also loved that conversation. listening to them two talking is always a delight, they balance each other out very well.
anyway, you are so real for speaking on this. though i think the current trends which you pinned down very comprehensively actually follow the larger tendency of the medium to be driven by emulating genre fiction in the worst sense possible.
like, at best it actually comes to doing something unique with genre, like apocalypse world, which i think vincent baker spoke of as being transformative rather than emulative, with which i agree whole-heatedly. or maybe something like sorcerer, which pins down a couple of particular idioms (sorcery in pulp horror/fantasy, demons as metaphors) and follows them through. but that still ultimately kinda drives you towards genre fiction, especially because the game-rules kinda establish a sub-genre in themselves, right?
what really baffles me personally is the utter lack of games that set out to be just straight up realist, not in the sense of verisimilitude but in the sense of being about something non-fantastical and non-exotic. i know people love to dunk on genre/literary distinction, but imho if anything ttrpgs are a great testimony to it being fairly useful. like, more of the time you get something vaguely "slice of life", which is actually genre fiction too, and goes with you talking about not being into anime and ya, and the answer given to you about "cozy" fiction. and then there's historical fiction, which too tends to calcify into its own subgenres. and also crime and mystery, or, marginally, some things like war or spy thrillers. nothing really *fits*.
you *do* get some things, like paul czege's excellent nicotine girls, but not much! i think it has to do mostly with pitching it. a game centered around pure character drama has to justify its existence either by presenting an incredibly interesting situation (which is what realist fiction mostly thrives on, actually! well, this and compelling characters, obviously) or having some interesting mechanics, both of which is really hard to market for for different reasons, as far as i understand. and even then, can you do a full-book-size game out of this? the aforementioned nicotine girls is a two-pager, but two-pager booklets are not what people buy, the industry is centered around big, lushly illustrated coffee-table books.
i wish there were games structured like dogs in the vineyard but sans the fantastical parts. or maybe even like in a wicked age. in fact, the latter would be so good just with modern mundane oracles.
i wish the hobby was not so nerd-culture-centered. and it's not like i don't enjoy genre fiction myself. it's just so oppressive how much it's all dominated by tropes. aren't people tired of that in commercial fiction? don't they want to make something different? i remember the passage from sorcerer & sword about doing the things sword & sorcery doesn't really do, angling towards the stuff you are frustrated about, the opportunities passed on. something like that is also in the monsterhearts book. i wish more rpg texts were encouraging this.
someone needs to launch something like a realist game jam. anyway, sorry if i've driven the conversation away to some extent. just really needed to vent about all of this after reading the conversation you had in replies.
