Quote from: pemerton;724369I also got the impression that at least some of the posters here - including the OP of this thread - are not enamoured of Guthries very left politics.

OT: We had a staff seminar at my work a year or so back which described the very socially progressive social policies of 1960s Spain under Franco. It made the Fascists seem quite cuddly. And actual Italian Fascism gets a rather unfairly bad rap through being tainted by association with demonic Nazism. Nazism was one of the most evil systems in world history, and the (also very evil) Soviet regime called the invading Nazis "Fascists", because they didn't want to say the 'Socialist' in National Socialist. But Italian Fascism didn't act anything much like Nazism, Communism, or even Iberian & Latin American militarism. If Mussolini hadn't invaded Ethiopia its death toll would have been tiny. The invasion of Ethiopia was an appalling crime, but not discernably different to my mind than similar crimes perpetuated by the Liberal Democracies, certainly including Britain.

So, when I see "This Machine Kills Fascists", I feel a bit sorry for the Fascists.  

Quote from: pemerton;724369I also got the impression that at least some of the posters here - including the OP of this thread - are not enamoured of Guthries very left politics.

I think we are actually fairly split but probably not as left leaning as say rpg.net, so by comparison people often assume we are a conservative group. Myself, I grew up in Guthrie and Phil Ochs, and left, but not that far left. Generally speaking though we try not to get too deep into politics in the main forum. Stuff like that , when it appears, is usually in pundit's subforum. On the whole there is a good mix of conservatives, liberals and libertarians here.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;724382On the whole there is a good mix of conservatives, liberals and libertarians here.

I also think more of the people here who discuss such things actually debate on the level of *ideas*, rather than toeing the party line lock-step and simply demonizing people they don't agree with.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;724382I think we are actually fairly split but probably not as left leaning as say rpg.net, so by comparison people often assume we are a conservative group.

Yeah. I was on RPGnet where I heard that TheRPGSite was a"right-wing hive of scum and villainy", or words to that effect, so I went over to have a look.

I was very disappointed to discover that only part of this statement was true.

Quote from: robiswrong;724384I also think more of the people here who discuss such things actually debate on the level of *ideas*, rather than toeing the party line lock-step and simply demonizing people they don't agree with.

There's plenty of name-calling here. The big thing about TheRPGsite is that people are free to debate without the moderators squelching anyone who deviates from The Approved Party Line.

You'll never know how many non-SJWs are on RPGnet, because if they don't keep their heads down the mods will boot them. TheRPGsite looks pretty left-wing to me (possibly because by now most of the 'right wing' posters are on my Ignore List) - but people of all stripes are free to debate.

Quote from: pemerton;724179Because?

Is there any evidence that the critical aesthetic theories coming out of The Forge had political goals? Or have had any political effect?

I've noticed more than one "This Machine Kills Fascists" tag on posters on this thread - I assume that they're not really Woody Guthrie fans, but is anyone seriously comparing The Forge to Fascism? Where is the street violence and the takeover of (formerly) democratic polities?

hah-hah. No. Was referring to the borderline doublespeak going on in the quoted text.

Quote from: The Traveller;724374That doesn't mean that discussions don't get energetic, in case you missed it.

Quote from: robiswrong;724384I also think more of the people here who discuss such things actually debate on the level of *ideas*, rather than toeing the party line lock-step and simply demonizing people they don't agree with.

I guess from my point of view, I wouldn't be reading or posting on this site except that someone started a thread here to get advice on how to argue with me on another site, simply because I expressed sympathy for an analysis of RPGs that they don't agree with, and then he went on to call me naive, authoritarian and (by implication) a cocksucker. All without doing me the courtesy of PMing me on the site that we both post on.

So (i) I wouldn't really call that debating, and (ii) I would see that as a fairly high degree of hostility against someone for having a different opinion.

Probably unfairly, that has somewhat coloured my perception of the site.

Quote from: pemerton;724494I guess from my point of view, I wouldn't be reading or posting on this site except that someone started a thread here to get advice on how to argue with me on another site, simply because I expressed sympathy for an analysis of RPGs that they don't agree with, and then he went on to call me naive, authoritarian and (by implication) a cocksucker. All without doing me the courtesy of PMing me on the site that we both post on.

So (i) I wouldn't really call that debating, and (ii) I would see that as a fairly high degree of hostility against someone for having a different opinion.

Probably unfairly, that has somewhat coloured my perception of the site.

Thats fair. This site has its share of trolls, smegheads, and crusaders, but thats the cost of free speech. Take heart though in that the overwhelming initial response to that poster was to tell him to not argue about it.

Youre not going to find many GNS fans here, but you will at least find a lot of people who wont hold your opinions afainst you, no matter what thunder and lightning they make about the subject.

Quote from: Omega;724481hah-hah. No. Was referring to the borderline doublespeak going on in the quoted text.

The weird language and carefully equivocal statements were a major selling point for TBM / GNS:

One of its major draws was that it let you call popular games (e.g. Vampire) crap with a certain degree of deniability -- because the language was convoluted, and academic, theorists could claim they were making a dispassionate assessment of the game, rather than just expressing their preferences and opinions.

The inadvertent, honest, and clear Brain Damage discussion really damaged the theory -- it expressed the hilarious, indefensible foundations of the work in a way that wasn't obscured, and you can sort of see how people who were looking for a way to defensibly criticize games they didn't like more or less abandoned GNS afterward.

But I think Brain Damage only really hastened the end of the theory, anyway -- GNS was never very robust and the attempts to formalize it (the Narrativism essay) ultimately ended up making that clear and creating an easily accessible body of work that left people scratching their heads going, "huh... this doesn't make a whole lot of sense."

It would have fallen apart anyway, but the Damage let it burn out in a fantastic, public display rather than simply fading away.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: robiswrong;724384I also think more of the people here who discuss such things actually debate on the level of *ideas*, rather than toeing the party line lock-step and simply demonizing people they don't agree with.

I would agree with that on politics although the site has a rightist bias simply because most posters are from the us and the us version of a socialist is more like a centre right christian democrat that a socialist worker.

As for rpg ideology i think that will be held against you. Gns advocates, story gamers and 4vengers get short shrift here and whilst you won't get banned your posts will get dogpiled and prepare for plenty of ad hominem attacks.

Over the last few years this has become an osr board, that is the prevailing game choice. If you make a post that states what a great time you had yesterday playing od&d and loosing 3pcs in30 minutes you might get called a rookie but there will be overall support for your old school chops. Come on here posting about your marvel superheroic roleplaying game and how you love the narative mechanics will get you villified or ignored... But not banned.

Quote from: -E.;724508The weird language and carefully equivocal statements were a major selling point for TBM / GNS:

One of its major draws was that it let you call popular games (e.g. Vampire) crap with a certain degree of deniability -- because the language was convoluted, and academic, theorists could claim they were making a dispassionate assessment of the game, rather than just expressing their preferences and opinions.

Like dissociated mechanics you mean? :-)

Maybe some people liked GNS for that, I don't know. But I liked it as a tool for game design.

Quote from: -E.;724508The inadvertent, honest, and clear Brain Damage discussion really damaged the theory -- it expressed the hilarious, indefensible foundations of the work in a way that wasn't obscured, and you can sort of see how people who were looking for a way to defensibly criticize games they didn't like more or less abandoned GNS afterward.

GNS isn't 'everything Ron Edwards says or does'. GNS is a bunch of published essays. The only people who consider brain damage to be in any way the foundation of GNS are the people like you who dislike GNS and saw something they could use as a weapon against it. A lot of 'GNS people' repudiated the brain damage comments when they heard them. Do Mel Gibson's latter day anti-semitic rants retrospectively make Lethal Weapon and Mad Max racist films? There is a dividing line between the creator and the things he has created.

Quote from: soviet;724516GNS isn't 'everything Ron Edwards says or does'. GNS is a bunch of published essays. The only people who consider brain damage to be in any way the foundation of GNS are the people like you who dislike GNS and saw something they could use as a weapon against it. A lot of 'GNS people' repudiated the brain damage comments when they heard them. Do Mel Gibson's latter day anti-semitic rants retrospectively make Lethal Weapon and Mad Max racist films? There is a dividing line between the creator and the things he has created.

I hear what you are saying, seperate the artist from the art. And to an extent i do agree. Like i said before, i have no problem with edwards personally, and i don't want to judge someone for one thing (or a few things) they said on the internet years ago. In the few interactions i had with him, he seemed like a nice guy to me. I also realize it isn't just Ron, that others were involved int he devleopment of the forge and many of them are nice people. My criticiism of this stuff is more about the concepts and how they are presented, rather than the individual personalities.

With the whole brain damage thing, you are talking about a foundational essay here. We are not judging lethal weapon, we are judging passion of the christ. I do think, having read that essay, and seeing how it appears to be pretty important to GNS theory, that it is entirely valid to criticize the brain damage remark (and really the spirit the remark embodied), and to wonder if the tone of that essay contributed to some of the problems down the road. He makes some pretty strong claims in that piece about playing the game a particular way leaving permanent effects on a person's ability to be creative. To me, that just takes playstyle debates too far. And I feel like there are echoes of it in some of the other forge stuff i have read. I do realize there was a whole forum there and it wasn't monolithic. However you have to understand, anyone who encounters the forge for the first time, the first thing they do is read essays like that and read over the GNS glossary. Those are the things you find when you look up GNS and the forge.

All that said, i do not have a problem with people finding GNS helpful. I will admit it annoys me though when folks advocate for its use too aggressively (which i have encountered). When I run into such discussions, i can't help but think about this essay.

Quote from: Brad J. Murray;724092There's another way in which a model can be valuable to designers other than elevating success. A model defines a map, in a way, of the solution space of its context (games in this case), and part of what's useful in a new map is all the unexplored regions that are revealed by it. These are potentially games that haven't been tried before (perhaps with good reason) and that's pretty interesting.

Yes, I think that's a pretty good summary of what I get out of the GNS essays.

Quote from: robiswrong;724089That's based on two premises:

1) That Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulationism are the primary drivers of what players want, and the best way to categorize games

2) That they are mutually exclusive

I disagree with both premises.

It doesn't say that they are mutually exclusive in that you can only have one or the other. It says that good play or design comes from focusing on one or the other. There will always be some element of the other agendas present, for instance in a narrativist game there might still be elements of tactics and competition in a duel with your character's enemy, or in a gamist game there might still be some fun parts where your character makes a stand for what he believes in or the like.

Quote from: robiswrong;724089Models aren't ever true, just useful. And the quality of a theory is based on its predictive capability.  So is GNS a model aimed at designers, or is it a model aimed at players?  Either way, we should be able to compare its predictions with reality, and get an idea of whether it's actually a useful theory/model or not.

If it's aimed at players, then it would stand to be true that the GNS split would be a useful tool to determine if a given player will like a game or not.  Is it?  Not in my experience.

If it's aimed at designers, then games conforming to its theories should be relatively successful.  If we ignore the elephants in the room, do GNS games actually have any measurable level of success, even in comparison to other, smaller games?  I think it's reasonable to say that the indie hit of the last year or so is Fate Core... which is not based on GNS theory at all.  Hell, it doesn't even fit well in any particular GNS category.

Lastly, if it's aimed at designers, and an accurate theory at all, then it should be able to explain the success of large games, even if they don't completely match up or weren't designed with GNS in mind - so does GNS explain how people are enjoying Pathfinder, D&D, or the other 'top' games?

I agree with you about models not needing to be true, just useful. Maybe GNS isn't a complete model of the roleplaying universe (for one thing, it only really work if you accept the premise that system matters). But I've found it useful as a tool for my own games design.

I think it's also true to say that GNS isn't a theory of commercial success and that to some extent focusing on one agenda will be detrimental to your bottom line. It's no coincidence that so many GNS-inspired games are indie games with other uncommercial punk/pretentious qualities such as book size, content, distribution method, etc.

The way that GNS explains people enjoying Pathfinder and so on is that people just ignore or change ('drift') the rules that don't fit in with what they want. Houseruling is a big part of the RPG hobby after all. Liking GNS doesn't mean you hate mainstream or non-focused games. I like GNS and my primary game is D&D (of various editions). I know that Ron Edwards said that a lot of gamers aren't having fun but I don't think you need to buy into that to get something out of GNS.

These are the lessons I took from GNS and how I use it in my game design:

• System matters. Rules are a tool you can use positively to create an effect.
• Games work best when the players know how they are supposed to play. Is it primarily about killing the orcs, experiencing Middle-earth, or telling a cool story? Or something else?  
• The text of the game should therefore clearly explain the intended play approach and the rules should support or reinforce it.
• The G, N, and S essays describe three basic styles of play to consider as examples of this (but note that within them there are various divisions and approaches - the agendas are not monolithic).

Quote from: soviet;724516Like dissociated mechanics you mean? :-)

Maybe some people liked GNS for that, I don't know. But I liked it as a tool for game design.

GNS isn't 'everything Ron Edwards says or does'. GNS is a bunch of published essays. The only people who consider brain damage to be in any way the foundation of GNS are the people like you who dislike GNS and saw something they could use as a weapon against it. A lot of 'GNS people' repudiated the brain damage comments when they heard them. Do Mel Gibson's latter day anti-semitic rants retrospectively make Lethal Weapon and Mad Max racist films? There is a dividing line between the creator and the things he has created.

I don't know what disassociated mechanics are, but possibly.

But let's look at the theory that "GNS isn't everything Ron Edwards says or does."

Overwhelmingly -- overwhelmingly, and in this thread -- GNS discussion that is in any way critical of the theory is theorists telling people they're wrong about it.

While it's true that the theory is poorly written, when so much of the discussion hinges on interpretation, I think it's important to go with someone who knows what all those words mean. And -- pretty much -- that's Ron and me (the GNS Cop).

And since no one's going to take my word for it, I'll go with Ron.

So, is Brain Damage part of the theory? Well, Ron says it is, and he's said it from the beginning -- in the very first essay, it's the "something worse" that Narrativists get when everyone else gets "ongoing power struggle."

The Brain Damage essays were in no way a departure from the theory stuff, itself -- it's in line with everything else.

What's different is that it's clear.

Cheers,
-E.