Toward the end of April, I was fortunate enough to be a guest at the Salon du Jeu de Société in Montreuil, on the eastern lip of Paris. (Only its URL indicated its connection with GenCon France.) I attended through the benevolence of the French RPG publisher 7eme Circle, who translated and published my game Trail of Cthulhu in French, as Cthulhu. (My fellow guest was Jérôme Huguenin, that game’s startlingly gifted illustrator — he also illustrated 7eme Cercle’s new hotness, Kuro Tensei, which looks all apocalyptic and J-horrific.) I speak essentially no French, save that which accretes after a year of grade-school instruction, a decade of French horror films, and a lifelong fondness for good food. So of course I did two interviews there.

So what was the convention like? It was mostly a boardgame show held in one giant dealer’s hall. (I was informed there is a more RPG-focused convention in September. My calendar is open …) Asmodee, the main sponsor, used to publish RPGs but now mostly produces boardgames — plus ca change. Gaming happened primarily at company demo booths, but there were a dozen or so RPG tables set up in one section under the benevolent gaze of Grog. French gamers (based on my random sampling from the thousand or so attendees) are pretty much just like American gamers, although they smoke more — the only barrier was linguistic. The ’satiably curious can see photos of the festivities at the Sci-Fi Universe site, or watch a riveting video shot at the event.

French games, from what I could tell within my Anglophone box, are primarily concerned with world and feel (consider Nephilim, In Nomine, and Qin, to name three French games with English-language versions), which may be part of the reason why they are (as a rule) far prettier than American ones. Given the relative sizes of the Anglophone and Francophone RPG markets, I haven’t the faintest idea how French publishers (very much including mine) support such gorgeous art and production quality. France also has an “indie” scene, if Johan Scipion’s Sombre is any guide — a stripped-down horror game with a number of similarly minimalist sub-games in planning or complete, among them Cthulhu DDR (“No Nazis, No Stasis” says designer Thierry Salaün).

I shan’t mention every game I saw there, but I will single out the upcoming 7eme Cercle game Devastra, which takes the long overdue step of “game-ifying” the legendary history of India, and Jean-Philippe Jaworski’s extraordinarily recondite game Te Deum pour un Massacre, a game about noble machinations surrounding the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, and the French Wars of Religion generally. (It has five supplements, I think.) Both are extraordinarily beautiful. Both assume a level of comfort with history and pseudo-history that American games mostly don’t.

Which leads me as if by predetermined column outline to the book Jouer avec l’Histoire, or Playing Games With History, which debuted at the show. Edited by Olivier Caïra and Jérôme Larré, this anthology presents essays by game designers and critics discussing the intersection of RPGs with history. Ranging from designer’s notes to “does making Nazis into orcs trivialize the Holocaust?” the book is probably years ahead of the state of the art in English-language RPG criticism. I say “probably,” because it’s not impossible to imagine someone putting together a similarly thoughtful, wide-ranging anthology for American games. (An arguable exception is Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan’s “… Person” series from MIT Press, but that takes a primarily narratological approach.) Caïra is a leading ludological scholar in France, having published a broad sociological study of RPGs, Jeux de Role, with the prestigious CNRS (the equivalent of the National Science Foundation in the U.S.). He is also very generous with his champagne, which has no bearing on my appreciation of his scholarship.

Which, as I may have pointed out, I can’t actually read. But the typography is very nice.

Which is French gaming in a nutshell. Next, the State of American Gaming, such as it is, and such as I can suss it out.

Tags: con report, olivier caira, salon du jeu de societe

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