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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 5784111" data-attributes="member: 177">I'll put it this way: That's what they want you to think. For a variety of reasons, many forces in the world put a lot of energy into making us focus on our differences, rather than on our similarities.  Now, we've only seen summaries of the WotC research, so you may take it with a grain of salt if you wish, but let me remind folks of what they found:They did a segmentation study, which means they looked for groupings of preferences among gamers.  And yes, they found them.  They are a bit, even notably, different from the GNS creative agendas, but they seem to be there.But, another thing they found is that there are a few core likes and desires that are common to most gamers.  Not only common, but in fact more important to the individuals than the things that make them different.  In short, to RPG players, pretending to be an elf is generally more important than being gamist, or narrativist, or part of whatever sub-segment of the gamer population.  This is part of why, to those who don't play the games, we all look pretty much the same.  The differences between us are smaller than the similarities.This is why I personally, and in my moderator capacity, find edition warring, what I call "dichotomy warring" (like new school/old school), or any other heated arguments so galling.  They drive wedges between people based on small differences, ignoring what is shared.  It is like two folks who really love pizza.  They love pizza in general.  But one has a leaning towards anchovies, and the other to pepperoni.  They have a knock-down, drag out fight over the anchovie/pepperoni divide, they refuse to eat with each other, and start labeling restaurants based on how much they cater to one side or another.  And they forget that all those places offer *pizza*, and that with a little forethought, they could manage their preferences - say, by getting a pie that has half pepperoni, half-anchovie, or maybe this week they both have sausage, because the pizza is the central thing they actually like, the toppings are merely accents.Now, in politics, people drive these wedges and amplify differences and claim that compromise is impossible as power plays.  I don't think that was Edwards - I think he just didn't realize that the commonalities were more important than the differences.  He didn't have the scope of data, or the detached perspective, to see it.If he did actually soften his position over time, as it seems to me he did, I give him some credit for doing so.  That shows that he was at least revising some in the presence of new information, in the form of people arguing with him."Extensive" is a vague term.  There are very few, if any, people with sufficiently broad gaming experience to claim to have a representative sample.  I've seen no sign that Edwards' personal experience was so extensive, or that he took any pains to not self-select or remove bias from his observations, such that we can call it anything other than his personal anecdotal experience.  The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".</blockquote>

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