Narrow focus is not in and of itself non-traditional. My In Harm's Way games are very tightly focused - Napoleonic Naval Officers, WWI or WWII fighter Pilots, etc. - but very traditional. The focus is, however, on the genre level rather than the session's structural level. DitV is narrowly focused on Genre - Mormonesque dogma creator/enforcers is pretty tight - but it is also narrowly focused on the session structure.

DitV game sessions work in a certain way due to the way the mechanics were designed. Varying the genre - which I see all the time with DitV - doesn't vary the way the mechanics work to structure the game session. Trying to force a DitV game session into a different structure is like trying to make a locomotive go off road. The mechanics being used to "reinforce" the story-generation force the "story" into certain lines of result which characterize this game. This is very non-traditional, and what the designer wanted. I have in the past called this effect "designer railroading," but I have gotten flak from many story gamers for using this term because it is prejudicial because of its negative connotations. I have to come up with a less predjudicial term or alienate some people I really like. Whatever term I use, though, the effect is real, and not limited to DitV, though it's a good poster child for the effect. It is, actually, a goal of the design.

My personal extreme sensitivity to railroading of any type unfortunately limits my enjoyment of such games to a regrettable degree. It is the reason why I refer to myself as a bad player. Most people are not nearly as sensitive to it, or are only sensitive to certain types of it, and can enjoy a game of this type much more readily. It just makes me angry and frustrated.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that limiting the sandbox area is a different type of focus than structuring the use of that sandbox. They may or may not coincide in a game design, but have nothing to do with each other.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmiceNarrow focus is not in and of itself non-traditional. My In Harm's Way games are very tightly focused - Napoleonic Naval Officers, WWI or WWII fighter Pilots, etc. - but very traditional. The focus is, however, on the genre level rather than the session's structural level. DitV is narrowly focused on Genre - Mormonesque dogma creator/enforcers is pretty tight - but it is also narrowly focused on the session structure.
-clash

Likewise Squirrel Attack! and its supplements.

Bill

Quote from: HinterWeltLikewise Squirrel Attack! and its supplements.

Bill

Exactly. You play squirrels and get the farmer's nuts.

-clash

Quote from: John MorrowIn many ways, have D&D being the Beatles, Four Tops, Elvis, or the Beach Boys has been good for the hobby because it gives role-players a common experience and the RPG equivalent of the iPod is people sitting at home playing World of Warcraft rather than sitting around playing D&D with their friends.

I think there's considerable value in community -- it gives everyone a common ground for understanding and discussion. Even if I wasn't a huge D&D fan, having played it would give me an appreciation for it.

I think this kind of social fracturing is going on across many spectrums including politics; in the past, everyone was more or less limited to mass media and that meant everyone got exposure to

A) The same ideas and
B) At least some ideas they didn't agree with

Today I can find a blog or station that narrowly views the world through my single-issue and pretty much only re-enforces what I want to believe. This is happening in all kinds of domains and RPG's are just not-exempt.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: -E.I think this kind of social fracturing is going on across many spectrums including politics; in the past, everyone was more or less limited to mass media and that meant everyone got exposure to

A) The same ideas and
B) At least some ideas they didn't agree with

Today I can find a blog or station that narrowly views the world through my single-issue and pretty much only re-enforces what I want to believe.

That depends what you mean by the past.  The dominance of mass media has risen enormously with the rise of television from the fifties through the nineties.  

In earlier decades, much more of society was face-to-face rather than mass media -- and even the mass media was more local.  For example, newspapers have been around for centuries, but they tended to be locally-produced rather than being owned by huge multinational corporations.  

Now, the Internet does produce a very different kind of fracturing.  I'm just noting that the cultural uniformity of old-time radio and television are relatively new rather than being truly old-fashioned.

Prior to mass media, though, face-to-face society produced local commonality through lack of alternatives. Geographical diversity was possible, although the presence of networked elites presiding over local hierarchies would work against that. Centralization of mass media under TV, radio, and the eclipse of the local newspaper made networked elites redundant and reinforced their effect of creating unifornity on a national scale.

However, with the democratization of the mass media, we aren't seeing a revival of geographical diversity so much as the rise of "subgroup diversity".

QuoteElvis was eclipsed by the Beatles.

Holy smokes, never, ever!

It´s the penultimate pop-music dichotomy:

Elvis OR the Beatles.

And Elvis wins every time.

Elvis and the Beatles works for me.

Welcome to the 21st century, strangers.

Quote from: jhkimThat depends what you mean by the past.  The dominance of mass media has risen enormously with the rise of television from the fifties through the nineties.  

In earlier decades, much more of society was face-to-face rather than mass media -- and even the mass media was more local.  For example, newspapers have been around for centuries, but they tended to be locally-produced rather than being owned by huge multinational corporations.  

Now, the Internet does produce a very different kind of fracturing.  I'm just noting that the cultural uniformity of old-time radio and television are relatively new rather than being truly old-fashioned.

Yeah. I was speaking about the era of mass media -- probably starting with the advent of popular commercial radio. Which, as you point out, was a significant transition from the pre-mass-media era.

Although, there were certainly hugely significant common cultural signposts in pre-mass-media times. I'm thinking of, say Confucianism in China or the Bible in western culture. (I will omit a nuanced discussion of class, anthropology and whether or not culture, as a concept, is meaningful -- I'm basically saying that if you went back 300 years ago and made a biblical allusion you'd stand a good chance of having some basic communication happening).

I think we're looking at -- in the not-to-extreme-future -- a fracture where there will be *far* fewer common assumptions or background.

Two other thoughts:

Name space and the divorce of information from original context:

I'm particularly interested in how namespace and channel issues get resolved. Roleplaying means very different things in different contexts. On this site, we don't have to worry about namespace collisions -- we have all the context we need. But we're already seeing things written in one context being syndicated hugely (I'm thinking of RSS feeds picking up blogs as a common and potentially extreme example. For another one put 'apple' into Google and watch the system make assumptions about what you might mean based on channel).

As the term RPG and Roleplaying continue to become more specialized and divergent in different contexts and information gets presented based on relatively naive algorithms I expect fun like never before!

The effective end of privacy and the permanent record:

The boundaries between public and private dialog have come down tremendously in the past few years. People change the way they communicate to the audience and the context. Things said in one context may be explosive in another -- and I'm not just talking about people telling 'the truth' to their friends and being 'politically correct' in public... it's a lot more complex than that.

We've already seen the effects of (mostly) private discourse archived and made public on the RPG dialog -- I'm thinking of the Brain Damage (the original comment on a blog, not the essays on The Forge). Some semi-private channels (Story Games and Knife Fight) have a privacy screen that is meant to keep potentially explosive discussion from poisoning the greater discussion, but it (inevitably) leaks out.

Also (going back to GNS, again, because it's contextually relevant), we've seen that what people wrote in 2002 can clearly haunt them in 2007. Of course it's always been good advise to make sure you can stand behind what you write -- and explicitly retract words you've thought better of (which hasn't happened in most cases in the RPG circles), but with channels for audio and visual and the increasing pervasiveness of recording devices I think it's even more complicated.

A few... what was it? Months ago? Anyway, there was a thread here and on RPG.net about some indie pirate game that was full of depravity (or not) and a discussion about whether the game was actually deep and spiritually uplifting or repulsive crap. I suspect the next time that happens, people will be able to link to a podcast.

I predict the podcast will be 1000x's more contentious than the text transcript and won't do *anything* to clear up people's conceptions. It'll also be easily exportable to channels and context that have never heard of RPG's in our context (more specifically: I bet you could get Fox News to play a recorded segment of that Pirate Game without any explanation or nuance).

Rough waters ahead ye-maties!
-E.

Quote from: SettembriniHoly smokes, never, ever!

It´s the penultimate pop-music dichotomy:

Elvis OR the Beatles.

And Elvis wins every time.

Elvis couldn't write his way out of a paper bag