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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8663433" data-attributes="member: 82106">Essentially you can skip to minute 30:40 where the first substantive statements are made about what the book actually says about The Forge, which is summarized as:1) The Forge community was organized around encouraging participants to design and publish actual RPGs. This was effective, as MANY titles can be seen to have been either launched there or gained some degree of inspiration and motivation there (it had a specific forum dedicated to this function).2) The 'Big Model' is &quot;Consistent with academic theories of role-playing Games.&quot; and White apparently goes on to substantiate this claim.3) It is a forum, you should consider it as such, a whole lot of individual contributions by different people at different times, etc. (much like, say, EnWorld...) . My reading of this is that it is kind of an admonition to stop painting the thing with a wide brush and pretending it is characterized by 2 or 3 posts or posters. It isn't. There were over 4,500 members and several hundred thousand posts. Beyond that White seems to think that the forum on actual play was extremely important and is often largely ignored. I mean, without reading the book its hard to say what White actually thinks overall, but the reviewers seem to feel that he's more just laying out and analyzing The Forge, and not passing a whole lot of judgment on it one way or the other. His statements about GNS/The Big Model etc. sounds to me a heck of a lot like he thinks it is a highly useful and theoretically sound analytical framework. Anyone who's thesis is &quot;GNS is nonsensical BS which is rejected by academic game studies&quot; would be best not to cite White! lol. Again, I don't have access to the book myself, but as much of the review as I've been able to go through seems to invalidate such a thesis.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 8663433, member: 82106"] Essentially you can skip to minute 30:40 where the first substantive statements are made about what the book actually says about The Forge, which is summarized as: 1) The Forge community was organized around encouraging participants to design and publish actual RPGs. This was effective, as MANY titles can be seen to have been either launched there or gained some degree of inspiration and motivation there (it had a specific forum dedicated to this function). 2) The 'Big Model' is "Consistent with academic theories of role-playing Games." and White apparently goes on to substantiate this claim. 3) It is a forum, you should consider it as such, a whole lot of individual contributions by different people at different times, etc. (much like, say, EnWorld...) . My reading of this is that it is kind of an admonition to stop painting the thing with a wide brush and pretending it is characterized by 2 or 3 posts or posters. It isn't. There were over 4,500 members and several hundred thousand posts. Beyond that White seems to think that the forum on actual play was extremely important and is often largely ignored. I mean, without reading the book its hard to say what White actually thinks overall, but the reviewers seem to feel that he's more just laying out and analyzing The Forge, and not passing a whole lot of judgment on it one way or the other. His statements about GNS/The Big Model etc. sounds to me a heck of a lot like he thinks it is a highly useful and theoretically sound analytical framework. Anyone who's thesis is "GNS is nonsensical BS which is rejected by academic game studies" would be best not to cite White! lol. Again, I don't have access to the book myself, but as much of the review as I've been able to go through seems to invalidate such a thesis. [/QUOTE]

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