What is "The Forge?"

[eyebeams]

So good gaming is having fun without impinging on the fun of the group or the game, but this always ongoing negotiation on the part of the players never has the force of a contract, not even in the categorical form you have given it here?

Ideally, but the tragedy is that this ideal can never really exist. One of the problems with the Big Model is that it does abhors these paradoxes to the point of ignoring or overgeneralzing them.

If I understand where you're going with this (and really I'm taking my cue more from the interest in poststructuralism you claimed earlier than from anything immediately visible in the text above), you want basically to do away with any totalizing concept of the game in favor of conversations about this game, someone's game, some group's game. From a design perspective I can see how that would take you to some interesting places, and it certainly forbids, as you said, a designer auteurism.

Yes! But we can also talk about commonalities and even larger models, as long as we understand that the model-making is in of itself something contingent upon the text of the discussion (the games we see and the people talking), and not an appeal to an ideal intellectial edifice for RPGs to situate themselves in. We have the advantage of similarities as well as differences in the subjective viewpoints we have playing, so talking about games and extending that talk into prescription is also a kind of "play."

What I mean is that we can still talk about "powergamers," but we know that we are not talking about something rigorous and must be prepared to go back to the semantic well to avoid stopping points where we agrue about what a powergamer is. We must accept that we will have differences about these things because the nature of talking about gaming makes such definitions amorphous.

So you and I talk about powergamers. Every once in a while we disagree, the term destroys itself, and we work it back up from specific instances and commonalities. What we write and read are ultimately the notes to ourselves we use to help better our games, rather than membership in a community of people following a set of ideas.

One we get here we can readmit the Forge's conversations with such a healthy sense of play.

I don't know that I believe gaming has to be about fun, anymore than I believe art has to be about beauty, but the rest of what you're saying is interesting. The emphasis on fun, while no doubt necessary commercially, seems to conflict with it though. Then again, internal conflicts can be very productive as well.

Well, look at "fun," as a shorthand for some form of utility.

 

[eyebeams]

True, game rules are included because they're deemed relevant to the game: Cthulhu without sanity, D&D without hit points or D6 Star Wars without the wild dice would play very differently. But sometimes rules are included for more trivial reasons that: encumbrance and mundane equipment (food, fire etc) being the obvious ones. These things need to be acknowledged for those people who it matters to, be it people who want to control these factors in a realistic way, or those who play in a game where these are more than trivial matters. (Waterskins in my D&D game are irrelevant: but the post-apocalyptic game my player is going to run next would suffer a big mood change without it)

Perhaps this is just a design methodolgy thing. Certainly, RPG designers should accept that their system will be house ruled all over the place and played in a variety of different ways. You may design your game for a narrow play style but even that can have wiggle room: WFRP may only really be a game system for playing fantasy horror adventures in a Warhammer World-like place, but even there the choice between "nobles banding together to fend of the seedy underbelly of the town" and "peasants rallying to save their home from corrupt aristocrats" would affect how much I'd worry about the price of a normal meal. :>

Well, rules like SAN, Vampire's Humanity and so on *loosely* direct players to a certain kind of play. I'm not saying that games should be utterly rudderless, but that we ought to expect significant flexibility.

 

[Samuel Leming]

I would just like to say that game rules = game world physics is the best way to express my view of gamng that I have heard.

"Rules == game world physics" is one of those phrases that sounds really good when you first hear it but starts to look shallow once you think about it a bit.

Sam

 

[eyebeams]

Do you mean that it falls into the fourth category of “illusionism” where people only think they’re playing a game. (I was stunned to discover that this was actually part of Forge thought!)

No. Ron believes that not many people actually play Vampire. He thinks everybody just buys the books to read. This is a common bit of silliness that was making the rounds in other circles, too.

If you want to really see Ron go off, venture the idea that Vampire is an indie game because it's creator owned and directed (Mark Rein*Hagen still part owns WW, after all) at least as much as Heroquest is.

 

[fusangite]

No. Ron believes that not many people actually play Vampire. He thinks everybody just buys the books to read. This is a common bit of silliness that was making the rounds in other circles, too.

I realize that. But it's also true that in his GNS essay, he explains that Vampire doesn't fit into G, N or S but is in fact an "Illusionist" game because people only think they are playing a game but are actually spectators.

 

[WayneLigon]

I realize that. But it's also true that in his GNS essay, he explains that Vampire doesn't fit into G, N or S but is in fact an "Illusionist" game because people only think they are playing a game but are actually spectators.

OK, that finally got my curiosity up enough to ask where this essay is. Is it in the RPG.net threads mentioned at the beginning of the thread? Does he mean he thinks people playing Vampire are being railroaded by a GM that misunderstands the concept of 'telling a story'?

 

[Wayside]

OK, that finally got my curiosity up enough to ask where this essay is. Is it in the RPG.net threads mentioned at the beginning of the thread? Does he mean he thinks people playing Vampire are being railroaded by a GM that misunderstands the concept of 'telling a story'?

Here you go, Wayne.

 

[LostSoul]

I realize that. But it's also true that in his GNS essay, he explains that Vampire doesn't fit into G, N or S but is in fact an "Illusionist" game because people only think they are playing a game but are actually spectators.

That's interesting, I didn't get that from the essay. It could be that I'm reading the wrong one. Let me quote it:

The players of the vampire example are especially screwed if they have Narrativist leanings and try to use Vampire: the Masquerade. The so-called "Storyteller" design in White Wolf games is emphatically not Narrativist, but it is billed as such, up to and including encouraging subcultural snobbery against other Simulationist play without being much removed from it. The often-repeated distinction between "roll-playing" and "role-playing" is nothing more nor less than Exploration of System and Exploration of Character - either of which, when prioritized, is Simulationism. Thus our players, instead of taking the "drift" option (which would work), may well apply themselves more and more diligently to the metaplot and other non-Narrativist elements in the mistaken belief that they are emphasizing "story." The prognosis for the enjoyment of such play is not favorable.

He's saying that they are not creating a "story" - not that they are just spectators in the game, as far as I can tell.

edit: I can't find an instance where he's saying that people aren't playing when they are engaged in illusionism (I have seen instances where he says that it is a fun way to play, however).

edit, take 2: Here's a link to a Forge thread about Illusionism. There doesn't seem to be much jargon there.

 

[fusangite]

The problem you're running into is this idea of a thing being itself. It makes sense and is absolutely fine, in casual conversation, to talk about things this way (I'm sitting at a desk; that's what it is). It's posed a problem for thinking, though, since the beginning, which is why you get, say, Plato coming up with that ridiculous separate world of forms. Do you believe in that world? Because I don't believe in this transcendental idea of gaming that people either hit or miss with their own practices. So no, my game, as I pracitce it, is not about gaming as you think of it. Sometimes it's not even about gaming as I think of it, anymore than going to a date at the movies has much necessarily to do with actually seeing a movie! Is that clearer?

No. Going to the movies for a date is not not about going to the movies it's just also, more importantly, about going on the date. Things can be "about" more than one thing at a time. Gaming is always about gaming; it's just also about other things too most of the time.

If taking part of a sentence out of context without bothering to understand it in its entirety is the best you have to offer, TB gave you way too much credit. I'm sorry but there is no right or wrong way to game, no right or wrong definition of what gaming has to be.

That's just not true. How can the word "gaming" have any meaning if it can potentially refer to anything and everything in in the entire world? The moment you bound/define gaming, you introduce the possibility that people will do it wrong. Take "walking" for instance. If I drag myself somewhere with my lips, I'm walking wrong.

You could come up with a definition that extends to every game (and we're talking about people playing here, not rulesets) out there, but next week some kid will come along and do it in an entirely new way, and then your definition won't be worth much. Ideas and practices change over time--is that really news? If you believe otherwise, you're wrong. It's an issue of description v. prescription.

Glad you have come up with conditions under which I can be wrong. Clearly, then, the word "define" has parameters; why doesn't the word "gaming"?

 

[fusangite]

LostSoul, I'm not going to ferret around looking for the words that gave me that impression. I'm happy to accept your judgement that I misremembered. You seem like an honest, thorough guy to me.