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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5196292" data-attributes="member: 2067">Looks like there's a bit of a misunderstanding.Oh, I'm not saying it's a causal relationship or anything. Sorry if I implied that. I'm just saying that it can happen. It's a risk, when you intellectualize things. It becomes about the intellectualization, and not about the thing. I'm sure you know art folks who are much more concerned about the context of their work then the work that they're doing. Heck, the creative types I associate with all come to that bridge sooner or later, they all have moments of it, and some never really move past those moments. A work can be too self-conscious, too aware of itself. This is part of what the hodge-podge of movements under the postmodernist (and post-post?) banner are aware of. This is meta-recursion -- references about references, rather than things. Heck, a huge chunk of modern art of all genres falls into this abyss sooner or later, but that's a whole different bucket of worms. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> As it applies to gaming at the table with your buddies, though, the expression is this: being so worried about getting something right, according to certain definitions of right, that you loose sight of what it's actually supposed to do for you in the moment.I don't think unbalanced = fun is necessarily true, just that you can have fun without things being cautiously balanced. So being balanced isn't a prerequisite for fun, nor does balance, in and of itself, make fun happen. Balanced things can make things more fun as well -- just as education about context can make creative art more fun, too. But I think we'd both agree that  there is a point at which, as Vonnegut said, it disappears up its own *. Just before that quote in the Paris Review, Vonnegut talks about how writers don't come from the English department at your local college. Much more likely from chemistry, zoology, anthropology, physics, astronomy, medical school, and law school. The point here is not that education is a bad thing, just that it can overshadow what you do, and if it does that, then it becomes a bad thing. If you're thinking about rules more than about if your players are cheering and whooping, you're probably not thinking about the right thing. You've disappeared up your own *. Balance can help you achieve that cheering and whooping, but it is not the thing you should be thinking too much about.</blockquote>

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