Pop Tabletop
Pop Tabletop
Table Top Roleplaying Games and Pop Culture Together Of Course
Sean Jaffe Nerdy City Games
“(We care a lot) about the Garbage Pail Kids, they never lie
(We care a lot) about Transformers because there's more than meets the eye
(We care a lot) about the little things, the bigger things we top
(We care a lot) about you people, yeah you bet we care a lot”
- Faith No More, “We Care a Lot”
I’m RM Sean B. Jaffe, and I’m a life-long indie tabletop game designer. My magnum opus is Rememorex, a rules-light game about 80s kids and the monsters that hunted us, both human and otherwise. I recently continued that story with Commandroids: A World Transformed, introducing giant transforming robots into the Goonies/Wargames/Breakfast Club milieu. I’ve also worked on countless other titles like Changeling: The Dreaming, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Dystopia Rising, and a host of others. I’m excited to use this space to explore the relationships between pop culture and gaming, so I figured with a bit of an introduction to who I am and why I do this stuff.
My first time running a tabletop game was in the supply shed of an Jewish sleepaway camp way back in the late eighties. My PCs were a motley crew of mutant animals who had discovered the secret of a subaquatic society of hyper-intelligent dolphins who had mastered time travel. It was like we’d discovered a new drug. We all snuck off when we were supposed to be taking swimming lessons, or playing volleyball, or making lanyards, convened in that sweltering box in the woods, and jettisoned off to a version of New York plagued by ninja-related crime, or a dinosaur-filled swamp, or a futuristic war between humans and aliens. We were hooked.
As any member of Gen-X will tell you, There was a strange and dangerous side effect to being a product of the 80s. We were a generation raised on pop culture. That doesn’t sound like much now—everyone is, these days. However, much in the way that the 60s didn’t invent music, but may have perfected it, the 80s refined and focused pop culture in a way our society had never seen before. The Boomers couldn’t understand why we identified so closely with Ninja Turtles or Strawberry Shortcake or Star Wars or the Masters of the Universe. And how could they? It would be like them trying to explain to their own parents about the Doors or Jimi Hendrix or the Beatles. Any worldwide youth phenomenon can’t really be explained at the time, only lived though and experienced. In fact, the pushback of the elder generation is a critical part of what makes it work. Every grandparent that raised a Boomer had to rant about how rock and roll was degenerate howling, every Boomer that raised one of us had to rant about how Star Wars, G.I. Joe and the Transformers were just senseless toy commercials, and no doubt my generation is now screaming at their own kids about how video games are a waste of time and when we were their age we rode bikes through the forest until midnight and got abducted by Demogorgons as befits a proper childhood. The cycle must roll on.
So, let’s agree to accept that, yes, that kind of marketing, the lifeblood of pop culture, has always been a cynical cash grab. Of course it is. But moving past that, a child rarely sees through those eyes. All we kids knew was that we loved the adventures of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, and if those adventures continued in the form of action figures, we were in. In fact, we made it very clear we’d follow the story through toothpaste and bedsheets and Spaghettios shaped like Vader’s face, if there was even a whiff, a hint more of the essence of the story that captivated us to be gained there. And there in the middle of this Toys-R-Us meets Saturday Morning blitzkrieg of story, wedged between Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and the Snorks, was Dungeons & Dragons, the cartoon..
The history of tabletop games is rooted deeply in that pop culture revolution. Dungeons & Dragons is as old as I am, and we’ve gone through a lot of the same identity crises. We’ve both identified as valiant knights, space adventurers, confusing interplanar nonsense, and, at times, a satanic threat to the American family. Something that seems almost sadly lost to time was that D&D was really never alone. Palladium, Steve Jackson, West End, and Chaosium, were advertising right alongside TSR in those days. Of course, these were always fringe elements, but the thing that made these and all games like them so appealing was the ways in which they turned control of that story back to us. Star Wars would continue how you wanted it to. Marvel heroes fought the villains you came up with. And of course, you could home-brew your own world and start telling the story yourself.
And that’s the true beauty of it. Tabletop Games are an extension of what that pop culture was, is, and will be. An outlet for everyday inspiration, and everyday inspiration doesn’t always come from a mountaintop or a beautiful sunset. Sometimes it comes from a cereal box toy or a commercial for fruit snacks. There’s no need to discriminate. With these games, we have a way to continue the stories we hold dear whether we own them or not, and maybe even give a little inspiration back to our friends, our family, and the people we love.
This article is part of the Indie Game Developer Network’s blog series. The content of this article reflects the views of but one member of the IGDN. This IGDN blog article is brought to you by Sean Jaffe of Nerdy City Games. If you want to get in touch with the contributor they can be reached at Sean@nerdycity.com or visit their website at Nerdycity.com.