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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8444900" data-attributes="member: 42582">What I would add to this is: most of the participants in a paradigmatic RPG adopt the "player" role, which means that their engagement with the shared imaginary space - the shared fiction - is mediated through their imagined projection into a particular person located within that shared fiction.I know that there are fuzzy boundaries here, and cases that don't fit my paradigm; but I'm trying to distinguish the "first person's eye view" that characterises a Braunstein, Blacmoor and then RPGing more generally, from the "god's eye view" that characterises a typical wargame player's engagement with the shared fiction (even in a wargame where the fiction matters to adjudication).I encounter literary theory mostly either in criticism, or when it bleeds over into social and political theory. It's normally a tool for analysing and evaluating content. It tends to take it as uncontentious that the audience has available the artefact to be criticised - though of course what exactly that artefact consists in, and how independent that is of the audience (if at all) is a matter of contention!But most RPGing analysis I'm familiar with isn't about the criticism of already available artefacts. It's an attempt to understand the processes of creating a shared fiction using RPGing techniques - or inventing new techniques that build on the core idea of the first-person perspective within a shared fiction. So I am really agreeing here with [USER=7032863]@gorice[/USER]: RPG theory mostly isn't about aesthetic criticism, but rather about resolving technical or aesthetic challenges that arise in the course of RPGing.Is there an element of observer bias here? I don't regard 5e as the RPG around which all other discussions orbit. For me, the canonical RPGs for comparison are Gygax's AD&D and Moldvay Basic; RQ; and CoC - the classics - and then AW as a modern classic. But I also like talking about systems as systems. My experience is that it tends to be those who predominantly play 5e D&D who are not happy to talk about less widely played RGS on their own terms.The seemingly widespread view that it is pretentious or elitist to enjoy or prefer RPGs other than 5e D&D strikes me as coming from much the same place as the view that it is pretentious or elitist to think that (say) My Life Without Me is a better film (both in general, and as a Mark Ruffalo vehicle) than Age of Ultron.I've never really got this. Ron Edwards analysis of purist-for-system RPGing is brilliant - as a 19-year RM devotee far more insightful than anything to be found on the ICE messageboards! Likewise his analysis of 4e D&D, all the more remarkable for being written about 5 years before the game was published! He also explains other games I've loved really well - CoC, RQ, Prince Valiant, even - I would say - AD&D. I have never felt patronised or insulted: he takes my games and (by implication) my play seriously. And helps me better understand my own engagement with them.</blockquote>

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