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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bloodstone Press" data-source="post: 2337140" data-attributes="member: 12468">Nope. I’m about 2 posts from getting this discussion back on track.  So you’re calling me a geek? By your own admission, most people reading this thread are geeks, so I’m not sure that’s really a bad thing. Furthermore, the behaviors you describe (the tendency towards memorizing the minutiae of certain sci-movies) also applies to sports fans who memorize player stats, and team records etc.  Actually, I am just a few credit hours away from having a BS in industrial/organizational psychology with minors in business management and marketing. I’ve studied consumer psychology and psychographics in college just recently. And I really could not have explained that any better than you did.  However, there is something fundamental that you are missing. No matter what method of psychological classification you are using to define people (personality trait theory, behaviorism, psychographics etc) you can always define them with negative terms. For example, people who are into watching professional sports often have very low self-esteem. They have a desire to associate themselves with something external that wins so they can go around saying “We won.” And “My team won.” And  “We are going to the championship “ Etc. They are trying to bolster their low self-esteem by associating themselves with something that wins, so they can feel better about themselves. That is most evidenced by the fact that sports teams that enter a winning streak suddenly gain more fans and when that streak ends, they lose fans. That’s pretty pathetic, IMO. But, again, psychologists say stuff like that about everyone. In fact, Freud once said “I have found very little about people that is good. In my experience most of them are trash.”  Furthermore, psychographics is a marketing tool, not a psychological assessment tool. Psychographics are really in that gray area between psychology and sociology. To understand my personality (or anyone else’s) I’d advise using the personality trait method (which I have written extensively about in the <a href="http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=157&" target="_blank"> Book of Broken Dreams</a>). According to that methodology, my psychological profile falls somewhere in the mildly anti-social category with influences from a few other areas as well. That’s why I am so intolerant of so many things. I don’t like most things or people. That’s just the way I am. I don’t even like the cliché “98% of everything is crap.”  BTW, I suspect that eyebeams has a schizotypal personality, and that’s why he is saying many of the things he’s saying. (“creative bankruptcy,” and  “It should not be beneath gamers to sup from the very pablum they ground between the two halves of their self-loathing.”)And just so Eyebeams doesn’t get offended by that, I AM NOT saying you are psychologically disordered. EVERYONE has a personality of some sort. If you didn’t have a personality (Avoidant, Borderline, Paranoid, Anti-social, dependent, schizotypal, histrionic, Schizoid, etc) you’d be catatonic. In fact, the schizotypal personality type is probably the best one to have if you are going to be a game designer, since they tend to be more creative than other people.  Anyway. No, but you can call me a realist.  No. Reread the thread. I was comparing the number of sports players Vs the number of spectators, not the number of football players Vs the number of RPG players.  And, as an interesting side point, note that high school kids are FORCED to play football (in gym class) while some high schools still ban RPGs. That's culture for ya.  I simply disagree. I wrote the first d20 stone age product to appear on RPGow back in 2001. Since then, there has been 3 or 4 similar books put out by other people. All have their good points. All are useful in one way or another. And, because of the advantages of e-publishing and the OGL, I am about to release a revised version of the Primal Codex that incorporates some of the best OGC from those other sources.  That’s evolution of the industry and I don’t see anything wrong with it. If ten more companies decided to publish d20 stone age supplements, I’d welcome all of them.  Resisting the urge to sling more mud with Eyebeams (and provide yall with more free entertainment <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=";)" /> )  I’ll stop here.  Later, I plan to sum up the important points of this conversation, make a few last comments to get us back on track and help us start thinking about things that we can DO, rather than just talk about. Then, I’ll shut up. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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