Sean Bonney, Baudelaire in English

 Can't remember when this was from, 2007? Sean Bonney reading Baudelaire poems.

Utopian Crunch

From a glossary-in-progress.

Crunch has at least two meanings in gaming. In game development, it refers to an intense, focused, and often exploitative work period that occurs near the end of a project. Workers are racing against the clock, working long hours with great intensity. This could be the time when everything comes together and final adjustments are applied. It might also be the time when all pretence of polish is forsaken. Workarounds are rushed through, risky compromises are gambled on. The product ships with glitches and bugs still twitching, half-squashed, under quick fixes. To the extent that crunch time is also a period of stress and exhaustion, it may also be a time of unusually unreliable judgment: workers may hallucinate that they are applying the final polish, when actually they are inadequately papering over the cracks.

Game development crunch is, in this sense, emblematic of capitalist accumulation: linked to the capitalist drive for profit maximization, the relentless pursuit of narrowly defined economic efficiency which comes at the expense of workers’ physical and mental wellbeing. As John Vanderhoef and Michael Curtin write:

[...] labor exploitation has if anything increased since the early 2000s, as game workers continue to toil under difficult conditions systematically orchestrated by major publishers that have agilely expanded their production networks and political connections around the globe. Although in some places conditions have improved and in others new opportunities have arisen, most shops are governed by wages, practices, and prejudices that undermine common assumptions about game development as an elite creative or IT career. Moreover, the possibility of reversing this overall trend is profoundly uncertain, given the challenges of building a reform movement in an industry where most workers are isolated in cubicles, anxious about job security, skeptical about organized labor, and susceptible to illusions that the indie sector might offer their best hope for deliverance.

Yet this crunch also evokes the logic of the exception. In game development, crunch time represents a state of emergency, where workers must put aside their regular lives and dedicate themselves to the project’s completion. It may have been planned for months, but it is still treated as a crisis. Giorgio Agamben’s 2005 State of Exception argues that the state of exception is a critical aspect of modern politics, enabling governments to suspend everyday laws and deny legal rights during times of crisis. However, the state of exception for Agamben is not really a discrete event that ‘interrupts’ everyday life, but a pervasive condition that governs modern society. Agamben argues that to find the paradigmatic example of modern power over life, you need to look at the camp.

[T]he state of exception separates the norm from its application in order to make its application possible. It introduces a zone of anomie into the law in order to make the effective regulation [normazione] of the real possible [...] the norm [is] able to refer to the normal situation through the suspension of its application in the state of exception.

Achille Mbembe also develops the concept of the state of exception in Necropolitics (2019 [2016]) and other works. For Mbembe, as for Agamben, the state of exception is not really an exception, but rather an enduring and widespread dynamic of contemporary governance. He offers the plantation and the colony as quintessential manifestations of the state of exception, a form of power which goes beyond Foucault's droit de glaive and biopower, and which racialises and instrumentalises human life to the point that those that suffer it are poised between life and death: the walking dead.

So what about game development crunch? Is it an exception to the way things are normally done, or an expression of the way they are normally done here? There are some obvious themes we might touch on here, such as games companies who have a continuous 'crunch culture'. There are also perhaps less obvious ones, such as the ideological role of military-themed games; or the rivalry for control of minerals and other resources for device manufacture. These might illuminate crunch time as an exception that is not really an exception, but rather the very visible part of something semi-invisibly pervasive.

While acknowledging these connections, we might also consider whether crunch times may gesture towards genuine alternatives to capitalist extraction, insofar as they may be times when the standard extractive apparatus of capitalism (money and bureaucratic authority) cannot meet capital's needs, and the more-than-capitalist world must be appealed to. That is, you cannot just pay someone to do that to themselves, so other motives for making things come into play, in however a distorted and corrupted form.

Let's return to that idea in a moment. In the context of tabletop roleplaying games, crunch also has another meaning. It describes a design style focused on complex and detailed mechanics. A crunchy tabletop roleplaying game may involve a lot of arithmetic. It may also involve large menus of options with fine-grained mechanical differentiation, and therefore a lot to memorise or to look up. It may also suggest the existence of many subsystems to handle different sorts of narrative situations (see Subsystem). Examples of games with a reputation for crunch include Shadowrun, Rolemaster, and Phoenix Command.

This second sense of crunch may contain some implied claim to realism, comprehensiveness, or abundant variety. It is also a kind of aesthetic category. Crunch offers an appealing depth to players who love to tinker with intricate systems. In this sense, the term has faintly positive associations. True, a player might say, “I don't like crunchy games.” However, generally crunch is a way of describing something that, if you didn’t like it, you probably wouldn’t call crunch. Instead you would probably describe the rules as too long or complicated — or you wouldn’t describe them at all, because you decided not to invest time in learning them, and so wouldn’t have any particular views about them.

While games might be ranked as more or less crunchy, there is also an understanding that the experience of crunch is something that might diminish with familiarity: to someone who has only ever played John Harper’s Lasers & Feelings, which features two stats and one resolution mechanic for every situation, a game like D&D 5e or Lancer might at first feel very crunchy. The crunchiness of some games, perhaps, is more resilient than the crunchiness of others: the experience of crunchiness does not always diminish, or at least not at the same rate.

For the utopian, crunch might arouse curiosity because it does not look fun, yet it is fun. This speaks to the utopian critiques of scarcity thinking, and the utopian concern with hidden plenitudes, with the possibility of vast pleasures tucked invisibly inside paltry resources, just awaiting the right reconfiguration. Things that don't look edible, but are delicious. Sources of wellbeing and wonder that are less than obvious, because they are being hogged by tiny elites. In a similar vein, activities associated with crunch — poring over customisation options, carrying out calculations, meticulous bookkeeping — have a reputation for being boring, a reputation which is not entirely unfair, but also not the full story. Utopian writing and even utopian society itself has likewise been denigrated as dull (see Boring). 

More subtly, perhaps there is some affinity between crunch aficionados and leftist culture warriors who hold that developing a systemic understanding of something need not necessarily spoil engagement with and enjoyment of that something: that it is possible to be at once immersed in a world and immersed in the rules that produce that world (and to think critically about how each of these emerge from and relate to the real world). This might be described as a ‘culture of systemic analysis,’ often conspicuous, for example, in contemporary culture war clashes around the right’s cherished belief in the possibility of apolitical games, narratives, and art.

What then is the relationship between crunch and immersion? It seems it is not straightforward. Crunchy games are sometimes contrasted with rules-lite or narrative-heavy games, which prioritise storytelling and player agency over complex mechanics. Perhaps players who gravitate towards crunchy games enjoy the strategic challenges, the problem-solving opportunities, and the chance to explore combinatorial wildernesses for local optima and other emergent phenomena. And perhaps players who are averse to crunchy games feel that clearing away a dense fog of numbers frees them to shape story and character. And both groups may well invoke the term immersion to explain their relationship with crunchiness. Are they describing different kinds of immersion? Are the crunch devotees immersed in the narrative and the system, whereas the crunch skeptics are immersed in the narrative alone? Some crunch devotees may argue that crunchiness does not displace narrative, but supports it (or perhaps supports particular kinds of narrative experience). Others may contest that there is any necessary or strong connection between crunch and narrative: instead, we might imagine a quadrant matrix, with an x-axis from crunchy to rules lite, and a y-axis from narrative to non-narrative (some might say, traditional or OSR).

Such questions could be interesting in themselves, and they also suggest another interesting line of enquiry: is crunch something that transcends games? Is utopia crunchy? Charles Fourier’s utopian designs, for instance, might be described as ‘crunchier’ than Edward Bellamy’s, and Edward Bellamy’s as crunchier than William Morris’s. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed might be considered a meditation not only on creeping centralisation, but also on creeping crunchiness (proliferating committees with proliferating conventions), within a syndicate anarchist society that is ostensibly without laws.

How crunchy, for that matter, are the societies we live in today? Social theorists including Niklas Luhmann have in effect explored this question. In Luhmann's framework, modernity has seen subsystems within society becoming increasingly distinct and specialised. This division of labour allows each subsystem to develop its own unique logic, rules, and communication codes. These subsystems can include areas such as politics, law, economy, education, and religion, among others. Subsystems can institutionalise symbolically generalised communication media, making it more difficult for uncomfortable communications to be rejected -- money is perhaps the clearest example (money tells us "do your job" in a way that is harder to refuse than mere promises). In modernity, according to Luhmann, society has transitioned from a simpler, more homogeneous structure to a highly complex, differentiated one. This shift has led to the emergence of a multitude of interdependent but autonomous subsystems. Each subsystem operates with its own internal logic, and is functionally differentiated from other subsystems, meaning they each serve a specific purpose and contribute to the overall functioning of society. Luhmann saw this differentiation as both a strength and a challenge. On one hand, it allows modern society to address complex problems with specialised expertise, enhancing overall efficiency and adaptability. On the other hand, it can lead to difficulties in communication and coordination between subsystems, as they may have different goals, values, and perspectives. There is potential for fruitful dialogue between the theory and practice of tabletop game design and social theory about differentiation and specialisation. Such dialogues might even explore the paradoxical notion of law-without-state, of utopian law.

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A game designer who is adding crunch may occasionally feel, paradoxically, that their game grows less crunchy: the more one attempts to model the universe in detail, the more the game feels like a model, filled with abstractions and simplifications.

A game with little crunch, we might say, will have a mechanic to determine who wins a fight; a game with a lot of crunch will have a mechanic that allows you to target head, heart, hand etc. separately, to factor in the weapon used and the level of proficiency, the proximity to the target, the wind speed, the sun in your eyes or in theirs as they duck or dodge, and so on. Again, it is all quite relative: to a table of pianists, it may be absurd that a hand is not differentiated into at least five distinct targets. To a table of hand surgeons, all familiar with a range of hand traumas and their treatments and prognoses, it might make sense to separate damage rolls to the flexor digitorum produndus and the flexor digitorum superficialis.

Jorge Luis Borges imagined a Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge in which animals are divided into those belonging to the Emperor, embalmed ones, trained ones, suckling pigs, mermaids, innumerable ones, etc., high level classifications which feel perfectly natural and self-evident to the authors of the taxonomy. What might a TTRPG manifesting such Borgeian crunch be like? Where should one subsystem end and the next begin? What ought to be considered a special case of what else?

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What about crunchiness as an aesthetic experience: might this too be experienced outside of games? For example, might the office worker who is entranced in spreadsheet construction be experiencing something crunchy? And if so, could there be ways in which these two senses of crunch — (a) game developers burning the candle at both ends, (b) players losing themselves in intricate rule-sets — are connected? 

Crunch, crunch: certainly, each sense of crunch seems to embody a notion of intense commitment to the task at hand and a desire for immersion within it. Immersion in each case is also figured as something quite intricate and textured. In other words, we are not really talking about immersion in some oceanic realm of primordial unity, where boundaries are fluid and ever-vanishing. We are probably not talking about what the poet Lisa Robinson describes as ‘a luxuriously distributed lubricant, an enticingly shimmering and moving fabric, a shared yet contested décor.’ Rather, the realm in which crunch immerses you is filled with precise relational details, details that are at once trivial and all-consuming — concern with correctness of syntax, conformity with procedure, with how this line of code relates to the next, with how the scattered dice add up or subtract. If there is a loss of self here, perhaps it is more Apollonian in nature than Dionysian; drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s dichotomy of Greek tragedy:

Whatever rises to the surface in the dialogue of the Apollonian part of Greek tragedy, appears simple, transparent, beautiful. In this sense the dialogue is a copy of the Hellene, whose nature reveals itself in the dance, because in the dance the greatest energy is merely potential, but betrays itself nevertheless in flexible and vivacious movements. The language of the Sophoclean heroes, for instance, surprises us by its Apollonian precision and clearness, so that we at once imagine we see into the innermost recesses of their being, and marvel not a little that the way to these recesses is so short. 

The notion of jouissance, associated with Freud, Lacan, Barthes and others, may also help to illuminate crunchy immersion. Roland Barthes’s distinction between plaisir and jouissance turns on conformity or nonconformity with norms: for Barthes, plaisir or pleasure arises from engagement within established codes and reinforces established subjectivity, whereas jouissance or bliss comes from exploding those codes, and tends to disrupt and transform subjectivity. Crunch might then suggest a third option, or at least confirms the interconnection of plaisir and jouissance: it is scrupulous obedience to the constraints of coding syntax that opens up vast vistas of representational possibilities. Jacques Lacan’s jouissance defies any brief summary, but there are certainly resonant themes to do with ‘forbidden’ or inexpressible modes of enjoyment, and pain-as-pleasure, pleasure-as-pain. Is there an erotics of submission to game mechanics, with an immersion or flow-state comparable to entry to BDSM subspace? It may be a fruitful analogy, insofar as bottoming is more a transformation of agency than it is a relinquishing of agency.

Each kind of crunch is also associated with time behaving strangely. For example, during game development crunch, there is not enough time to do everything that must be done, and yet it must be done (and sometimes even can be done). Likewise, crunchy mechanics in TTRPGs may slow down gameplay as players consult rulebooks and perform calculations. A crunchy game might therefore be one that has more “time per time,” one in which a few moments of narrative stretch out into minutes or hours of gameplay due to all the extradiegetic intricacies involved. Alternatively, we might not think of this ratio as time to time, as such, but rather story to mechanics, as though these were quantifiable: as though there could be a lot of mechanics per unit of story, producing a sense of crunchiness. Whether temporal or something else, such ratios might interest the utopian: the little hidden in a lot, or the lot devoted to the care and elaboration of the little. 

In a 2021 article, Amanda C. Cote and Brandon C. Harris explore how a discursive distinction between ‘good’ crunch and ‘bad’ crunch has been used to undermine the demands of game industry workers and to perpetuate exploitative working practices. Cote and Harris reject the reality of this distinction. They argue for an urgent need for greater unionisation within the games industry, while also cautioning that even well-organised workforces with robust employment rights may remain vulnerable to exploitation via so-called ‘good’ crunch. Analysing articles and talks from Game Developer magazine and the Game Developers Conference, Cote and Harris point out: ‘Numerous articles and talks positioned self-imposed crunch emerging out of developers’ passion as a good thing, giving specific examples of times when developers’ voluntary overtime improved the resulting game.’ 

The construction of ‘good’ crunch is a weaponised utopianism, which can draw both on neoliberal individualism (personal passion, hustle culture, being driven and ambitious, having what it takes) as well as a more collectivist ethos (the company figured as a family or as a community of mutual care, the worker encouraged to work hard and solve problems on behalf of everybody, workers and gamers as part of a wider community with a passion for making and playing games). Cote and Harris invoke Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism:

The idea that employee passion drives them to engage in ‘good’ crunch acts as a form of cruel optimism, sustaining crunch practices even in situations where there are organized efforts to improve working conditions. Fully reimagining games’ labor systems will likely require developers both to engage in tactics such as collective organizing and to forgo problematic understandings about crunch.

Cote and Harris’s analysis might be further strengthened by acknowledging the grain of truth within ‘good’ crunch discourse. Like much discourse used to legitimate oppressive practices, ‘good’ crunch discourse reflects, in a distorted form, lived realities. An intense period of work to get a game just right, without financial or professional motives, is something that many hobbyist game-makers experience. It is an experience that they share with, for example, a poet tinkering to perfect a poem or a musician with a song. It is a kind of concluding inspiration, the counterpart to the early stage inspiration in which a creative work begins to coalesce within an apparent void. This is not to say that these periods of delighted productive mania are ‘true good crunch,’ entirely protected from capitalist imperatives — leisure-time subjectivity is still shaped by living under capitalism. But when we do experience them, we are not wrong to wonder: Why shouldn’t most or all work be like this? In other words, these experiences point toward the more free, pleasant, interesting, and less alienated labour explored by postwork theory. They might also be suggestive of the many different ways of working that have existed and still exist in the more-than-capitalist world. The anthropologist James C. Scott, for example, contrasts the tempo of life of hunter-gatherers, “punctuated by bursts of activity over short periods of time,” with that of agriculturalists:

These meticulous, demanding, interlocked, and mandatory annual and daily routines, I would argue, belong at the center of any comprehensive account of the 'civilizing process.' They strap agriculturalists to a minutely choreographed routine of dance steps; they shape their physical bodies, they share the architecture and layout of the domus; they insist, as it were, on a certain pattern of cooperation and coordination. In that sense, to pursue the metaphor, they are the background musical beat of the domus. Once Homo sapiens took that fateful step into agriculture, our species entered an austere monastery whose taskmaster consists mostly of the demanding genetic clockwork of a few plants and, in Mesopotamia particularly, wheat or barley.

As crunch is an aesthetic category, it's perhaps finally worth considering yet another sense of crunch: crunch as an auditory and haptic phenomenon. The sudden breaking or fracturing of a hard, brittle material makes a resonant, sharp-ish sound, a crunch. Crunching is similar to, but not quite the same as, crumpling, snapping, crushing, squelching. Nuts are crunched. Bones crunch, sickeningly. Popcorn is too soft to crunch, apart from the unpopped kernels or kernel fragments. Something which crunches has not collapsed with enough force to fly apart, as something that shatters often does. It may well still be in one piece, connected by fragile new hinges. In fact, gravel crunches underfoot, and here the implication is not something brittle bursting, but rather hard material being tilted, rearranged, and ground together. Pine needles, fresh crisp snow. Perhaps crunch is actually ambiguous between a catastrophic collapse and a survivable deformation.

The aesthetics of the auditory and haptic crunch may also carry utopian charge: concerned as utopians are with pressure from outside, and how an enclosed system might respond to that pressure. When utopias, utopianisms, and utopian sparks and seeds are forced (however temporarily) into narrow margins and small nooks, what survives and what does not? ‘Crunch’ in TTRPG contexts probably derives from ‘number crunching.’ Numbers might be thought of as some of the least crunchable things ever: immutable and abstract, they resist deformation and fracture; you can divide one integer by another, and then combine the result with yet another integer, and nothing really ‘crunches’ — or does it?