Aesthetic Conflict in the Musical Role-Playing Game: Runic Soundscapes

Aesthetic conflict serves as a vital tool for game design, offering a mechanism to prevent the formation of rigid, exclusionary idiocultures. By intentionally introducing tension between the differing aesthetic stances of participants, designers can foster more resilient and adaptable collaborative environments. While many role-playing games currently prioritize consensus and mutual affirmation to avoid non-diegetic conflict, this approach risks creating closed social systems that are ill-equipped to handle broader cultural differences.

The analysis centers on the musical role-playing game Runic Soundscapes, which functions as a unique case study due to its non-semantic, improvisational nature. Unlike narrative-based games where aesthetic values are often conflated with semantic content, Runic Soundscapes allows for the isolation and examination of pure aesthetic interaction. Through two years of playtesting and development, seven distinct categories of aesthetic conflict were identified: identity, interaction, materiality of sound, interpretation, ineptitude versus virtuosity, complexity versus simplicity, and form. These conflicts emerge at the intersections of various human and non-human agents, including designers, players, rules, and musical scores.

The methodology relies on actor-network theory to map these interactions, utilizing informal debriefs and personal reflections to categorize how participants navigate divergent creative values. By encouraging players to embody alternate musical identities and engage with unfamiliar aesthetic frameworks, the game provides an "alibi" for conflict, allowing participants to explore tensions safely. Ultimately, the findings suggest that incorporating aesthetic conflict into game design—supported by appropriate safety tools—enables participants to better understand and negotiate abstract aesthetic values, thereby preparing them to address more significant cultural conflicts in real-world settings.