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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4283132" data-attributes="member: 42582">KM, thanks for the thoughtful series of posts.This is true of fast food. I don't get the sense that it's interestingly true of 4e in a way that it wasn't of 3E. Both give races, gods, an implicit social system etc.Fast food also implies bland, unhealthy, tasteless, poor quality etc. In short, generic. I don't get that feel from 4e at all. I get it less from 4e than from 3E precisely because of the design of 4e's powers (as I've sketched in earlier posts). It may be that my response in this respect is atypical.I see the force of your argument. I'm not sure what the true response should be. But here is one response which I would like to be true, even though it may not be.Adorno and the other Frankfurt school theorists took the view that, when it comes to aesthetics, the masses would prefer the (self-evidently, to those theorists) superior high culture over low culture if only they got the chance to be exposed to it and make it their own. (A somewhat related notion lay behind the movement for working men's colleges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centures.)Ron Edwards' attitude towards RPGing, as expressed in his essays, has a similar optimistic tone: the masses would love RPGs if only good RPGs were made accessible to them.I would like to think that 4e might be something that vindicates Ron Edwards' view, and therefore the Frankfurt school aesthetic theory, at least in one aesthetic domain (namely, that of the RPG). That is, that we have a game which can be played and appreciated for what it is by the masses, not because it speaks down to them or has been made "casual", but because it speaks aesthetic truth to them and makes that truth accessible to them.If such a thing were possible, then it could be true that a game could appeal to the casual gamer without forsaking that which makes it rich for the hardcore.Now, all the above might seem like mere academic wishful thinking or projection! But there are a couple of historical examples that show that it can happen: in the nineteenth and early twentieth century (basically, the pre-modernist period) the great authors (eg Twain, Dickens) were also popular authors; from the 30s till some time around the end of the 70s the great flims (Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Les Enfants du Paradis, Midnight Cowboy, 2001) were also the popular films. So it doesn't seem to be a necessary cultural truth that the great cannot also be the popular.Anyway, whether or not the any of the above is actually true, I hope it explains why I can see the force of your argument and yet refrain from fully agreeing with you.</blockquote>

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