(This is part of an ongoing discussion of the 2018 OSR Survey results. See the table of contents at the bottom of this post for links to the other parts.)

Over the past few years, I have been continually surprised by the degree of disagreement, confusion, and, occasionally, vitriol regarding the meaning of OSR. I think it is uncontroversial to state that the meaning is contested. It is unclear, however, whether there is any consensus and, more generally, what is the structure of underlying beliefs. Summarizing, the results of the survey support at least three main aspects of OSR meaning. Agreement about these three aspects varies by respondent age, with younger respondents seeing greater conflict between the aspects compared to older respondents. There are other variables to consider, but I will focus on age and self-declared participation in this post.

Age and participation might influence beliefs about OSR for many reasons. Considering rules, older participants might have played older games when they were originally released and so have a different frame of reference compared to younger players. Self-declared participants in the OSR may have different priorities, or more information, compared to self-declared non-participants. We asked respondents directly about participation. (Do you participate in the OSR? Yes/No.) We also asked five questions about identification with the OSR using a seven-point agreement scale (for example, I feel a bond with the OSR). Respondents who participate in the OSR also identify more with the OSR (by approximately 1.75 points of agreement, or the difference between Somewhat agree and Strongly agree).

Before I describe the associations in the survey between meaning beliefs and age or participation, it is worth first looking at the beliefs in aggregate, over all responses. Following are the means of the OSR is… questions, which I think of as the basic “meaning” questions. We also asked each of these questions in terms of respondent desires, so we will be able to look at the discrepancy between what people believe OSR is and what they want it to be.

These averages tell a simple story, which is that respondents agree most that OSR refers to a play style and set of design principles. Respondents agree somewhat that OSR is a scene or movement and that OSR is a collection of aesthetics. Respondents are close to neutral, on average, about the commercial aspect of OSR. Looking at the text of each question, and the averages, three pairs seem to hang together conceptually, tapping into game design, social, and commercial aspects, with aesthetics and specific rules off in their own space. Formal statistical analysis1 leads to the same conclusion, so I averaged each of those three pairs into new scores for the game design, social, and commercial aspects. In the following figures, I color code aspects where possible, using black for rules, green for commerce, and blue for social interaction. I created similar scores for aspects as desired (that is, what respondents say they would like OSR to mean).

The following figure shows a box plot of the three aspects. Quartiles determine the look of box plots. The central line in each box shows the median. The diamonds represent outside values, which are values more than 1.5 quartiles away from the median.

One way to interpret the the greater number of outside values for the rules aspect compared to the other aspects is that there is more consensus around the rules aspect. The quartiles are tighter. Looking at a similar figure that compares OSR participants to non-participants yields similar conclusions, though participants seem to both perceive and want a greater social component. (The right pane below is OSR participants.) It is perhaps unsurprising that the discrepancy between perception and desire is greater for non-participants than participants on average, as that mismatch may be part why non-participants avoid participating to begin with.

Age provides a potential explanation, at least partially, for broader misunderstanding and disagreement, shown in the following figure. Younger respondents seem to have stronger beliefs about OSR meaning compared to older respondents (as in, positions more strongly held). Further, there is a stark divide between commerce and social/game design aspects for younger players. Older players seem to agree, relatively speaking, that OSR is more about rules than social interaction or commerce, but are basically neutral, on average, regarding OSR as commerce or social interaction. (The pattern looks similar if I plot a figure using years playing tabletop roleplaying games as the independent variable, rather than age.) I suggest only interpreting the linear predictions (the lines) for age < 60, as the number of responses decreases markedly for age > 60.

This pattern is similar for non-participants compared to participants, though older non-participants have much stronger aversion to the social component of the OSR (see figure below). Though the left pane may look sparse compared to the right pane, 372 responses is substantial.

1. A three-factor model fits the data best, with the three item pairs loading heavily on factors consistent with the three aspects explained above. For stats nerds, I used exploratory factor analysis with maximum likelihood estimation and oblique promax rotation. I chose oblique rotation because the latent variables are correlated above a conventional threshold, making orthogonal rotation less appropriate. I chose to score latent variables using averages rather than factor scores so that interpretation of the results in terms of the seven-point response scale is possible. ↩

OSR survey report

Table of contents