Paranoid Delusions

Posted by Rob MacD on March 3, 2004 at 05:25 PM

As promised, some thoughts on the recently announced return of Paranoia.

Paranoia was, of course, “the role-playing game of a darkly humorous future,” first published in 1984. It’s a game about a post-apocalyptic future in which humanity lives in an underground warren of color-coded Habitrail tubes called “Alpha Complex,” all watched over by an insane and all-powerful computer called (with refreshing simplicity for an RPG) “The Computer.” The players take the part of laser-happy “troubleshooters” rooting out non-existent Commie traitors. Life is cheap, trigger-fingers are itchy, and just about every activity you can think of is treason punishable by death. Luckily, the citizens of Alpha Complex all come in six-packs of identical clones. A second edition with fewer rules and more puns came out in 1987. There may have been another edition in the 1990s, in which they revealed that The Computer was a vampire alien or something, and gay, and Luke’s father, before killing it off to make way for a series of lavishly-illustrated splat-books, but most fans regard this “fifth” edition as apocryphal. And now there’s a shiny new Paranoia for the 21st Century on its way.

The designers are talking about blowing the dust off, bringing Alpha Complex into the 21st Century. Greg Costikyan says:

We have an opportunity not to "bring back" an old title, but to make Paranoia relevant to the 21st century. Networking. Spammers. Scammers. Blackhat hackers. Weapons of mass destruction. Totally dysfunctional government. Paranoia XP is not an exercise in nostalgia. Paranoia XP is today. Paranoia XP is what we're living through--writ large, and excessively, and humorously.

That’s an admirable goal. And it’s true that a game about living in a crazed totalitarian state run by incalculable morons seems more relevant today (there's a cheery thought!) than it has at any other time since the end of the Cold War. But I gotta ask myself: can you take Paranoia out of 1984 without, you know, taking the 1984 out of Paranoia? It was a great, great game, ahead of its time in many ways, but very much of its time in others. The Cold War ambience, the fear of this thing called the “Computer,” the digs at joggers and the Sierra Club--the whole gestalt is as 1984 as “Where’s The Beef?” and “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”

Since the new version was announced last week, the usual RPG forums have already seen debate on such crucial issues as: whether it should be called Paranoia XP, whether it’s ok to change the name of Alpha Complex, whether the new version should have Commies or not, how many clones each character should have. (Allen Varney, the main writer I think, had to point out to history-challenged youth that the “Commie threat” was meant to be a joke even in distant 1984.)

Obviously, there are a lot of people who remember Paranoia very fondly, and this has both opportunities and pitfalls for creating a new version. Gamers are extremely susceptible to nostalgia and can quickly turn on anyone screwing with their memories. See for instance, the recent edition of Gamma World, and the scorn heaped on it by the teeming dozens of fandom. I’m no Gamma World expert, but as far as I can tell, the great crime of the new edition was to downplay the “shambling man-size mutant carrots with plasma rifles” craziness of the original post-apocalyptic RPG. Or maybe it was only perceived to do this. You might not think that a move away from anthropomorphized vegetables would be all that controversial, but one trifles with the nostalgic memories of geeks at great peril.

I’m divided: On the one hand I really don’t want to be the aging grognard all bent out of shape because someone took his beloved man carrot. On the other I have a lot of affection for the old Alpha Complex. By all means drop the Hill Street Blues references, the song parodies, and the stupid naming puns (o lord please drop the stupid naming puns). But I’d be very glum if they got rid of Commies, or Hot Fun and Cold Fun, or the smoking boots, or Teela-O-MLY, or the Computer. [Don’t be silly! They’d never be stupid enough to get rid of the Computer! They’d– oh, um, never mind.] It’s the classic focus group problem. If you ask the teeming dozens: “Do you want an updated Paranoia that’s modern and timely?” they’ll say “yes!” If you ask them: “Do you want the classic Paranoia you knew and loved?” they’ll also say “yes!”

But maybe both sides are missing the point.

Here’s the thing. Despite my affection for it, I know the setting wasn’t the reason Paranoia was fun to play. It's the other way round. The game was fun to play, and that’s the reason I have affection for the setting. In other words, it’s easy to talk about setting and tone, to argue about what secret societies should there be and how many clones do we get and all that. But really, the setting is not sacrosanct. Alpha Complex was a tolerably clever mishmash of second-hand dystopic cliches. But it was never brilliant satire, the claims of some to the contrary. Why was Paranoia a brilliant game? Because it was so fun.

That’s an answer so reductive as to be nearly useless, but let me expand on it. Looking at the first edition rules today, what jumps out at me are the designer notes. (I love designer notes in games, and 1st ed. Paranoia had two luxurious pages from Dan Gelber, Greg Costikyan, Ken Rolston, and Eric Goldberg.) Dan Gelber kicks off by saying:

Paranoia was designed to fill a role-playing need, rather than to fulfill my design ambitions. There was no game which fostered a play environment of treachery, suspicion, fear, and quick and easy death, in which the players compete just to stay alive.

This was, I think, a big deal in 1984, and is still a pretty big deal today: both the setting and the rules of Paranoia were designed to support a style of play. Gelber wanted players to compete to stay alive, to stab one another in the back, to plot and scheme and bootlick and lie. And that, my friends, is wicked fun! The genius of Paranoia is that was built from a style of play--“a play environment of treachery, suspicion, fear, and death”--and both the setting and the rules grow organically out of that, and are subsidiary to it. Multiple clones, security clearances, secret societies, the way lasers and armor interact, the repetitive structure of missions: they’re not there to be funny (or realistic) in and of themselves, but to drive a certain style of actual play. Even today that’s rare: when we talk about games and game ideas, we mostly talk about settings that have captured our imagination, or rule sets that do funky things. But the best place to start is with what you want play to be like. Paranoia did that in 1984 and was an instant classic.

Now, I haven’t read every thread on RPG.net or Paranoia Live about the new game. But I’m a little perturbed that all the discussions I have seen hinge entirely on setting and tone. I haven’t seen anybody talking about what Paranoia is actually like to play. It’s getting that chemistry of fear and treachery between actual gamers in actual play that matters. And debates about Commies vs. Terrorists or exact numbers of clones are totally irrelevant to getting that right. Succeed at capturing the right kind of gameplay and you can call the Commies whatever the hell you want. Get that wrong and all your clever jabs at Homeland Security and intellectual property law aren’t gonna save the game. Actual play. That’s the key.

The forum debates about whether Paranoia is serious satire or just silly fun kind of miss the point too, I think. First of all, it’s a false dichotomy. Second, it confuses the trivial issue of how to make the rulebook funny with the critical issue of how to make game play funny. It sounds like Paranoia XP will be pushing the pendulum back from silliness towards black humor. Which is Kool Moe Dee by me. I pretty much hated all the punny names and genre parodies in the old Paranoia adventures (the adventures were worse than the rulebooks in this respect). They made it hard to conceive of Alpha Complex as a real place, and they diluted the horror on which the black comedy depends. But that doesn’t mean I’m clamoring for trenchant political satire. I had a little more tolerance for the satirical elements, but they didn’t really send me either. (For instance: Yes, OK, there’s lots of paperwork in modern society—there’s lots of paperwork in Alpha Complex. I get it, already!) I’m sure the developers of the XP edition have a lot of clever new zingers on the computer industry and file sharing and so on. Lord knows the world never gets enough of computer geeks making in-jokes for their own amusement. But a funny rulebook does not a funny game make. In fact, there may sometimes be an inverse relationship between them. Because wandering through somebody else’s jokes is just not fun! And that’s true whether those jokes are cutting insights on politics and society or absolute atrocities against humor like the Scrub-bot song.

If anyone connected with Paranoia XP happens to read this, I urge them, nay beg them, to look at and better yet play a couple of games like InSpectres, My Life With Master, or Kill Puppies For Satan. What makes them fun? What makes them funny? Jared Sorenson has often pointed this out: the funniest game play, at least when you’re going for black comedy, comes from some kind of disconnect between the players and their characters. The blacker the horrors experienced by the character (or better yet, perpetrated by them) the funnier the game becomes for many players. The humor doesn’t live in the game world, it lives in the space between the game world and the players. You see this in a lot of games, not just new style Forge games – but the games I listed above are built almost entirely around that dissonance. And they can generate hilarious play. But I’ve had the same experience playing Unknown Armies, and GURPS, and Call of Cthulhu, hell even D&D. And I had it first, and best, playing old school Paranoia.

Let the players commit the atrocities. Let the players get the big laughs. That is the key to darkly humorous gaming.

Tangent: So I hinted a few months ago that Paranoia was a meta-game, that is, a game about gaming. Here’s my evidence. Listen to the second paragraph of those designer’s notes from the original 1984 edition of Paranoia. Gelber writes:

In my fantasy role-playing campaign, I had seen the more forceful player characters repeatedly bully the weaker ones, become powerful, become complacent, and then turn on the game master. The world of Paranoia makes the dangers of passivity so apallingly clear that even the milquetoasts among the player characters become able to resist the Machiavellian play style of a Mike Rocamora or an Eric Goldberg. Best of all, Mike and Eric transferred the aggressive responses of their characters from the gamemaster to one another.

Get it? As a satire of modern society, Paranoia was kind of scattered. Where it worked, though, was as a cheerfully vicious satire of gaming circa 1984. The Computer, you see, is the Dungeon Master. It’s all powerful yet painfully ignorant, capricious and death-dealing, caught up in baroque schemes and paranoid fantasies. The troubleshooters are every player. They’re trigger-happy, violence-prone, vicious, backstabbing little punks. They’re skinny and juvenile too, trapped by hormone suppressants in perpetual spotty adolescence. And all of this takes place underground, see, where the troubleshooters stumble around at the Computer’s behest, squabbling and slaughtering one another on ill-defined missions for no particular reason. It’s D&D! It’s a series of 20’ by 20’ rooms! They’re even marked with color-coded “levels.”

Anyway. Just saying.