Tragically, this is a 3-hour video and I can't say you will enjoy it, but it's basically the steelman of this point. The rest of this post is me being mean to this position, but I've never seen it demonstrated better than this video, which I have inexplicably watched twice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpbZBS2GcN0&ab_channel=CollabsWithoutPermission
To be uncharitable, and this position is exceptionally uncharitable to game designers, so perhaps being uncharitable isn't exactly uncalled for.
Going off memory of this fucking epic (derogatory):
-There was this forum called the forge where people talked about design stuff.
-One person on the forge was really into Applied Behaviour Analysis.
-An idea that "came out" of the forge is that games should encourage and reward you to do the things in them that are fun or support the game's vision of itself.
-Draws a connection that because ABA is used to abuse autistic children sometimes, and "the forge" is "encouraging designers to think about player incentives," that game design is mind control, ESPECIALLY if it comes from "forge ideology."
-All story games are wrapped into this as a part of "forge ideology."
-The only thing designers should make are scenarios and modules* not rules, because rules encourage or discourage different behaviours and are thus ABA and are thus mind control abuse.
Throw in a wild number of personal attacks to a bunch of different designers along the way, and them inexplicably getting the excellent C. Thi Nguyen to talk to them, and that's the video. Also, a review of Root and kind of Severance I guess. There's a lot. It's a 3 hour video.
*I remember when I got to this, I nearly lost my mind being like "MODULES FOR WHAT?!?" because at this point they had thrown the entire field of game design off the cliff, so presumably just like... original Dungeons and Dragons? I don't know. They have reviewed other games positively, which have incentive structures... so is it only ABA if it comes from the forge region of France?
The creator of this video is or was pals with a crew of Twitter TTRPG designers: Micah, Jared, Monkey's Paw, and a couple of others. They were infamous for brigading a lot of people online, often weaponizing social justice language to justify their brigades. One position they commonly advocated for, but tbh it could have just been provocative trolling, was "system doesn't matter," a position I so thoroughly disrespect I couldn't begin to present it in a positive light. Monkey's Paw and I think another one of them, I genuinely can't remember who got accused of plagiarism, and they more or less deleted themselves from Twitter, they aren't really a thing anymore as a group, at least not in public.
They were only really a 'threat' as a group, individually, I don't think any of these people ever had more than 10k followers, and most of them these days seem to be like 500. Tbh these fuckers made me become a hermit after releasing Valiant Quest, seeing just how little it took to get yourself on the wrong end of a brigade. It wasn't just spontaneous internet cruelty either, but like coordinated attacks, they would brag about.
So to answer your question, yeah, there was a group of people very vocal and often abusively vocal in the indie ttrpg design scene who argued system doesn't matter. There is a rich irony in that what they suggested instead was useful scenarios and random tables and stuff and one of them got caught plagiarizing a random table.
kaledo-art
prguitarman
tangentwithtanner
jbbartram-illu
vaporwave
ellievsbear
blakekathryn
annaxmalina
