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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8658759" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've got no particular view on Torner's work, which I haven't read. But I agree with your basic point.I think that the sociology of gameplay isn't necessarily relevant to technical questions of game design: for instance, it seems to be within the scope of plausible results from sociological research into gameplay that playing games serves a similar function in American urban communities today as it did thirty years ago. (I'm not saying that's true, or even the most plausible conclusion on the question; just that it doesn't seem so implausible as to be fairly obviously false, or a result that would be greeted with incredulity.) But even if such a thing were true, that wouldn't tell us anything about game design and whether or not it's developed in some way.The point of a system like Apocalypse World or Blades in the Dark, relative to D&D, isn't to change the social system within which gameplay occurs. Nor to change the fundamental reasons why people play games.The same thing could be said about recipes. Good chefs are inventing new recipes all the time, but not with the goal of changing the basic social logic of food, eating, dining out, etc. That doesn't mean that no chef has ever developed anything new. Likewise for cinema: Citizen Kane didn't revolutionise the social logic of cinema - other inventions from outside the domain of film-making, perhaps most obviously television, have done that - but that doesn't mean it didn't make significant technical innovations within the domain of film-making.I made a post in a similar vein to yours nearly a decade ago:It took time, experimentation, reflection and ultimately a particular group of designers to work out how to do this stuff. You mention Blades in the Dark, but I think the clearest technical realisation of it is Apocalypse World.</blockquote>

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