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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6201701" data-attributes="member: 4937">Err... yeah.  Ok.Based on your explanation, I haven't misunderstood your meaning.   I take 'uncomfortable truth' in this context to mean something that provokes an emotional and intellectual response from the participant - excitement, interest, introspection, etc.    And I maintain that you are no more likely to do that with a 'real' setting than a 'fantasy' setting, because ultimately you 'reality inspired' setting is just another fantasy setting however you may try to maintain a pastiche of being real.  Indeed, I maintain that by placing the details at some distance from the real world things, you probably more likely to inspire introspection and offer more opportunities for exploration because you are immediately avoiding probably the biggest source of distraction, does your reality inspired setting actually bear a close enough resemblance to reality.Science fiction and fantasy are at there strongest when they are examining reality by way of contrast and comparison.   By contrast to what you hold about reality, I postulate a universe where this is true.   Instead of arguing about the details of reality, I ask you to respond to that (in a way that is inevitably informed by what you believe about this reality).  Just as an side, it is quite possible to hold something to be offensive and to believe something is a fantasy story.  A fantasy about child rape would probably offend most people even if they took it as a fantasy story.  Furthermore, the majority of 'offense' taken against The Da Vinci Code was primarily because one of the conceits of the story was that it was not fantasy.  In other words, Dan Brown in marketing the book made claims about the stories factuality, particularly that all the artistic, historical, geographical and architectural details found in the book were true, and in that light it provoked a backlash because those claims were in fact false.   The remaining offense was primarily taken by members of real organizations who felt they had been slandered by mischaracterizations of their beliefs and memberships.   Given the way the beliefs and members of the gaming community are frequently slandered in their characterization by the media, I would think this would be something the gaming community could sympathize with.   I don't think you have to be particularly sensitive about your gaming to not want to see gamers presented in wholly negative and unsympathetic terms.Again, I protest that I know what you meant and that I read what you wrote.  And, I still for the reasons I have outlined think that is very bad advice.  If you are going to engage in mature story lines, and I mean 'mature' in the best sense of the word and not as a synonym for juvenile fascination with sex and violence, then I think that you need to create a safe mental space for that exploration to occur.   If I create a universe with the idea of reincarnation and karma, then it might be interesting to explore the different ideas about how karma is accumulated and canceled, but it doesn't follow that making that universe explicitly Hindu and pretending it is the real world adds anything to the setting.   Either the participants won't be conversant in the intricate disputes of the Hindu religion, and thus have no starting point I wouldn't have to recreate in game anyway, or else they might actually be practicing Hindus - in which case all the fun of exploring the question is sapped out of the situation because I'm being flippant and vain about something they take very seriously.Likewise, while 'Dogs in the Vineyard' involves a clear pastiche of early Mormonism, it doesn't follow that the setting would be made more intriguing by making it conform more to reality - which involves less questioning of the things explored by the setting and more (I feel unnecessary) exploring what you feel about real Mormonism.</blockquote>

Verification