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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9416100" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Is there anything whatsoever? Possibly. I don't think there's very much to it though.This would be like saying, "Is there anything to the thought that when we categorize things like Italian, Basque, Provençal, etc., that we are pigeonholing ourselves to eat a 'certain way'?" That is: Yes! The whole point of having a defined cuisine is so that you can produce dishes with a particular flavor, style, and set of ingredients with relative consistency, up to the limits of one's cooking skills. But the fact that we have definitions for these dishes and cuisines is not a straitjacket. It is a useful tool for talking about the flavors produced in our food. Treating food as though it were all one massive melange would be less useful. Are the categories artificial? Yes, certainly, they're things humans decided to create. Do people cross those boundaries? Sometimes! That's where fusion cuisine comes from, and where interesting new dishes can be born--pad thai was developed in the 20th century and couldn't exist without foods from both Asia and the Americas.RPG terms like the ones you scorn are very similar. They tell us information about what one's interest is in playing, or what experience the game (be it a campaign, a system, or something else) offers. They are artificial, as most human categorization systems are artificial, but just because they're artificial doesn't mean they're useless or harmful. It means that we should keep in mind that they were invented for some reason, and we should try to know what that reason is and why. Chesterton's Fence and such.</blockquote>

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