As far as I understood it ..."Cheetoism" didn't involve the study of anything. Its a way of playing games and an attitude...NOT a study method.


- Ed C.

Hegel is no doubt spinning like a dreidel in his grave at this thread.

Quote from: jeff37923You're still losing me on this. I was under the impression that Cheetoism explains why we play and not how we discuss RPGs. It seems like two different things here.

Cheetoism does both. It explains why we play and in doing so, discusses RPGs. It implicitly contains ideas of how we ought to discuss RPGs, and those ideas often become explicit when some RPG theorist pops up and starts spouting off about GNS or the Big Model etc. Kyle's argument against jargon is pretty core to Cheetoism, and it's an argument against a way of talking about RPGs.

Interesting.

I never took Cheetoism as anything but a rejection of RPG Theory. That is, Cheetoism is meant to say "Look, it's silly to categorize games and/or gamers. I'ts much more productive to simply look at the gathering of people and the social dynamics therein. Those issues are far more important in any gaming group than the rules..."

In other words, you could be talking about my semi-regular Texas No-Limit Hold-Em game as much as about RPG's.

But, my memory is admittedly limited - it's been a while since I looked at the full Cheetoism.

....just look back a page or so. I posted the original "Cheetoism" post in a quote box.


- Ed C.

Quote from: PseudoephedrineCheetosism involves the study of concrete social situations and the dynamics therein rather than creating and labelling types of play. Forge RPG theory involves the suppression of the details of actual play experience in order to prioritise abstract categorisation.

I think this is because most theory - Forge (derived ?) -is positivist in nature. I appreciate Kyle's theory because it falls neatly (somewhat) into my own "play defines reality" experience.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: droogHegel is no doubt spinning like a dreidel in his grave at this thread.

Well, if you're a guy who's being quoted an average of 50,000 times a day, them's the breaks.

I wonder what they'll be quoting me for 200 years from now?

Quote from: PseudoephedrineCheetoism does both. It explains why we play and in doing so, discusses RPGs. It implicitly contains ideas of how we ought to discuss RPGs, and those ideas often become explicit when some RPG theorist pops up and starts spouting off about GNS or the Big Model etc. Kyle's argument against jargon is pretty core to Cheetoism, and it's an argument against a way of talking about RPGs.

The only flaw I find here is that you are saying that your conclusions are implicit to both Hegel and Cheetoism. This means that your conclusions are what you have read into the original material. I doubt that the meanderings of a 19th century pundit on intellectualism have anything to do with playing a subset of games that were invented about 150 years after his death. You're stretching the analogy a bit too far here.

It's not an analogy, RPG theory is an example of the kind of behaviour Hegel is criticising, albeit one not addressed directly in the essay itself. It's an instantiation of a kind. Since Hegel is talking about a kind of reasoning, and only using specific examples to illustrate that, his catalogue is not meant to be exhaustive.

As for Cheetoism, Cheetoism definitely has a critique of abstraction that is similar to Hegel's. There's nothing particularly weird about that - most of Hegel's works have been around for about two hundred years and many of the critical approaches he pioneered are now incredibly common and basic to how we think in the modern day, even if we don't explicitly understand them as being his. Cheetoism is not sui generis.

Certainly Cheetoism isn't sui generis, just sprung up from nothing, no.

Really it comes from a kind of positivism - and no, David, GNS is not at all positivist. Positivism says that the only worthwhile knowledge is scientific knowledge, that is, stuff we can observe and test directly. GNS is more like Platonic realism, really - the idea that things have properties (like "weight" and "colour"), and those properties have an independent existence of their own, floating around somewhere. So Platonic realism holds that we can discuss those properties (which it calls "universals") by themselves, without reference to the physical things they're attached to.

That's why you end up with silliness like saying that you can only pursue one of three game play styles at once, and if you try to do more or a mix, nobody will have any fun. That's the sort of thing you get when you focus on abstractions while ignoring reality.

An influence on my style of thought was being taught the philosophy of science early in uni. I was taught that we just have models of reality in science, not the reality itself. An example is light. Sometimes it behaves like a particle (bouncing off mirrors like a billiard ball off a cushion), and sometimes it behaves like a wave (refracting through water like you see when you poke a stick in a glass). So is light a particle, or a wave? In reality it's neither. Sometimes it behaves like a particle, and sometimes it behaves like a wave. So we have those two models of light, the particle model, and the wave model. Sometimes we use one model, and sometimes the other, whichever works best at the time.

Sometimes a model is flat-out wrong, supposing things that aren't really there, like in the 19th century talking about the luminiferous ether (what water and air are to sound, the ether was supposed to be to light) or the "vital force" that was supposed to make organic compounds different to inorganic compounds.

But once we toss out the flat-out wrong models, we're left with lots of different models of reality which are good or bad for various situations. So if you want to model light going into water, how does it turn and reflect, then the particle model is bad and the wave model good, and so on. We just swap and change models, using whichever works best for us at that moment.

The Platonic realist, or the Ron Edwardist, would believe we can reach The Truth, the One True Way in the end. That's what you get when you mistake the abstract models for reality. The positivist (or empiricist) will know you'll never reach The Truth, you'll just come up with better models for it in different situations.

So Hack/Thesp, GNS, zodiac animals or whatever you choose - they're just models. The question is not "which model is the reality?" since none of them are. The question is, "which model best helps me understand what's happening now?" If your model begins by looking at what's actually happening in the lab or at the game table, and describing it, then you'll go better than someone who begins by thinking in terms of grand abstract concepts.

Quote from: PseudoephedrineRPG theory is an example of the kind of behaviour Hegel is criticising, albeit one not addressed directly in the essay itself.

That's what I'm getting at here. How can you seriously claim that Hegel advocates something that didn't exist until after he died? Answer - you can't. You can only make an assumption of what Hegel's opinion on the matter may be based on what you believe he would have thought about the subject. It's nothing but guesswork.

He's saying it's the same approach. Which I dunno about. The best you could say is the reverse of the title; Cheetoism advocates a Hegelian approach.

Which is really making Cheetoism out to be a lot more than it is. Thus droog's excellent photoshop The only way this could get any more overblown is if someone were to put a cheetoism article on wikipedia. But no more ridiculous than there being a GNS Theory article there. Oy, vey.

It might be useful to actually look at the cheetoism wiki.

This thread has brought fear into my heart, if only the fear of the ferocious ribbing droog will give me at the next Geektogether.

Quote from: Kyle AaronHe's saying it's the same approach. Which I dunno about. The best you could say is the reverse of the title; Cheetoism advocates a Hegelian approach.

Now that actually makes a whole lot more sense to me, Cheetoism advocating a Hegelian approach.

Remember that I don't know if it's really true, that Cheetoism advocates a Hegelian approach. Hegel, like most German philosophers, is a bit muddled and wordy for my taste. Most stuff I read I take time to digest, but Hegel and Kant and his buddies sit like lead in my guts, they're heavy stuff. So I'm just going on that one rather muddled essay pseudoephedrine linked to, my vague memories of Hegel from years back, and what's been said here and there casually.

It's better to say that cheetoism says we should talk about what actually happens between the players at and around the game table. Whether that's Hegelian or empiricist or positivist or whatever doesn't really matter that much. It's true that this sort of (positivist) thought hasn't always been around, but it's around today. Today it's just called "common sense." So we can say that cheetoism says we should have a common sense approach to describing and understanding what happens at and around the game table.

It's common sense that whether Bob likes Jim and if anyone remembered to bring snacks have more effect on the success of the game session than how simulationist or immersionist it is, and whether the GM uses illusionist techniques, or any of that stuff. That stuff I think is not a good model of what actually happens, and even if it were a good model, it's irrelevant, because other things are so much more important.