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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 8932416" data-attributes="member: 7023840">I do not agree regarding the continuing positive contributions of the Forge. Look at this thread, for instance. There is no mention of the Forge in the OP (I should know!). The thread explicitly is noting that we should be moving toward better and more neutral terms.Nonetheless, within the space of a few pages, we are embroiled in yet another thread that's all about the Forge.Let us look at this in terms of what has become the favored metaphor in the prior comments- music. Maybe the Forge was punk rock! Sure. But at this point, to torture the analogy, it would be as if fans who attended some shows of the Sex Pistols in the late 70s were showing up to a Public Enemy concert and lecturing Chuck D and fans of hip hop that they're all doing it wrong, and that punk rock is the avant-garde, and everyone needs to talk about punk rock. Except ... Public Enemy is closer in time to the end of punk rock than we are to the end of the Forge as a creative force. Really.Which is why it is disappointing that we cannot have a discussion of RPGs that doesn't somehow end up with ... yes, the Forge (and Ron Edwards). There has been a bloom of academic material, coinciding with the explosion of popularity of RPGs. Even if you are a fan of the Forge, it is bizarre that it keeps getting dragged into conversations given the vast amount of things that it does not and cannot bother covering- including things that are incredibly important, such as issues of representation and diversity in roleplaying games; power dynamics; bleed; you know, things that matter and are important to people in the community beyond just the tired old debates of people from two decades ago that weren't interested in those issues.There is (just as there has always been!) an amazing amount of truly great work done by Nordic LARPers in terms of defining the basic terms and going through the meta-ideas of the game.There is some great and amazing work done on the history of the game; unsurprisingly, the various RPG theories advanced by the Forge were just the rehashed debates from the early years of the game. Much like music, it goes in cycles- punk wasn't new, it was just the current manifestation of the same cycle (the rebellion against the dominant paradigm). Music, art, fashion- plus ca change.There are an increasing number of academic works and published articles exploring RPGs from a diverse number of perspectives and disciplines. Again, it is unfortunate that, for some participants, regular discussions by people here are not academic enough or use the proper jargon, but actual academic discussion are somehow too dry, or too historical.There is some absolutely bang-up work about RPGs and their roles in expressions of queer identity and also how they can reify or subvert typical expressions of race.If you truly are interested, there are worse places to start than this, which I previously linked to-[URL unfurl="true"]blackgreengames.com/thoughts/[/URL]Again, that's just a starting point, and will show you that there is an explosion of books, papers, articles, and even courses on all sorts of issues .... If nothing else, it will provoke some thoughts. All that said, at this point I think that it would be impossible to have a conversation about topics from the last twenty years without creating a "+" thread with a "No Forge Talk Please" rider, as suggested by [USER=177]@Umbran[/USER] ... because it's clear that the use of the term theory or criticism in any thread is like a blinking neon light. <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=";)" />So I will think about whether it's worth doing, and maybe create a thread starter at some point in the future for a thread to see if we can avoid the inevitable.ETA- Or, you know, someone else can start it!</blockquote>

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