When I played role-playing games in the old days, nobody talked about "gonzo" gaming. Now it seems to be a normal thing to talk about, and to look for, especially with the OSR crowd.
What is gonzo? In the '70s and '80s, when I was a kid, it meant one of two things, as this guy remembers. It could refer to that sweet but pathetic hook-nosed Muppet with the chicken girlfriends. Otherwise it referred to a style of journalism written in a participatory style and represented by Hunter S. Thomson. The Oxford English Dictionary records both, more or less. It can mean Hunter S. Thomson's style of journalism, as coined by Bill Cardoso, or "bizarre, crazy; far-fetched; a crazy person, a fool." Thomson took a lot of psychedelics, so it seems that the term gonzo also implies a psychedelic edge.
(This picture by Christine McVay.)
SO WHAT IS GONZO GAMING?
As any reader of my musings knows, I'm late to the party (and that is the point of this). It turns out that gamers have been talking about gonzo gaming for a while. About five years ago, one self-appointed pundit of role-playing games even made himself the arbiter of "good gonzo" versus "bad gonzo." These are, it seems, very serious matters for some, and you can really "get it wrong" if you don't read the right books, take their advice, and most of all, buy amateur "gonzo" products with the OSR seal of approval on them.
Basically, though, gonzo refers to wacky, bizarro stuff that seems so weird you're not sure if it's serious. It may also have a psychedelic edge. I see that stuff and I think, "stoner D&D." Or it's inspired by Terry Gilliam films and the like.
I'm not interested in defining it. I don't care what you call it. I'm interested in the combination of a style of play with an aesthetic choice.
My take on the so-called gonzo aesthetic is that it appeals psychologically to a sense of divorce of the player from the character. Gonzo gaming entertains the players with freaky wink-wink stuff and real-world funny references. The characters surely will find these things strange, but they have to live with it in the context of the story. Gonzo is for players and emphasizes that the players are an audience. The gonzo game aesthetic reminds participants that this is all a dream, so they shouldn't worry too much about it.
I've seen some writing by OSR proponents in which they claim that OSR gaming emphasizes that the player and the character are distinctly separate. The idea is to emphasize that it's a game, not play-acting or storytelling. You know, "player skill" versus the world. Role-playing games that are highly lethal to the characters, in the vein of OSR games, are probably less fun for players who identify deeply with those characters and who spend hours developing back-stories for them. The misplaced antipathy of some OSR gamers towards "story games," which seems actually to represent disguised cultural politics, fits the syndrome.
If the so-called OSR emphasizes the player's choice, not the character role adopted by the player, then the gonzo game aesthetic fits right in. "Gonzo" settings entertain players, who are the focus of the OSR style, not characters, who are imaginary, anyway.
I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions. My point is that the style of play and the aesthetic choices fit well together. Emphasizing separation of player and character, to my mind, makes the game more about the game and less about role-playing. The gonzo game aesthetic deliberately urges players to remember that this isn't real. That's an interesting choice, and not one that I instinctively turn to when I run games.
As for the psychedelic side of the gonzo aesthetic, that speaks for itself. Everybody, be safe.
What is gonzo? In the '70s and '80s, when I was a kid, it meant one of two things, as this guy remembers. It could refer to that sweet but pathetic hook-nosed Muppet with the chicken girlfriends. Otherwise it referred to a style of journalism written in a participatory style and represented by Hunter S. Thomson. The Oxford English Dictionary records both, more or less. It can mean Hunter S. Thomson's style of journalism, as coined by Bill Cardoso, or "bizarre, crazy; far-fetched; a crazy person, a fool." Thomson took a lot of psychedelics, so it seems that the term gonzo also implies a psychedelic edge.
SO WHAT IS GONZO GAMING?
As any reader of my musings knows, I'm late to the party (and that is the point of this). It turns out that gamers have been talking about gonzo gaming for a while. About five years ago, one self-appointed pundit of role-playing games even made himself the arbiter of "good gonzo" versus "bad gonzo." These are, it seems, very serious matters for some, and you can really "get it wrong" if you don't read the right books, take their advice, and most of all, buy amateur "gonzo" products with the OSR seal of approval on them.
Basically, though, gonzo refers to wacky, bizarro stuff that seems so weird you're not sure if it's serious. It may also have a psychedelic edge. I see that stuff and I think, "stoner D&D." Or it's inspired by Terry Gilliam films and the like.
I'm not interested in defining it. I don't care what you call it. I'm interested in the combination of a style of play with an aesthetic choice.
My take on the so-called gonzo aesthetic is that it appeals psychologically to a sense of divorce of the player from the character. Gonzo gaming entertains the players with freaky wink-wink stuff and real-world funny references. The characters surely will find these things strange, but they have to live with it in the context of the story. Gonzo is for players and emphasizes that the players are an audience. The gonzo game aesthetic reminds participants that this is all a dream, so they shouldn't worry too much about it.
I've seen some writing by OSR proponents in which they claim that OSR gaming emphasizes that the player and the character are distinctly separate. The idea is to emphasize that it's a game, not play-acting or storytelling. You know, "player skill" versus the world. Role-playing games that are highly lethal to the characters, in the vein of OSR games, are probably less fun for players who identify deeply with those characters and who spend hours developing back-stories for them. The misplaced antipathy of some OSR gamers towards "story games," which seems actually to represent disguised cultural politics, fits the syndrome.
If the so-called OSR emphasizes the player's choice, not the character role adopted by the player, then the gonzo game aesthetic fits right in. "Gonzo" settings entertain players, who are the focus of the OSR style, not characters, who are imaginary, anyway.
I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions. My point is that the style of play and the aesthetic choices fit well together. Emphasizing separation of player and character, to my mind, makes the game more about the game and less about role-playing. The gonzo game aesthetic deliberately urges players to remember that this isn't real. That's an interesting choice, and not one that I instinctively turn to when I run games.
As for the psychedelic side of the gonzo aesthetic, that speaks for itself. Everybody, be safe.
I think there's plenty of room for both coherent settings (Glorantha, Tekumel, etc.) and those that are more funhouse/gonzo/whatever (e.g. old-school D&D). Both can be immersive - perhaps surprisingly so in the latter case.
ReplyDeleteThe relationship you draw between player skill and gonzo settings is valid, I think, but I don't think it's the whole story. I'd argue that the implied setting of D&D is inherently gonzo; it's not a coherent, convincing setting in the way that a Glorantha or Tekumel is, but it can still produce great games and be immersive in its own right.
To put it another way, the implied D&D world of blue-nosed hobgoblins living down the gully from bugbears, with both having 'trick' notices outside their lairs to lure passing humanoids, is profoundly gonzo - especially when you add in two tribes of orcs across the ravine, a tribe of goblins below and a tribe of gnolls further up. And an owlbear. Oh, and a few evil priests and a gorgon. And a minotaur! And some oozes! It's a gloriously gonzo mishmash - and yet it works.
And then if you add in robots and androids (present and correct in the very first edition of D&D), you've got something that implies genre-hopping - or a much more elastic setting than Middle Earth/Glorantha/Tekumel. At the very least, it's much more Nehwon than Hyboria: think Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser encountering a German time traveller riding a two-headed dragon!
I think the 'classic' D&D approach - as inferred from the original rulebooks and reports of early play - is one in which the GM might quite happily have the players exploring the faerie realms one session and discovering a crashed spaceship the next. Or moving between a fantasy world and the real one. Or travelling in time. Or encountering dryads one day and dinosaurs the next.
Now, modern D&D has moved slightly away from this approach. But it seems to me that its more formal fantasy settings can't compete with either the great 'coherent' RPG settings (Glorantha, Tekumel, Legend, the Old World) or the whacky gonzo weirdness of the assumed original setting.
But if you go with the old, gonzo stuff - perhaps even with PCs and NPCs whose names are dreadful puns or jokes - you can get a surprisingly pleasing campaign out of it. It's the kind of thing I'd have *abhorred* as a teenager - but in middle age, I find it works just fine.
At the heart of this is, I think, the dichotomy between good role-playing settings and good literary fantasy settings. The latter generally demand internal consistency and coherence, but the former don't need it. And this gap has something to do with why RPGs are generally a very bad source of literary inspiration ...
As usual, I find your ideas interesting and convincing! I agree with your take on the "gonzo" in gaming. If you look at Tunnels & Trolls, it's still far more "gonzo" than D&D ever was even at its... gonzoiest? Yet I loved Tunnels & Trolls. I still have a ratty old copy of Judges Guild's T&T megadungeon "Rat on a Stick," in which you can explore the (senseless) dungeon or set up a franchise to vend rats on sticks to wandering monsters (for XP, of course). It makes much less sense that the Caves of Chaos, to which you refer. (I think the Caves of Chaos can be made to make sense if we push hard enough.)
DeleteMoldvay's Lords of Creation game (1983) takes the early instinct to blend genres whimsically all the way. Laser guns and unicorns on the same page? Sure, why not! If people want to play crazy settings that make little internal coherent sense, they should! It can be fun.
My point in this post, though, was that I think that the so-called gonzo aesthetic (a new name for something there in the earliest phase of the hobby, as we agree) appeals more to game-oriented players than to immersive role-playing. It's about the match between the aesthetic and the mindset of play.