Wayside said: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.