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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8933319" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think I disagree with both suggestions.First, it's not clear to me that literary criticism can be applied to any written work. Is there really literary criticism of Run, Spot, Run and the similar genre of child readers? Is there really meaningful criticism of The Hardy Boys? I guess there can be sociological-type criticism of either - what sorts of human relationship, expectation, etc do they foreground (maybe someone once wrote a paper or a thesis on "Virginal eroticism in middle America: the case study of the Hardy Boys") but I don't see that there is anything  very meaningful to say about them in terms of composition, technique etc. An example in the fantasy genre, which my kids read when they were young, would be Beast Quest.To apply this in the RPG context, I reiterate what I said upthread - I know of instances of D&D play about which criticism has nothing to say. The play I see my kid and my kid's friends engage in is not developed to a point where criticism can gain any purchase. As I posted, they are at the stage where someone explaining to them that one of the GM's jobs is to frame the PCs into interesting situations might be revelatory.Second, my proposition which you disputed was A purported critical theory of RPGs, which didn't have regard to Apocalypse World and the PtbA games that have been (to various degrees) inspired by it, would seem pretty impoverished to me. This is a claim about the adequacy conditions for a critical theory: the critical theory has to have a place for, and an account of, AW if it is not to be impoverished. To put it more generally, any critical theory has to be able to account for the basic "touchpoints" in the field. What those are might be up for grabs, and as I said there can be counter-narratives; but counter-narratives are themselves reactions to received narratives - they're not just abandonments of the idea that there are adequacy criteria for a critical theory.Once someone has an interesting theory, they can go to town on whatever topics they want! But if it purports to be a theory of RPGs, and yet cannot say meaningful things about Apocalypse World, I will regard it as impoverished. (Perhaps it will be a critical theory of some sub-set of RPGs eg CoC and similarly structured RPGs. Whether such a theory has any potential for generalisation will depend on its details.)</blockquote>

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