TTRPG Settings: A Canny Valley of Playability?

[pemerton]

I found this in Dragon 62 (p 2), reporting on the results of a survey in issue 56:

Not surprisingly, heroic fantasy was the most popular topic for games among our readers. But science fiction showed some strength we didn’t know it had; two-thirds of the respondents marked SF as one of their favorite game topics.​

 

[Aldarc]

I don’t necessarily think that it’s an issue of sci-fi vs. fantasy. Because we could look at this subject squarely within the realm of sci-fi/fantasy: without accounting for publisher reach, why are niche sci-fi settings niche and why are mainstream sci-fi settings mainstream? If we talk about this in terms of accessibility, then what makes settings accessible or not? What is the right balance of depth and shallowness? Fantastical and familiar? etc.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

It's not a claim grounded in scientific historical evidence, though.

Thank you. So don’t assert it as a fact.

For everything else, I created a new thread so as not to derail this one. If you have further comments, post them there.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

So maybe the issue is not a canny valley but is instead a pedantic valley of people who focus on tangential issues and poorly constructed analogies.

I thought your analogy was perfectly clear.

It's a shame so many people have to explain to you, in great detail, exactly what the uncanny valley means. It's almost as if they come loaded for bear without reading the OP. Oh, internet!

You know what might be interesting? A graph of popularity of different systems (and more niche ones) over time- I think there are decent figures for at least the last decade, and probably more. Then see if you can find some commonalities with them; part of the problem would be controlling for D&D and D&D-like systems (PF, etc.). But I think that the familiarity aspect matters. Then again, sometimes we mistake the familiar ...

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