S
Sunseeker
Guest
Sure. I disagree with that particular author that "unknown knowns" defines ideology. There's nothing inherent to ideology that makes it particularly subconscious and the assertion that ideology is an "unknown known" seems to ignore the many ideologies that people consciously subscribe to. That's not to say you can't have both subconscious and conscious ideology or that there's no such thing as subconscious ideology, but IMO, if you need to define a thing by using two words such as "subconscious ideology" you are speaking about a specific form of ideology and not public or known or overt ideology. You can't simplify your statements by leaving out "subconscious" because then you're talking about something else. This isn't so much of a critique of @darkbard but more of one of the author he is quoting.Well, I think this aspect of @darkbard's claim - that people believe things they're not aware of believing - was evident as soon as reference was made to unknown knowns.
I think the reason this happens is that the GM is always working from a top-down approach, which generally suggests one of two strategies for creation: start with something specific (like this one civilization you have in mind) and work out from there, or start from something general and detail inwards (like starting with a blank world map). The problem lies in the fact that IRL, the world exists outside of the existence of the viewer. DMs, for good or ill, attempt to model this, but even the most advanced computers cannot simulate all the processes of the world, across the whole world at once. For that, DMs turn to dice, which is a poor adjudication method because the systems in play IRL are not based on random chance, even if they may have, eons ago, been seeded by random chance, those processes are now the result of understandable and somewhat predictable mathematics.Relating Weber and ideology to worldbuilding in RPGs: I think many fantasy RPG settings are presented in a strangely rationalist fashion. There are accurate maps, accurate conceptions of history and politics, rather unified cultural and linguistic practices, etc. Even Glorantha - which makes a serious attempt at presenting a non-disenchanted world - suffers from this, in the sense of being presented to us in a series of more-or-less logically organised textbooks that document, in rational fashion, the non-rationalistic lives and beliefs of the Gloranthans.
How would "worldbuiding" for a fantasy RPG look if it was attempting not just to assert, but to produce an experience of, a non-disenchanted world? It couldn't start with maps and catalogues. It couldn't start with an assumption that the roll of the dice models impersonal causal forces. How would we do it?
But a DM can't rightly simulate that, but I think there's a strong belief within worldbuilding that, particularly in circles where Random Tables are popular, that the DM needs to. And THAT I think harkens back to the OP's article, which (since I can't read it now) was hopefully arguing that DM's shouldn't been that need to simulate everything.