First off, kudos to Samuel for the thimble/bucket/barrel analogy for the Forge. It expresses my difficulties with the categorization system well.
Lostsoul said:
Wait, I'm lost. "Story Now" or "story now"? You see how I define "Story Now" - addressing moral and ethical issues. If the goal isn't to address those issues, it's not "Story Now." (Using my own definition.) The desire to be part of/create a story isn't necessarily part of that.
For instance, playing through the saga of Beowulf with the intent of creating a story that mirrors Beowulf's. (Let me clear that up - where the goal of play is to stay as true to the story of Beowulf as possible, and avoiding making your own, personal choices about the issues brought up in that saga; instead, you want to follow Beowulf's lead, and make the choices that he made.) Since you aren't addressing moral and ethical issues, it's not "Story Now".
The players want a story, but they avoid making personal choices about moral and ethical issues via gameplay - it doesn't fit my definition of "Story Now". It might be "story now", however.
Maybe that means that "Story Now" is a bad label.
Maybe? Maybe!? The fact that a term means something radically different depending on whether it’s capitalized!?
Let’s suppose I wanted to rehabilitate narrativism into what a friend of mine, who is a Forge regular, thinks it is. I would define narrativism as follows:
A creative agenda where the participants wish to engage in collaborative storytelling by decentring from the GM those elements of the rules that permit direct modification of the story unmediated by the game world’s physics or the constraints of the individual powers/boundaries of a character. For example, a narrativist group might have rules enabling players to create and stat important NPCs during play; they might have rules enabling players to create or modify the challenges faced by their character or those characters played by others. An example of such a game is the Forge-affiliated
Prime Time Adventures.
Prime Time Adventures, as I understand it, can be played equally well by people choosing to conceptualize the choices they are making, as players, about the challenges their characters and those of fellow players face as moral or ethical and those who conceptualize them based solely on aesthetic criteria. I see no great conflict within a group comprised in equal parts of players who conceptualize the choices and situations they play out in different ways.
The only way they are going to come into conflict is if those who are choosing to think about these things as about morality/ethics as opposed to coolness or grittiness is if they are arrogant pricks who can’t take gaming with people who fail to take notice of their profundity. Isn’t the purpose of identifying these different styles to prevent conflicts in creative agenda? Everybody in my example has a “story now” agenda but because half of them aren’t using the game to explore human ethics and morality, the game can’t be classified as “Story Now.”
Wil said:
So, the Forge is like my company's Princeton office - they're trying to tell us what's innovative, what we should like, what is the best game to do x with - and they've distanced themselves enough to not quite understand why most gamers don't care.
I think you are mistaken Wil. I think being a Forgeite wouldn’t be a desirable identity if it were available to everyone. How can people who play these games know they are superior if any old gamer might purchase, appreciate and, heaven forbid,
understand them.
eyebeams said:
Mind you, the "never play the games," thing has to do with Ron's bizarre assertion that nobody plays Vampire, but that's a different humdinger.
Do you mean that it falls into the fourth category of “illusionism” where people only think they’re playing a game. (I was stunned to discover that this was actually part of Forge thought!)
Wayside said:
Gaming doesn't have to be about anything. Gaming doesn't even have to be about gaming.
I hate to tell you this but yes it does. I can write all kinds of forum posts in this space but what I can’t do is write a post that is not about this post. It is impossible for a thing to
be itself and not
pertain to itself.
Nobody's right or wrong in any absolute fashion,
Wrong again Wayside!
You’re wrong. Right now.
Umbran said:
Um, perhaps because quality of product doesn't mean diddly if you dont' have major marketing and distribution so that people hear about it and can get their grubby paws on it? Making a good product and reaching an audience with that product are two thoroughly separate activities.
While I don’t go all the way down the road with D20 Dwarf that good=popular and bad=unpopular when it comes to RPGs, to state that quality and popularity have nothing whatsoever to do with eachother is kind of absurd. There’s a pretty wide distance between “identical” and “completely separate.” The truth is somewhere in there. Otherwise, the Phantom Menace is an objectively great movie. Otherwise, Ishtar (a movie I happen to like by the way) is of equal quality to Schindler’s List.
I think D20 Dwarf’s main point, however, is not about a product’s quality but about how influential it is. The fact is that while there isn’t going to be a 1:1 correspondence here, there is pretty clearly a direct variation relationship.
Where I come from, disparity comnes from differences. I'd imagine that if most gamers are bad at gaming, then the quality of play in most groups would be rather uniformly bad. Only groups of collected good gamers would have high-quality play. If good gamers are in the minority, there should be few of these groups, and thus few incidents of disparity.
Disparity in what sense? There are as many kinds of bad play as there are of good play, perhaps more.
mythusmage said:
My purpose here is nothing so benign as trying to win. No, my purpose when replying to your statements and assertions is a cruel one. It is a vile and nasty one. My purpose is to make you doubt.
If you want eyebeams to doubt that you are wrong, posting things like this isn’t exactly feeding into your grand strategy.
Jim Hague said:
the assertion that you need to immerse yourself in the community or be considered a wannabe is downright destructive.
Well observed Jim! The Forge’s occult approach to discourse (which is mainly what I’m referring to when I complain of ‘poststructuralist blather’) is such a huge chunk of its problem.
If you told me some crap movie I'd never heard of was the greatest film ever made and that all commercially successful films from the last 5 years owed it gratitude, I would think you were off your rocker. "High quality products will find distribution" is not the same thing as "that with the best distribution has the highest quality."
