The-Magic-Sword
Small Ball Archmage
So to be clear, I did understand your connotation, I am asserting that the G elements themselves were likely fun for people with different tastes than you, in the same way that Fighting Video Games get a lot of heat for being clunky or unfun but have a devoted following that enjoys them, and converts who used to feel that way but don't anymore (like me!) It's telling that games you would identify as having more or less identical gameplay loops nevertheless engender vicious edition wars and other schisms over the outsized impact of their small differences-- if the G portion of the difference between say, Pathfinder 2e, DND 5e, and Old School Essentials (three games with extremely similar loops) didn't matter, it mattering wouldn't have such a large impact on the scene.The thing is is that I'd hope if one is seeking to discuss theory that they, in turn, are willing to then accept a more objective discourse. Its not lost on me that improv has baggage as a term, but I can also put that aside and focus on whats actually being said through the word, and not what we colloquially associate with it.
Back in the day I used to run into the same issue with political theory, in particular the baggage of the word "anarchy" when it came to discussing anarchism. If one can't or won't be more objective, it just leads to the conversation being held hostage as we try to skirt around the least convoluted word to describe something because it has colloquial baggage.
Its a lot more concise to just say anarchy than it is to say anarchist society or whatever, and we can take the steps to ensure that contextually we understand whats being said.
The use of improv in this case is the same sort of situation.
It'd be a mistake to assume I'm the only one with my thoughts. I do interact with people in real life, and we collectively think the way we do for a reason.
But more than that, it misses what I meant by that, which is completely on me as I didn't elaborate. My bad.
When I said those games aren't fun, I was referring to specific core elements of them, rather than the overall experience. What we might call the "G" parts of the RPG.
The RP part is always consistently fun, and that tracks. The people I play with are all pretty good at it, even when entirely divorced from any sort of G, and that we all recognize that RP is what we're doing plays into that.
The G parts however are seldom that consistent, and this is related to another wide reaching opinion of mine that finds the fact that so much of the hobby is the same 5 or 6 game systems copy and pasted a million times over distasteful.
Too many games have more or less identical game loops, and even where the quality is at its best, its often not any more fun than the original was.
I was saying that simplification requires abstraction. The jargon laden crosstalk I was referring to is more or less the opposite.
I'm using analysis in the colloquial sense, not the literary. If you don't believe analysis is necessary for game design, thats fine I suppose, but that is so incredibly flabbergasting a stance to take that I can't even engage with it on an objective level. Its patently absurd.
Your distaste for that in the abstract, is more disqualifying than it is informative, novelty isn't itself, much of anything.
As for Anarchism, that itself is a fraught field because not only are there connotations and whatever you believe it really means, but also other people's identification of the core of that movement (Against Me's hit song "I Was a Teenage Anarchist" comes to mind as a pithy expression of what I mean.) The desire to use it anyway and dismiss the baggage it comes with as orthogonal to it's core meaning doesn't really withstand scrutiny because your authority over the term isn't capable of imposing itself on the generalized meaning of how the term has been experienced. This also gets into the nature of simplification, because control of language determines control of the concepts that can be discussed, if we cut away the seemingly problematic baggage of the term, we might be eliding the problematic portions of the concept itself from discussion, rather than some kind of red herring. It's a No-True-Sctosman, problem, in other words.
Analysis in the colloquial sense has the trouble of being whatever you'd like it to be, in this case it appears to be a mechanism by which subjective assertions of tastemaking are laundered into something more authoratitive, which I'm not looking to be permissive towards, as an intellectual stance. People will like things that you don't, and that's fine, the discussion isn't really about rejecting the form, the form is self-validating on the basis that there exist people who enjoy it or who find meaning in it or whatever means it derives value for some group, it's about understanding the form and how it operates, and what is appealing about it for those people. There is a lot of analysis going on in this thread, it's tastemaking masquerading as analysis that we might have a problem with, at least to my mind.