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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 2031754" data-attributes="member: 9225">Anybody who's afraid of giving offense really ought not to be doing creative work at all. They just don't have the stomach for it.I'm always a bit amused and a bit nonplussed that the things tha guarantee that other forms of entertainment will be garbage -- spoonfeeding the material, writing for a demographic instead of an ideas and worrying about hypothetical reception -- are, in fact, what many gamers demand.And then people wonder why games and game settings all end up looking and feeling so similar.Don't misunderstand me; working within a form is not easy and has its own rewards. But to a certain extent, when creators respond only to what they think fans want, you'll reach the point of diminishing returns.I'm not talking about ignoring fans. I'm just saying that there is always room for something new, and that if creators took that leap in a sensible fashion, things would be better for it.(Incidentally, most of the story-focued games in the 90s did not take that leap. They imitated games that did. Thus, there was a demand for games like Vampire and Ars Magica; there was most assuredly not a demand for a derivative game like Immortal or Legacy.)Put another way, Arneson and Gygax must have made a leap of faith when they introduced the idea of the dungeon adventure. Similar leaps of faith are periodically needed to keep the hobby fresh and add to its body of ideas.Where does an agenda come into it? Creative agendas are a part of a designer's arsenal. So is subtlety, satire and allegory. Disarming yourself of these just gives you less to work with; there's no sense in it.This is a particularly important issue right now, because game design is, in my opinion, critically moribund. It's currently stuck between the orthodoxies of D20 design and the Forge. I appreciate the latter for being about practical craft, but I think less and less original* work actually gets done because part of the fanbase wats to adhere to certain rigid ideas about gaming -- and, well, they make a lot of noise. Monte Cook is a notable exception here.The Forge seems to be mostly interested with perpetuating its own orthodoxy rather than investigating everyday gaming, and I don't have much use for most of the results.I think the main problem is that ver the past 35 years or more, there have been some really interesting things going on in other creative fields, and nobody's really given them a look. Arts scholarship has gone off in a lot of exciting directions, from the scientific framework fr the humanities in vogue on the right to identity-based criticism on the left. All of this stuff is pretty agenda driven, and we haven't done a very good job in harnessing it.*by original, I mean in terms of the way elements are brought together, not as a mysterious unique thing that comes out of nowhere.</blockquote>

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