Personally, I think more diversity would be great. Overwhelming diversity. Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that. Surely the best ones will rise up to the top, right? Enrich our multi-hued rainbow of choices. By all means, please go about doing this. I am not being sarcastic or ironic, either.

But for gods sake.

SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT EVERYONE ELSE.

You aren't beat poets, rock stars, moral theosophers, or psychologists and you shutting the fuck up saves me the trouble of pointing that shit out. Just produce the game, make the goddamn thing available, and then .. I dunno.. disappear.

So here's one vote in favor of diversity! Glut or not!

Quote from: Abyssal MawPersonally, I think more diversity would be great. Overwhelming diversity. Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that. Surely the best ones will rise up to the top, right? Enrich our multi-hued rainbow of choices. By all means, please go about doing this. I am not being sarcastic or ironic, either.

But for gods sake.

SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT EVERYONE ELSE.

You aren't beat poets, rock stars, moral theosophers, or psychologists and you shutting the fuck up saves me the trouble of pointing that shit out. Just produce the game, make the goddamn thing available, and then .. I dunno.. disappear.

So here's one vote in favor of diversity! Glut or not!

I'm more and more in agreement, here.

QuoteIncreased role for criticism.

Well Elliot, that will always remain a dream. A nice one though.
For that, you´d need several central organs, like newspapers. You´d need an  ongoing intellectual debate, most likely in several media to cater for different political views. Just like in newspapers.

But newspapers have reach and impact. Gaming forae do not. Why?
Because nobody except the users need them. The press is powerful, as long as it is needed for publicity.
So a review in the New York Times is important. A review on RPG.Net is worth shit.

That´s also because only very few venues offer reliably news on a regular basis, and most importantly: with known bias.

Choosing a newspaper or TV station is a major step in a political humans life. Some blogs already offer a stern value-centered reporting style. But most don´t.
Forae thereby have to act as a sort of substitute, and they continue to crack up under the weight of all the conflicting interests that people try to realize with them.

Only an oligarchy of major venues that are received by the majority of players would bring relevance to debate, and thusly relevance to criticism.

Quote from: Abyssal MawPersonally, I think more diversity would be great. Overwhelming diversity. Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that. Surely the best ones will rise up to the top, right? Enrich our multi-hued rainbow of choices. By all means, please go about doing this. I am not being sarcastic or ironic, either.

But for gods sake.

SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT EVERYONE ELSE.

I don't actually think that's possible.

The way I see it, the problem predates the Forge. Heck, it predates the internet. Gamers, shop owners and editors were already preaching back when this hobby was limited to brick and mortars and a few dead-tree zines. I've personally seen extremely loud arguments between Hero and GURPS fans. Literally shouting at each others' face.

Another instance, the old "role-playing VS roll-playing" argument is extremely old. Snobbing games because of their lack of realism, ignoring games based on brand recognition, etc. Just the other day, I was arguing with a really nice gamer dude who was offering me a ride. He's *never* been on the internet but man, did he have some things to say about AD&D2nd edition VS 3rd! He turned from "nice" to "rabid" in no time.

Then these debates were accentuated by the internet. I mean, one look at the rpg-create mail list will tell you homebrew designers like to argue and it dates back to 98-99. Same with internet forums and gamers.

Today, it's not just about the Forge. It's also about Blog-mania. Blogs in and of themselves are about people who have a sense of self-importance and need to show off. Many in the Forge community have embraced it but we are seeing other designers use them and the trend will only accentuate.

It doesn't make G/N/S any less delusional than it is. I'm not excusing this. But loud debates about pointless things have always existed and, in the case of roleplaying, they will exist as long as there will be at least two gamers left on this planet.

I mean sure, all roleplaying theories are doomed. But beyond that, any single opinion on roleplaying game is condemned to lead to debate. Even the fact Louis Porter Jr. sucks donkey balls is debated.

Nothing will ever make concensus in this hobby.

See, I don't actually care about snarking on games. That doesn't bother me at all.

Let's say we're talking about breakfast, and we're all breakfast hobbyists. I, as a mainstreamer "love eggs". Fried, scrambled, whatever. But then there's some people who hate eggs, or maybe they're allergic to eggs or eggs killed their dad or something. And then there's a group of people who have given up eggs in favor of eating.. I dunno.. tofu.

They could totally be insulting to eggs, ("I hate eggs!"  "Eggs are yucky!") and I wouldn't have much to say about it. Such is the nature of breakfast.

 But when they start commenting about egg-eaters, or they start to make grandiose comparisons of themselves to egg-eaters, I pretty much have to reply. At that point, I'm gonna bite me off a piece of that tofu guy, just because I can, because it's easy, and because it's justified. Because that fuck is ruining my breakfast community.

Quote from: Consonant DudeThen these debates were accentuated by the internet. I mean, one look at the rpg-create mail list will tell you homebrew designers like to argue and it dates back to 98-99. Same with internet forums and gamers.

Today, it's not just about the Forge. It's also about Blog-mania. Blogs in and of themselves are about people who have a sense of self-importance and need to show off. Many in the Forge community have embraced it but we are seeing other designers use them and the trend will only accentuate.

Yeah, those bloggers are bad with their inflated self-importance -- but what's even worse are the forum posters.  How pathetic is it to expose your desperate need to show off by posting something on some web-based forum?  Sheesh.  

:rant:

Seriously, is there something wrong with communication?  I mean, I was part of the Hero vs GURPS arguments way back when.  What's wrong with them?  Discussion about games and game design is vital to a critical community.  

Sure, an given online review or debate won't touch *that* many people, but it forms the first layer in the tree of word-of-mouth.  i.e. A game which gets rave reviews on here or RPGnet will sell to some more people than it would otherwise.  That increased exposure means that a more major person might pay attention to it -- say Ken Hite writes about it in his review column.  Then maybe Mike Mearls reads Ken Hite's review and it makes it's way around that part, and maybe a staff writer for some company writes a review of it for a print magazine.

How fragile is a breakfast community if a guy calling egg eaters losers can damage it?

What's your point, James?

****

I think what's really changed, in the last decade or so, is the increasing contact between creators and consumers even while the roles are still in many ways distinct. E.g., it's traditional to think of your relationship differently if you are buying something, or prospectively buying something, and it's also traditional to regard someone differently if they create something for sale. Traditionally, consumers are entitled to criticize even in the rudest terms without concern about the creator personally setting them straight, and creators are traditionally entitled to a degree of "difference" or distance, even reverence. On the one hand they're expected to have thick skins, but put another way they're (imagined to be, and may succeed in thinking of themselves as) above it all.

Now those distinctions are breaking down. Consumers can confront creators directly and they are perhaps not aware of the real person. Meanwhile creators interact directly with consumers; they may want to be "regular folks" but that is prevented by artifacts of tradition (such as the commercial exchange) and a not-unfounded sense of a conflict of interest.

Basically, if I was in a conversation with Francis Ford Coppola, would I tell him to his face that The Godfather, Part III was a cheap betrayal of the earlier two films? Heck, I wouldn't even do that to George Lucas. But similarly it'd be completely out of line for either of them to hunt down their detractors on an internet forumt to trade insults.

The first place I really saw this happen was on rec.games.frp.advocacy, when one of the coauthors of Theatrix used the newsgroup to hawk his game and then respond to criticisms of his theory of roleplaying. IMO that led to far bigger flames than I'd seen previously, even compared to the pro- anti-D&D wars of the 80's.

I'm wondering why Abyssal feels the need to leap to the defense of his community when someone that doesn't know what the heck they're talking about makes a moronic insult.

That's a good question. Just wanted to acknowledge.

Actually, I'll do more than that, but I'll be brief: I think part of the problem is that the community isn't well defined, so when insults come it's not clear if they're from clueless outsiders or from insiders.

If they're labelling an entire group with an insult, they're almost certainly clueless, unless they're calling a group of scatologists shit-watchers or something. But in that case it's not really an insult, just a vulgarity. IMO insider vs. outsider doesn't really enter into it.

I'm sorry, I've once again lost track of your point. It's probably my fault for stepping into the back & forth between you and Abyssal Maw, so I will bow out now.

Quote from: jhkimYeah, those bloggers are bad with their inflated self-importance -- but what's even worse are the forum posters.  How pathetic is it to expose your desperate need to show off by posting something on some web-based forum?  Sheesh.  

:rant:

Seriously, is there something wrong with communication?

What the fuck are you on? I didn't say it was wrong. I'm just pointing out what I concluded with my post: you can't have concensus regarding roleplaying games. I'm saying it's useless to point fingers at one place or another.

On blogs: yeah, most of them suck ass and are written by morons who like to pat themselves on the back and read themselves. That's simply how it is, whether you realise it or not. You can't compare that to a forum, unless it's something like Pundit's pointless personal section here, or creepy off-topic cesspools like Tangency.

Basically, Abyssal said he had to defend his hobby against people that would insult gamers. I wondered why it mattered, since anyone insulting an entire group is a moron.

Quote from: Elliot WilenThe first place I really saw this happen was on rec.games.frp.advocacy, when one of the coauthors of Theatrix used the newsgroup to hawk his game and then respond to criticisms of his theory of roleplaying. IMO that led to far bigger flames than I'd seen previously, even compared to the pro- anti-D&D wars of the 80's.

If it hadn't been for David Berkman's hard sell of Theatrix on rec.games.frp.advocacy, a lot of the theory discussions that led to the Threefold wouldn't have happened.  So while there were certainly flames, it was also a catalyst to get people to explain what did and didn't make a game fun for them.