Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 3767895" data-attributes="member: 7240">I guess if we understood them as poles in a continuum rather than as distinct and separate styles that do not overlap, I wouldn't have a problem. But this also doesn't mean that I prefer your heuristic to alternative modes of categorizing play. Similarly, while I would agree that the numbered elements of "acting" and "immersion" do seem to correlate positively to one another but I don't think the correlation is as strong as you perceive. Also, I would argue that you (2) in the "thespian acting" list is actually a better fit with the "immersion" category. I think all that it has in common with the acting category is that it is a gaming habit that annoys you (it annoys me too) but I find it pretty evenly distributed between the two groups.Nevertheless, I do think that the general issue you are getting at is an interesting one. The fact is that there is an increasing interest in seeing gaming as democratized narrative generation. Often, as a result, dialogue in the game becomes a performance of what it has already been agreed will happen rather than a real-time part of evolving play; character sheets begin to fill up with mechanics for players acting directly on narrative unmediated by their character. I guess where I diverge from your view is that I don't see one style as intrinsically preferable. While I, like you, have an interest in seeing the game as a world-centred rather than story-centred experience. But that's just my personal taste. I like it better but I see people who have a lot of fun in story-centred experiences where the player functions as an co-author/actor rather than in a more immersive experience. People who like that kind of gaming get different payoffs than I do. What I have noticed, and perhaps this is where your post's partisanship and apparent intolerance is coming from, is that people who are interested in your second mode of play are more assertive about this than they used to be. In recent years, online communities like the Forge have helped these people find eachother more effectively; as a result, there are more games that are well-suited to this kind of player.Let's face it. The term "immersion" has had so many different, slippery, vague, colloquial definitions in the gaming world that, at this point, it is probably best avoided altogether. It has had simply too many meanings to make attempting to stabilize them worthwhile.</blockquote>

Verification