Subjectivity, Objectivity, and One True Wayism in RPGs

[Neonchameleon]

Your two reasons are invalid for two more reasons.

The first is that the subtlety of a hoax is a matter of perspective. I and a few others found Reveille's hoax to be equally unsubtle--and yet almost all of ENWorld fell for it. Do you know why? Good will. That's what the editors of Social Text were guilty of. That and being a small, irrelevant journal that didn't referee submissions.

Good will and sheer incompetence. There is no way that paper could have been put together by anyone with even a cursory understanding of either mathematics or physics. The Social Text editors were composing an issue on Science Wars (their term). And that it made it through any sort of editing process (as it did) shows very clearly that the editors, despite being prepared to blather about the sociology of science for pages, had absolutely no understanding of any modern mathematics or physics.

For that matter, if Sokal's quotes are fair and accurate, could someone take away Luce Irigaray's keyboard every time she tries to write something even vaguely concerning the sciences please?

The second is that the damning part was indeed getting the paper published, as Sokal's whole point was a) the lack of rigorous evaluation humanities papers undergo, and b) the anti-intellectualism this fosters by allowing two-bit humanities folk (of which I know firsthand there are many) to publish uninformed screeds critical of the sciences.

That was Sokal's goal, granted. He succeeded far more comprehensively than that. If he'd succeeded in a small, out of the way journal that was just publishing random articles it would have shown very little. But the article of Social Text was on "Science Wars" - their term of choice. Apparently they enjoyed the war as long as it was them firing on scientists. They "engaged in some speculation about his intentions, and concluded..." that the response was quite clearly not to show the article to anyone who understood anything about the science he was talking about. Or to show anyone who understood anything about science the rest of the article. Apparently studying and making war on science is best done by people with no understanding of it or even the language of science (i.e. mathematics).

So, to reiterate, the comparisons are valid, since the issue for Sokal was the lack of rigorous evaluation, and scientific journals have routinely showcased a comparable lack of rigorous evaluation.

Hardly routinely. But that's why he submitted, granted. What he actually hit was something far more damning.

Schön, who received several prizes for his fabricated work, is an even more damning example of this.

Schon is out and out fraud. There are also very few tell-tales in any one of his papers. Sokal's is littered with tell-tales. It was designed to not be hard to spot. Schon's was designed to be as hard to spot as possible.

When you say things like this you make it very hard for me to take you seriously. One editor suspected that Sokal had been serious but lost his nerve. One. Suspected.

One suspected that after a patently absurd hoax (relating the axiom of choice and the axiom of equality to feminist theory) was revealed it was still a result of his changing his mind.

There was not then and never has been any unified "post-modernist camp."

Point.

On the contrary, the very definition of postmodernism is "incredulity towards metanarratives."

Which is itself the biggest metanarrative since the Watchmaker Universe. Possibly bigger.

And yet they were still, unlike Social Text, refereed journals. There's a reason Sokal chose a small, unrefereed political journal for his hoax. He was never going to get that paper published in boundary 2, let alone PMLA.

Oh, probably not. It's you claiming that just getting it published was the core issue.

 

[Storminator]

That's very interesting. I've found, in playing a number of different games, that I strongly prefer convergent games.

I would think that in a convergent game you have a lot of trust in your DM. In a divergent game you need to trust everyone, right? Because each one of them can seize control of the narrative at any moment. I've tried at times to introduce various narrative control elements into my games, usually with poor results. My players tend to revert to letting me run the show. Perhaps I've been sabotaging my efforts with some unexamined assumptions I'm making about the game structure.

Hmmmm. Does round-robin DMing introduce a divergent paradigm into the campaign, even tho each adventure is still convergent? Would that loosen things up enough to move to a more divergent game? Interesting...

Thanks for the insights howandwhy!

PS

 

[howandwhy99]

That's very interesting. I've found, in playing a number of different games, that I strongly prefer convergent games.

There is a mechanic in Burning Wheel that - under a certain style of play - allows players to declare facts about the game world. I find this unpalatable; if you are truly trying to see how far you are willing to go to get what you want, or if you can, this kind of mechanic can disrupt things.

I dislike answering for storygame design as it isn't my preference, but I would suggest looking at stake-setting as you being in control of when you want your themes of meaningful choices to be addressed. Having difficult choices you didn't sign up for can feel tyrannical and autocratic. Don't forget, in Burning Wheel you have the option to roll to worsen your PC's situation for narrative reasons as well as improve them.

"The orcs are chasing you into the woods."
"Are there any creatures in the woods who may hate orcs? I have Forest-wise, I might know of some."

We do the: "Does anyone remember or have notes on any creatures in these woods we might use against the orcs!"


@Storminator,
PFGs are trust games. Collaborative games have all rules in the open. That's actually something that has been used to deride old school games.

Round-robin storytelling is collaborative storytelling, so games like 4E and most every other game recently published is a round-robin design. In a more traditional sense, switching DMs between sessions means switching games, so it doesn't loosen things up. If each DM took over from the other, well, even then no. A PFG is like a guessing game. Once you told the hidden rules to the next GM, you couldn't "go back" and somehow play in that game. It becomes a codebreaking game where you set up the code for yourself.