Deconstructionism has been an increasing fad for western culture since I was born at the beginning of the space age.
The method is simple, find a traditional thought (any thought, it doesn't matter) and wreck it. Make it into something completely different. When someone creates something new and presents it as new, it may have its place in the world. But when they insist on it replacing the original (i.e. keeping the same name while calling the original invalid for whatever reason), it's basically nothing more than an act of hatred driven by personal ego.
Case in point, this post here at Motor City Gamewerks.
Now nothing is stopping Jason from creating a new fantasy race, called Hippie Runts (to coin a name) that are short polish speaking, forest dwelling, wood crafting folks without breads and a taste for malts for his fantasy campaign.
But creating something new wasn't the point. Instead Jason had to rage against the traditional view of dwarves because he lacks the imagination to do something new. Instead he is driven to undermine the work of others to feed his own needs.
And that is so common, and yes- now days it's also boring.
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You're giving deconstructism too much credit here. Knocking down accepted wisdom just to get a rise out of people is an august tradition going all the way back to the snot-nosed punks Socrates taught. The crime of the deconstructionist types isn't inventing or even popularizing that process, it's making a career out of what ought to be merely Step One in any decent critique.
Aw, dammit. I misspelled deconstructionism. I think my point remains, no matter how ineptly expressed.
As an example of deconstructionism, I don't think it's a particularly awful one of the sort described in Steve Ditko's "Toyland" essay:
“Asked point blank by a fan if things in the Marvel Universe will ever go back to normal after being ‘screwed up’ by House of M and Civil War, Joe Quesada said, ‘These toys are meant to be broken. If we just told stories that kept the status quo, nobody would be in this room, and I’d be out of a job. They’re meant to be thrown against a wall, smashed together, and built back up again.’” (“Baltimore 06: Cup o Joe”, Newsarama.com, 10 September 2006.)
[...]
“Broken” and “smashed” are not creative concepts but aggressive and destructive.
At least what he's doing here isn't "aggressive and destructive".
Jeff Rients: your correct in how old of a tradition it is, however I've seen it grow over my lifetime from a once in a while thing to the point where it's almost the only thing you encounter now days.
johnmorrow: comics are in some ways the clearest example of the waste found in that mindset.
I recall an article once saying that comics dropped in sales an order of magnitude from Golden to Silver Age, and another from Silver to Bronze, and yet another from there to today.
Deconstructism flatly doesn't sell. But yet it's still done.
I'm a philosopher who is also an editor. Is there an industry movement called "deconstructionism" or are you talking about something akin to Derrida's deconstruction?
Because Derrida's deconstruction isn't an ism - and it certainly isn't a process that can be applied to a given thing (English departments and literary theoreticians actually get this quite wrong).
The post in question isn't, in any meaningful way, a post that is inspired by deconstruction - and if the author in question were to claim this is the case, philosophers would simply say that the poster in question didn't much understand what he or she read and leave it at that.
I only bring this up because deconstruction - proper deconstruction - is something I've seen evident in game design, and it is in my opinion a best practice for a certain type of game: Unknown Armies is a game that would be impossible without that intellectual movement and Jungian psychology. I'm a big Unknown Armies fan in large part because it nails the source material and creates a game that is actually a better explanation/exploration of these philosophical points than most philosophers do (plus its fun!).
So if this is a reaction to a certain ism that's prevalent in RPG design as a semi-formal movement, fair enough. But if this is coming from an assumption that the offending post is indicative of a philosophical movement that's been influential in art (my field is aesthetics, and I was trained in Derrida by a student of Derrida's so this is actually something I have some expertise in) then I'd encourage you to take a step back and just write off the poster as being uncreative.
Derrida scholars - especially Derrida scholars who are gamers - will appreciate this!
lessthanpleased, I agree with your assertion that Derrida's concept has been ridden like a naughty pony in the English departments. But I must respectfully disagree with any argument from apostolic succession, especially when someone taking that position is saying what can and can't be done with a theoretical construct.
Jeff:
This isn't an argument from apostolic succession. I assumed you wouldn't want to be bored by a discussion about how to correctly interpret Derrida.
I'll be brief: all assertions that Derrida's deconstruction is "a process" or "an ism" or "something one does" are quite bluntly ruled out by Derrida in his book "Positions". Therein Derrida stipulates that he isn't describing a process or even a product, but a revealing the phenomenological reality of the world in which human subjects find themselves.
In fact, to call deconstruction or "differance" a theory at all is to fundamentally misunderstand what Derrida is doing (this is per "Of Grammatology" and "Margins of Philosophy", Derrida's two most important works); Derrida is working within the Heideggerian tradition of phenomenology (a philosophical movement that is explicitly anti-theoretical), though sometimes he combines this with a sort of Nietzschean sense of affirmation (look for the essay "Differance" for a pretty explicit view of this).
So I apologize if it appeared that I was doing something akin to "apostolic succession" - in philosophy circles, something like this can be shorthand for I know the source material really well and can provide canonical reads of this stuff on command if required.
My argument is that one simply can't "do" deconstruction properly at all (per Derrida's own words); it's a description of the world, not an operation that can be performed (pursuant to the above texts or, alternatively, you can find a good recapitulation of Derrida's argument in Graham Priest's "Beyond the Limits of Thought" - a good book for a discussion like this because Priest isn't a Derridean at all). Therefore, given the above, someone who is "doing" deconstruction definitionally cannot be doing deconstruction because it is something that can't be done (which is why I can say that English departments universally get this wrong; they ignore the Derrida literature that rules out deconstruction as an iterative process that can be used by or through human agency).
I can, of course, provide more - quotes from Derrida and whatnot - but I'm hoping the above is enough to cause you and the blog author to step back on your claim that deconstruction(ist/ism) is damaging to games. Again, the philosophers who play games and are quite familiar with this literature would be quite appreciative.
lessthanpleased, I feel like there is a little distance between your position, my own and Gleichman's. I agree with your reading of deconstruction as posited by Derrida. But I also agree with Gleichman's observation that there are people claiming the mantle of deconstruction'ism' (who are ab/using Derrida, as you say). These people seem to spend an lot of time knocking down other constructs without building anything themselves. Rather than call them deconstructionist and rail against deconstructionism, I'd prefer that we call them idiots and rail against idiocy. My only beef with you was that by establishing your bona fides you tripped my "Who cares where he learned it? His argument is the only thing that's important." alarm.
lessthanpleased as tripped my own alarms as well.
I'm not impressed with a narrow and high minded view of deconstructism (I will say it's a lie and an illusion in passing), rather I'm more impressed in where that mindset has taken the general population and how it's been used in practical terms.
Gleichman:
My point would be that deconstruction hasn't actually taken the world anywhere - I "do" Derrida, but I'm not a Derridean (I'm probably an Aristotelian at heart). I wouldn't go so far as to say Derrida's quite useless - he's actually quite useful in art criticism - but deconstruction certainly isn't a particularly useful frame for interacting with or understanding the world.
My point would be that labeling all reductive or against-the-grain readings of a given text as deconstructive readings isn't terribly useful, accurate or helpful in figuring out where they've gone wrong. If anything, it provides bad thinkers intellectual legitimacy by falsely lumping them in with an intellectual movement currently in vogue with intellectuals - so even as you trash them, you're rhetorically situating them as meaningful participants in the life of the mind. I oppose this, ergo my post.
What you call a "narrow and highminded" reading, I call a textually motivated reading that can only shed light on any discussion of deconstruction. Perhaps this doesn't impress you - but simply asserting that something is a lie in passing isn't terribly impressive, either.
What I think is quite funny is that my own position on this is quite a bit more damning of the offending post - and deconstruction - than your own, and that seems to have been ignored or passed over to defend the contention that the offending post is in some way a good example of deconstruction (it's not, for the reasons outlined earlier).
The dwarf post doesn't meet the sufficient conditions for deconstruction: at best, it betrays an understanding of deconstruction that is woefully incorrect if it is an attempt to participate in this dialogue.
As for deconstruction as a good-making element of design, I can name exactly one game it's helped or informed since 1968 (when the movement began upon Derrida's address at Yale). That track record is quite simply pathetic.
Understand that a textually-motivated reading of Derrida is substantially more damning of Derrida than your position. Perhaps that's a problem - but it's a pretty good instantiation of why doing a "narrow and high-minded" reading of a philosophical issue can bear much fruit in discussions of game design.
So... I'm going to be honest, I don't understand where this whole conversation has gone (Derrida, Philosophy, etc). But getting back to the original post:
If I understand correctly, you don't like it when someone complains about something being "stereotypical" (like dwarves) once it has achieved a broad level of adoption and uniformity? Ie. hating it because for the very reasons its become popular, because its become popular?
Am I reading that right?
lessthanpleased: You're wanting a exchange for some reason about something (i.e. a pure form of a now common cultural trend) that I'm not interested in having.
So you're not going to get it.
It's not any more important to my point than someone bringing up Marx would be a statement that about hating how they hated communism played out with the Soviets.
anonymous: I'm really completely disinterested in someone disliking popular things. I dislike many of them myself.
For example I dislike Lady Gaga's music. However I don't then try to say that Lady Gaga's music isn't done correctly followed by subbing Mozart's music in and calling that Lady Gaga.
I just say I like Mozart better than Lady Gaga and leave it there.
Gleichman: What I actually want is for you to realize that incorrectly labelling reductive readings of popular things "deconstructive" only empowers them by giving them more intellectual legitimacy than they deserve. There's a secondary claim that deconstruction - when done properly - isn't damaging to games, but it certainly doesn't make the one game that did engage in the dialectic successfully a best-seller or mainstream.
And yes, it is apparent that I'm not going to get that.
lessthanpleased: I see you completely failed to understand my point. I would have thought the communism/Soviet comparsion would have made it clear.
So let me make it clear.
In real world terms, Proper Deconstructionism doesn't exist outside of very short and unimportant things. It is its nature to be used as people will use it. Call it wrong, but it is what it is.
Thus I've used the term correctly for layman's and real world use, communism is correct while applied to the Soviet and Cuban systems.
You can take your idea ivory tower version of it and shove it. It's crap. And in fact I'll take the incorrect usage of it for at least it's rather honest in comparsion.
"In real world terms, Proper Deconstructionism doesn't exist outside of very short and unimportant things. It is its nature to be used as people will use it. Call it wrong, but it is what it is."
Aren't you now guilty of deconstructing deconstructionism?
Regardless: I don't see deconstructionism of any stripe in that post. I see someone essentially saying: For people who are allegedly engaged in creative endeavors, some concepts show a remarkable lack of creativity.
And that is an idea that is always worthy of consideration. And if it comes down to it, I'd agree with someone making that argument far more often then I will agree with someone saying that "This is how X has always been and thus this is how X should always be" (especially when speaking of allegedly creative endeavors). And there is absolutely no question in my mind which is "the boring approach" - and it isn't the approach that argues for traditionalism in favor of creativity.
Carl
Syrsuro: "Aren't you now guilty of deconstructing deconstructionism?"
No.
And I like creativity, I supported creativity and well as tradition in my post. Just call your new thing by a new name.
The end result of the path you so approve of is not new or better dwarves. It's nothing less than no dwarves at all as they dilute to the point of non-existence.
Is this a GNS/FORGE discussion? When do we get to the part about not understanding what "deconstruction" is outside of the context provided by the "Big Model"?
highadventuregames: I had the same reaction, which is why I stomped so hard on it.
It's a sadly typical sleight of hand that I've seen in countless debates on countless subjects. Anyone taking them there is at some level dishonest and attempting to shift the subject to an abstract one where nothing can be put to a test- or any possible test is so extreme that any real world item is excluded.
So much for defining terms, then.
Still, it would have been good if lessthanpleased had listened to you saying "I don't wanna talk about it". I don't see a lack of desire for discussion to hint at some deeper whatever at all, though I can understand his terrier-like impulse to pursue the topic further. How often does Derrida come up in conversation, anyway?
Zac in CA: I can't imagine it comes up much at all outside academia, so yeah- someone who is really into that will likely try to pursue it even when it isn't reasonable to.
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