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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 8447914" data-attributes="member: 7023840">...{I}t picks up one of a few perennial debates: realism versus playability; task resolution; game design and play advice; gender, ethnicity, and sex; and finally, the subject matter of the post, player and system typologies – what people enjoy about playing RPGs, how different people may have different preferences or styles, and how game design may accommodate that. The post responds dismissively to one of the most influential typologies, the Threefold Model, trying to focus the discussion on what “really” matters – player emotion – while also trying to claim a middle ground: “The thing is, different people’s emotional responses to different gaming techniques differ.” This move – third – can be found again and again: “Making different kinds of games to support different kinds of play and different kinds of people shouldn’t de-legitimize the kinds of play that already exist” “People can often enjoy many different types  of games. And if someone starts playing these ‘wrong’ games, they probably are getting something they missed elsewhere” Each time, a new piece of theory wishes to end fruitless debate and provide a big ecumenical tent of tolerance, yet by contributing a new piece that disagrees with previous ones, it does the opposite: continue the debate. While Henley’s blog post overtly makes light of the self-seriousness of RPG theory, it also tries to make its own theory stick. We see here at work some motives for RPG theorizing we identified: the joy of intellectual argument (and connecting over it); the desire to help design and play ‘better’ (implying particular normative ideas about what ‘good’ means); and the jockeying for social status and recognition within one’s community.Finally, fourth, we see the almost-eternal return of debates and points made previously (Henley’s appeals to affect theory are far from new), due to the ephemeral nature and fragmented structure of RPG theorizing. As Bourdieu put it: “To account for  the infinite diversity of practices{, one has} to reconstruct the networks of interrelated relationship which are present in each”. In this respect, valiant attempts to capture its history can only scratch  the surface. Cultural sociology may prove just as helpful. Future research on RPG theorizing will likely reveal just how rhizomatic our processes and means of thought and communication actually are. -Evan Torner, Theorizing by Designers and Players. (2018) (internal citations omitted; emphasis supplied).Same story, different day. It truly baffles me that:(1) There is little to no acknowledgment, especially in light of recent research, that the majority of these debates over theory have repeatedly re-occurred over the past 50 years (and have their antecedents prior to that). It's like Sisyphus.  (2) There is little to no acknowledgment that people have done and said things since 2006, or at least 2010.(3) There is little to no acknowledgment that a good portion of these conversations are about "jockeying for social status and recognition within one's community" and the so-called desire to design and play 'better.' (and what that naturally entails). (4) Finally, given the wealth of material being generated in other countries, the utter absence of credit to, or reference to, the intellectual ferment and discussions held in other countries, both in other languages or in English (the more academic work) is also strange.</blockquote>

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