what leads to it being a common experience is that we actually have game manuals which explicitly encourage these techniques.
- "Punish the character to 'teach' the player
- "GM is God"
- "Cheating/fudging is ok as long as you don't get caught"
- "Meta is bad"
- "Don't let the players get control"
Etc. All of these either involve weird power games, anti-communication, passive aggressive behavior instead of open discussion, deception, and a lot of things you wouldn't say, want to deal with from a boss at work, or in any other kind of relationship.
And, the biggest red flag, the ever present "Problem Players" sections. Notice that most books encourage strange combinations of either punishment or accomodation, but always make "Let's just not play together" the last option. The fact that problem players is a common feature of game texts, or even play, says something is terribly wrong. It's as if every book on marriage contained a section on how to treat broken ribs (from spousal abuse)...
Can you imagine that? If relationship books had advice saying, "Lie", "Talking is bad", "Cheating is ok as long as you don't get caught?", "Hit someone to make them obey", "Breaking up is worse than suffering", etc.?
Those would be textbooks for abuse.
It's not just that a bunch of people accidentally made mistakes- it's that there's plenty of encouragement, expectation, and explicit techniques to keep the mistakes going. That's what keeps the dysfunction a common experience in our hobby.
Ron's 3 Principles are especially relevant here.His April 28, 2006 post about "Incoherence", at the top of the linked page, is especially telling. For example, he discusses compromising on what you want in a game session, giving everyone
some of what they want (he ignores the possibility of getting
most of what you want, it's only none, some or all for him), he says -
While this sounds like a good compromise in theory ("You can't always have what you want!"), in practice it works very different. For example, in real life, we might compromise "We'll watch this movie this time, and we'll watch that movie next time", so that in the end we get to see both movies. What happens in play is like everyone agrees to keep flipping the channel back and forth- so that no one actually sees the whole of anything they wanted to see.
Or, 20 minutes of fun from 4 hours.He's talking to all of us, pretty much.
He also in his
"read before commenting" section refers to Ron Edwards'
comparison of "bad" roleplaying to child abuse (as a defence of the "brain damage" comments) as "the most truthful, and painful thing ever said about roleplaying."