At the risk of repeating myself from the very beginning of the the thread-
First, the OP was saying something negative about other playstyles by definition. If he hadn't been, then people wouldn't have reacted the way they did. Notice that when Hussar tried to agree with him, he reiterated his thesis statement by asserting the strong version (that RPGs have a point, and he was telling us what the point was). That you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there. It's not your ox being gored.
I didn't see it as a negative comment on other playstyles. But maybe you have a point in that it's not my ox. Although, I use plenty of narration and description in my play, so I don't think of it as a case where it doesn't pertain to me.
But to your other point- as already discussed:
Certain genres of TTRPGs are depending on performance and/or the use of narrative to evoke emotion.*
An easy example is Paranoia, and other games that use humor.
Another easy example is any type of LARPing.
Moving on, we have diceless systems (Amber, for example) and other RPGs that depend heavily on narrative and/or performance.
Then, we have other genres- horror, for example. Call of Cthulhu is an example of a game where narrative matters a great deal.
I think Call of Cthulhu is a great example. I would expect most games of it would lean heavily on mood, and that one of the ways mood would be established would be through description, and choice of narration, and tone, and so on.
But do you think that this is a question of style over substance?
Do you think that you can achieve an engaging Call of Cthulhu session without leaning heavily on these things?
From there, we can look at thematic choices within a game. For example, some groups might be drawn to Ravenloft, or Dark Sun, within D&D because these particular settings allow for more narrative and/or performance than "traditional" D&D.
What has been aggravating is that, for some of us, performance and narration matters; both as DMs and as players. In fact, the emergent quality of the game is improved by the component abilities of both the DM and the players. To see that level of engagement that some of us enjoy reduced to "funny voices" as we have repeatedly seen throughout this thread is the type of hostile denigration that is not productive.
The "funny voices" comments I can see as being annoying. I don't think all of them were meant that way so much as they were simply a shorthand for "performance", but I can see how repeated use of that kind of phrase would be annoying.
Put another way; it is inarguable that RPGs can use different techniques to evoke emotion and engagement than other media; but they also share techniques as well. To use an example I used hundreds of comments ago- you can't use a jump scare in a book, and you can't use the repetition of words to evoke fear in a movie; but just because movies and books are different doesn't mean that they don't share some commonalities when it comes to creating tension and fear, and no one would credibly argue, "You can only use JUMP SCARES in movies. That's it. Because they are different." By the same token, there are commonalities between books, movies, video games, and RPGs when it comes to creating a sense of horror, dread, and fear.
I agree with this. Each media will have its own techniques, but there will also be a pool of techniques that are available to multiple media. I do think that RPGing is unique in that it is a game, and potentially open ended in that sense. Much of it is undetermined even as those who are participating are experiencing it. So is that element, the fact that it is a game, important?
If so, is it paramount?
Must the RPG engage the players in the way a game engages participants more than an RPG must engage an audience in the way other media do?
I feel like the game is more important to the performance. I don't think it must always be so, but I would tend to make that call.
Do you think that the performance is more important than the game?
