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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6633577" data-attributes="member: 42582">In English history, enclosure means the privatisation of common lands, generally by Act of Parliament. The ostensible rationale is an increase in the economically productive use of the land (eg by turning it over to pasturage). The result is a mass migration of poor peasants and agricultural labourers, whose livelihood becomes impossible without access to the commons, to the newly-emerging cities. Where they become the industrial working class.Urbanisation is largely complete in modern England, but similar processes are still going on in other parts of the world. (For a treatment of some of the issues from one particular political perspective, see Mike Davis, Planet of Slums.)In the context of the game I'm talking about, aspects of this history would be drawn on but others set aside or romanticised/idealised. The core contrast that the game would posit would be the free, self-realising peasant or woodsman against the socially organised and integrated city-dweller. For the lawful side, the aim would be to vindicate the social transformations as showing the merits of social organisation over the poverty and vulnerability of having to live as individuals; for the chaotics, they would be vindicating the self-realising individualism of the yeoman farmer against the impersonality and degradation of becoming a mere cog in the machine of urban life.In the simple version, what would be at stake would be establishing, via game play, certain qualities of urban or rural life.In the "interpretive" version (building on my reply above to   [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] and our discussion of Nazism), there would also be conflict over the most defensible interpretation of the competing forms of life. (Eg there is certainly a school of thought that sees peasant life as highly socially regulated and cloying, and sees the anonymity and pluralism of mass urban life as a springboard for self-realisation via sub-cultures, avant garde artistic movements, etc. An Over the Edge-style or cyberpunk-ish urban game might raise issues a bit like this.)A more traditional fantasy variant of what I have in mind might involve the king's forces (including knights, paladins etc) taking over the peasant lands so as to drive off the humanoids and keep the people safe (so instead of enclosure-style migration, we have rational government and production migrating into the countryside): is this a victory for law (establishing wellbeing by bringing people into the fold of social order), or a proof that the chaotics were right all along (as people's dignity, self-realisation etc is crushed by their absorption into a callous and ultimately demeaning system of social hierarchy)?</blockquote>

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