Quote from: jeff37923I think you are trying to obfuscate the truth of the situation, that with a game mechanic designed to reward sociopathic behavior the players will tend to engage in that sociopathic behavior in order to gain the reward.

I'm frankly not entirely sure what this particular game does and doesn't reward because no two advocates seem to give exactly the same answer nor are the answers always particularly clear.  I'm currently guessing the intent of the game is to put characters into brutal situations to see if they fight turning brutal or become brutal, giving different advantages and costs for either choice.  

That said, this is exactly the reason why many people object to the idea of giving players experience points primarily for killing things and taking their treasure.  It can encourage psychopathic behavior in order to gain the reward.

Well, Baker himself says,
   "My game design created, or at least contributed to, a play environment in which someone had their character commit a horrible murder-rape. I don't see why anyone would argue otherwise."
If he's willing to take the blame then let's give it to him.

Quote from: Kyle AaronWell, Baker himself says,
   "My game design created, or at least contributed to, a play environment in which someone had their character commit a horrible murder-rape. I don't see why anyone would argue otherwise."
If he's willing to take the blame then let's give it to him.

I think he really catch himself into his own trap. System in sense of Lumpley principle means everything not just rules he designed. So how does he know, it was the part of the system (the rules that he designed) that create or contributed the murder-rape?

BTW: Hi Killraven, happy lurking! :-)

Is there mileage in talking about Torture Porn and how it applies?

QuoteFor your entertainment

Mainstream movies are getting darker and more violent. And as Quentin Tarantino's latest project, Grindhouse, demonstrates, the worst of the violence is often directed at women. Kira Cochrane on the rise of 'torture porn'

Tuesday May 1, 2007
The Guardian


Out on a limb... Rose McGowan in Death Proof.
 


Talking about his upcoming film Hostel II at a press junket recently, the young director Eli Roth couldn't contain his enthusiasm for the poster devised by the film's marketing team - a close-up of some sinewy, gleaming boar meat. "Any time people see women in a horror film," he noted, "they say, 'Oh, these girls are just pieces of meat.' And, literally, in Hostel Part II, that's exactly what they are. They are the bait, they are the meat, they are the grist for the mill. So I thought it was actually a really smart poster ... and really, really disgusting! I love it."

Unless you have a taste for seriously gory films, chances are you haven't heard of Roth. Last year, though, the first instalment of Hostel - the story of a Slovakian boarding house where rich men pay to enact tortures on unwitting victims - was a massive hit, topping the US box office on its opening weekend. The trailer promised that, "There is a place where your darkest, sickest fantasies are possible, where you can experience anything you desire," and the film strove to live up to that promise. Hostel's most famous scene shows a man taking a blowtorch to a woman's face, her eyeball coming out and dangling from the socket. Later, another character snips it off with some scissors.
Horror films have, of course, always been full of nasty, misanthropic imagery. In many other films, extreme, sexualised violence against women has frequently been a theme (Clockwork Orange, Boxing Helena and many others spring to mind). But recently the levels of horrific violence on show at the multiplexes - and the sheer cynicism of the films involved - have gone through the roof. And a lot of the most nasty, unrepentant and terrifyingly pointless violence is aimed at women. At least Clockwork Orange had a political point to make. (There can be no excuses for Boxing Helena.)

Hostel is just part of a new subgenre of horror films which are so dehumanising, nasty and misogynist that they are collectively known either as "gorno" (a conflation of "gory" and "porno"), or, more commonly, as "torture porn". Other films that make it into the torture porn category are Wolf Creek, Turistas and The Devil's Rejects, with each new film promising higher levels of violence - guaranteeing not just a considerable body count, but long, lingering scenes of terror, torture and pain.

In most of these films, both men and women end up being sliced, gored, dismembered, decapitated. In that sense they offer audiences equal-opportunity gore. But it's the violence against women that's most troubling, because it is here that sex and extreme violence collide.

The publicity campaigns for many of these films flag up the prospect of watching a nubile young woman being tortured as a genuinely pleasurable experience. So, for instance, a recent US billboard campaign for the upcoming (mainstream) film Captivity featured the film's star Elisha Cuthbert (just voted the 10th sexiest woman in the world by the young male readers of FHM magazine) in a series of four photographs. In the first (labelled ABDUCTION) a black-gloved hand covers her mouth. The second (CONFINEMENT) shows her, with bloody fingers, struggling to get out of a cage. The third (TORTURE) has her face encased in an odd white mask, tubes shoved up her nose, and apparently filled with blood. Finally, under the word TERMINATION, she is shown laid out, apparently dead.

The billboard attracted a barrage of complaints, with Jill Soloway (one of the writers of Six Feet Under) leading a campaign against it - the poster was soon taken down. In a piece on the Huffington Post website, Soloway wrote that the images were "the most repulsive, horrifying, woman-hating, human-hating thing I have ever seen in public" and didn't just represent "horror, this wasn't just misogyny ... It was a grody combo platter of the two, the torture almost a punishment for the sexiness. It had come from such a despicable inhuman hatred place that it somehow managed to recall Abu Ghraib, the Holocaust, porn and snuff films all at once." Joss Whedon, creator of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series, agreed, writing in a letter to the MPAA, the US ratings board, that the ad campaign "is not only a literal sign of the collapse of humanity, it's an assault ... this ad is part of a cycle of violence and misogyny that takes something away from the people who have to see it. It's like being mugged."

Many of today's torture porn films are being made on tiny budgets by little-known directors, but with the release of the new Tarantino/Rodriguez double-bill, Grindhouse - designed as a tribute to the ultra-violent B-movie programmes of old - the trend officially reaches the mainstream. Made up of two films plus a clutch of trailers for non-existent movies, Grindhouse bombed when it was released in the US last month. American audiences were said to have been put off by the three-hour running time, and last week it was announced that Grindhouse will be released in a different format in the UK, the two films sold as separate features. Whether either film is any good is still up for debate - I, for one, found them both suicidally boring. What isn't in question is the disturbing attitude towards women in these films.

First on the programme is Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, a repetitively gory, gloomily depressing zombie picture, which opens with Rose McGowan pole dancing. There are close ups of her bottom and breasts in those initial scenes, and then she appears to be kissing another woman. In a feature about Grindhouse in Rolling Stone last month, Rodriguez noted that, "When we started talking about the movie, Quentin said, 'There should always be a lesbian kiss just around the corner - possibly.' I took that to heart, and in my very first scene, I have two female tongues going at each other and licking. You find out that it's Rose licking a mirror, but it gets across the idea that it could be around the corner at any time."

So far, so predictable. It isn't surprising that the film's main female character is a go-go dancer - Rodriguez is, after all, the director who made Sin City, in which the female characters ran the gamut from prostitutes to strippers. But having established McGowan's sexiness, in Planet Terror, the attacks on her begin. First a zombie rips off McGowan's leg, and then Tarantino (playing a zombie soldier called Rapist Number One) holds a gun to her head, before threatening her with rape. You can currently buy a Rapist Number One action figure online for your kids, should you so wish.

Then there's Tarantino's Death Proof, in which Kurt Russell stars as Stuntman Mike, a guy who gets his kicks from stalking groups of gorgeous young women, following them in his car and ramming whatever vehicle they happen to be travelling in, until they are dead. Severed limbs and bloodied faces abound. Interestingly, of all the women actors in Grindhouse, McGowan is the only one to appear in both films, and, while she survives Planet Terror (fitting the age-old horror archetype of the "final girl" who persists to the end - usually, it seems, to help justify the misogyny that has gone before) this triumph is short-lived. In Death Proof, McGowan's character is swiftly - gruesomely - dispatched. (In that same Rolling Stone feature, McGowan talked about her own attitude towards today's horror films, saying that, "all they do now is think about ways to torture women, primarily. I don't really get that. What is this, a manual for young, budding serial killers? Can't we just go watch Pillow Talk?")

Some of the nastiest images in Grindhouse arise in the fake trailers. Rob Zombie, director of The Devil's Rejects, creates one for a dream project - Werewolf Women of the SS - which includes the image of a topless woman, bound and gagged, being tortured by cartoonish Nazi soldiers. And Eli Roth - him again! - packs a host of sex and gore into his three-minute trailer for a potential film called Thanksgiving, including an image of a cheerleader peeling off her clothes while bouncing on a trampoline, before apparently being impaled with a large, gleaming knife - through the vagina, no less. (Horrifying though this is, it isn't actually original - the 2005 film Chaos showed a woman being anally raped with a knife.)

Unsurprisingly, the cheerleader scene in Grindhouse attracted some attention from the MPAA, the US ratings board, and Roth was forced to change it, to make the imagery much more suggestive than explicit. Addressing this at the American press junket for Grindhouse, he commented that "when I shot that trailer for Thanksgiving, I really thought there was no problem with anything - it just shows you how genuinely out of touch I am! I was like ... a full frontal labial shot, to camera, of a girl landing on a knife seemed like no problem to me ..."

Of course, maybe Roth's just trying to be funny - his tone is gleeful throughout this interview (a transcript and audio version of which can be found on a number of film websites). Later in the interview he says: "Let me tell you, I heard that Stanley Kubrick did a lot of takes on Eyes Wide Shut, it was nothing compared to the amount of takes we did once we had that cheerleader naked and bouncing around on a trampoline! I mean, she was great, she got it on the first take, but we did take, after take, after take! And we finished early and we had like three hours, and we're like, 'Well, how much film do we have?' And we're like, 'All right, let's ... let's do it again!' And she just had a smile on her face the whole time."

Grindhouse is, in many ways, a cartoon, and its intersection of sex and violence is meant to be ironic, funny even. It makes multiple nods to parody and pastiche. I'm not so sure that British audiences will share the directors' humour though. As one of the stars of Planet Terror, the British actor Naveen Andrews, has said on the subject of the B-movie films Grindhouse is based on: "Obviously, Quentin and Rodriguez saw some kind of aesthetic in these kinds of films, and for the life of me I was trying to grasp what it was. They were laughing like maniacs and I didn't find it funny for more than like a minute."

Over the years, many directors have defended the violence in their films by claiming that it's ironic. But is an image of a nubile woman having her innards pulled out - as occurs in Planet Terror - any less problematic because it has been made in a knowing way? You could argue that it's more problematic. Irony - with its inherent insincerity - can be an emotionally deadening tool, and, in terms of their content, these films are already deadening, de-sensitising enough. The irony just adds another layer of soul-sucking cynicism to the mix.

Watching Grindhouse, I felt fundamentally depressed: who would seek out this experience as entertainment? What is more depressing is the fact that such films seem to be part of a wider trend towards the mainstream depiction of women as highly sexualised bait and prey: meat, as Roth had it. Over the past year, for example, we've seen mainstream fashion images that have shown highly made up, designer-clad women being brutalised (Italian Vogue), apparently about to be gang raped (a Dolce and Gabbana ad), and shot, stabbed and electrocuted (America's Next Top Model). On shows such as CSI and its many spin-offs and imitators, the victims of each weekly murder case are, disproportionately, nubile young women. Lisa de Moraes of the Washington Post came up with an apt shorthand for such series in 2005, dubbing that year's programmes the "season of Die, Women, Die!".

Of course, watching one of these films won't turn a sane, decent individual into a killer or a torturer, but you have to wonder what effect this widespread meshing of sexuality and graphic violence will have on the young men at whom they are primarily aimed. The clear logic behind all these films, TV shows and images appears to be that if a young, good-looking, barely-clad woman is sexy while alive, she's even sexier when she's being tortured, or when she's a bloody corpse.

In an article in Newsweek last year, Tony Timpone, editor of the horror magazine Fangoria, commented that "in 1990, I had to pull my hair out just to find a movie to put on the cover. There were only three or four major horror releases a year. Now there are three or four a month. We're like pigs in slop." That's not a bad way of putting it.

Nasty and nastier
Xan Brooks on the history of misogynist violence in film

Blood Feast (1963)
Blood Feast was the forefather of the exploitation genre, a strain of low-budget, cheap-thrill cinema that catered to America's burgeoning drive-in market and its attendant teenage demographic. Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, this amateurish, ketchup-drenched affair offered viewers the chance to "witness the slaughter and mutilation of nubile young girls", culminating in a scene in which one victim is pinned to a bed while her tongue is torn loose. Where previous horror films had run shy of graphic gore, Blood Feast laid it on with a trowel.

The Last House on the Left (1972)

Ingmar Bergman's Oscar-winning drama The Virgin Spring was the unlikely inspiration for this bloody tale of two good-time girls who are raped and murdered while on a jaunt through the backwoods. Creator Wes Craven hastened to explain that the sadistic violence was an artistic response to the war in Vietnam, although this cut little ice with the UK censors, who effectively banned the film until 2003. In the meantime, Last House proved hugely influential, kick-starting a run of women-in-peril slasher movies that stretched throughout the 1970s.

Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS (1974)

Rob Zombie's spoof trailer for "Werewolf Women of the SS" (in Grindhouse) has a real-life ancestor in Ilsa. She's the jodhpurwearing, cleavage-baring nymphomaniac Nazi who plies her trade as the mistress of a concentration camp-cum-knocking shop (her mission: to prove that women can withstand more pain than men). Don Edmonds' dubious cult offering was shot on the cheap on the discarded set of the TV show Hogan's Heroes, with the extras billed as "Big Busted Prisoners". In a touching display of cultural sensitivity, he went on to dedicate the film to all "victims of the Holocaust".

I Spit on Your Grave (1978)

This sleazy B-movie outing gained a new lease of life when it was singled out as the archetypal "video nasty" in the early 1980s. It starred Camille Keaton (grand-niece of Buster) as a career woman who becomes an angel of vengeance after she is assaulted by a bunch of brutish yokels. The notorious video sleeve (bloodstained rump, clenched dagger) looks like an X-rated version of that iconic Athena poster of a tennis player scratching her bum.

Baise-moi (2000)

Baise-moi was a rape'n'revenge saga that attempted to have its cake and eat it; a hardcore Thelma and Louise that dispatched a pair of ass-kicking porn starlets on a mission of reprisal. The fact that the film was French gave it the veneer of art-house class in the UK, where it largely escaped tabloid attention. Moreover, the behind-the-scenes presence of two female directors supposedly inoculated it against charges of misogyny, with one of its creators explaining that "this movie is not for masturbation, so therefore it is not porn". Not everyone was convinced. On its release in France, Baise-moi was dismissed by critics as "a sick fi lm" that "throws sex in your face to sell blood and gore".

Grindhouse (2007)

Grindhouse is Tarantino and Rodriguez's homage to the exploitation genre: a gleeful double feature that comes awash with vixenish go-dancers and killer zombies; peppered with fictional trailers and spoof commercials. Despite glowing reviews, the wheeze appears to have flummoxed the American public. There have been reports of audiences filing out after the first half, apparently unaware that there was another feature still to come, and the box office has been middling. The production will now be sawn in two and released as two separate pictures. Tarantino's section competes for top honours at next month's Cannes film festival.

QuoteSeen any good surgery on unanesthetized people lately? Millions have, in Hostel, which spent a week as America’s top moneymaker. It’s actually not a bad little thriller, if you can live with the odd protracted sequence of torture and dismemberment. The director, Eli Roth, captures the mixture of innocence and entitlement in young American males abroad: They breeze into a former Soviet-bloc country the way teens in old sex comedies headed for Daytona, confident that their country’s power and prestige will make them babe magnets. And those are some supermodelish babes in Hostel’s Slovakian village, where life appears to be a nonstop naked sauna party. One of our heroes is confused about his sexuality, though, and sympathetic to an old man who makes a pass at him. It’s quite a shock when he wakes to find himself in chains, with that same old man preparing to eviscerate him. The poor sap screams, pleads, weeps: He doesn’t understand why he’s in that place.



As for me, I didn’t understand why I was in that place either, watching through my fingers—or why I’d found myself in similar places many times during the past few years, at The Devil’s Rejects, Saw, Wolf Creek, and even (dare I blaspheme?) The Passion of the Christ. Explicit scenes of torture and mutilation were once confined to the old 42nd Street, the Deuce, in gutbucket Italian cannibal pictures like Make Them Die Slowly, whereas now they have terrific production values and a place of honor in your local multiplex. As a horror maven who long ago made peace, for better and worse, with the genre’s inherent sadism, I’m baffled by how far this new stuff goes—and by why America seems so nuts these days about torture.



It might be, as a screenwriter friend argues, that this trend is mainly a way of ratcheting up the stakes—that in the quest to have a visceral impact, actual viscera are the final frontier. Certainly television has become the place for forensic fetishism. But torture movies cut deeper than mere gory spectacle. Unlike the old seventies and eighties hack-’em-ups (or their jokey remakes, like Scream), in which masked maniacs punished nubile teens for promiscuity (the spurt of blood was equivalent to the money shot in porn), the victims here are neither interchangeable nor expendable. They range from decent people with recognizable human emotions to, well, Jesus.



Is there a masochistic as well as a sadistic component to the mayhem? In the same way that some women cut themselves (they say) to feel something, maybe some moviegoers need to identify with people being cut to feel something, too. Maybe. I can think of no other reason to endure Greg McLean’s extraordinarily cruel Wolf Creek. He creates an overpowering sense of place: the Australian outback, where the mix of endless vistas and claustrophobic confinement leaves you shaking, and where the serial killer—a sociopathic inversion of “Crocodile” Dundee—slices through the heroine’s spinal cord and announces, with satisfaction, “Now you’re just a head on a stick.”


As potential victims, we fear serial killers, yet we also seek to identify with their power.


Some of these movies are so viciously nihilistic that the only point seems to be to force you to suspend moral judgments altogether. In Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects, crazed mass murderers take a group of touring musicians hostage before slaughtering them all. Well, one of the women isn’t exactly slaughtered: She’s left hanging in the doorway wearing her lover’s detached face; she ends up running into the road, where a semi turns her into multiple heaps of gleaming innards. When, during filming, the actor playing the most sadistic of the psychos became traumatized by what he had to do, Zombie reportedly told him, “Art is not safe.” But with characters who have no larger awareness—who are just inexplicably deranged—The Devil’s Rejects isn’t art by any definition I can think of.



Are there moral uses for this sort of violence? Certainly Mel Gibson aimed to achieve a kind of catharsis—a purification—via the two-hour beating, lashing, and scourging of his Jesus, although some of us felt that he’d made his usual bloody revenge picture in which the revenge part had been lopped off (or left to the spectator).



Stephen King has written that horror “feeds the alligators of the mind,” yet it remains an open question whether those alligators have a little nap after they’re fed or get busy making more alligators. In her book Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Carol Clover argues that many hack-’em-ups are empowering; the “final girl” always slays the monster. But the “final girls” in Wolf Creek and The Devil’s Rejects die ghastly deaths, and while Hostel ends with bloody retribution, it’s set in a world in which people pay big money for the opportunity to torture and murder—a world of latent serial killers.

In an essay called “The American Vice,” Will Self speaks to the “moral displacement” of modern cinema—which is far different from the viewer’s perspective on, say, Guernica. Of the scene in Reservoir Dogs in which a sadist exuberantly mutilates a bound policeman, Self writes, “We lose sight of whose exact POV we are inhabiting. The sadist who is doing the torturing? The policeman? The incapacitated accomplice? It is this vacillation in POV that forces the sinister card of complicity upon the viewer. For in such a situation the auteur is either abdicating—or more likely foisting—the moral responsibility for what is being depicted onscreen from himself to the viewer.”



That’s a tough charge—and the issue of where the spectator’s sympathies lie at violent movies has always been a complicated one. But there’s no doubt that something has changed in the past few decades. Serial killers occupy a huge—and disproportionate—share of our cultural imagination: As potential victims, we fear them, yet we also seek to identify with their power. A key archetype is Will Graham in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon—a genius serial-killer tracker because he can walk through grisly crime scenes and project himself into the killers’ heads. He’s both the instrument of justice and the empathic consumer of torture porn.



Fear supplants empathy and makes us all potential torturers, doesn’t it? Post-9/11, we’ve engaged in a national debate about the morality of torture, fueled by horrifying pictures of manifestly decent men and women (some of them, anyway) enacting brutal scenarios of domination at Abu Ghraib. And a large segment of the population evidently has no problem with this. Our righteousness is buoyed by propaganda like the TV series 24, which devoted an entire season to justifying torture in the name of an imminent threat: a nuclear missile en route to a major city. Who do you want defending America? Kiefer Sutherland or terrorist-employed civil-liberties lawyers?



Back in the realm of non-righteous torture, the question hangs, Where do you look while these defilements drag on? Consider a nightmarish film that many critics regard as deeply moral, Gaspar No’s Irreversible, which delivers a nine-minute anal rape (of a pregnant woman). Noé means to rub your nose in the violence and make you loathe it, but my nose had been pretty well rubbed after the first two minutes. For a while I stared at the EXIT sign, then closed my eyes, plugged my ears, and chanted an old mantra. I didn’t understand why I had to be tortured, too. I didn’t want to identify with the victim or the victimizer.



I am complicit in one sense, though. I’ve described all this freak-show sensationalism with relish, enjoying—like these filmmakers—the prospect of titillating and shocking. Was it good for you, too?

Will talking about nasty misogynist vanity press games land?

Yeah - So ?

 Those aren't RPGs that are trying to be Oh so trendy and "edge-y".

 I don't enjoy thse kinds of sick movies....and recent box office indicates they are not making  money like they used to.

 Only kind of horror movies I even like grudgingly are what others might call "Dark Fantasy" - for example NIGHTBREED. In that one the monsters are actually odfffshoots from humanity trying to survive in a secluded enclave of their own.


Trying to claim sick shit in RPGs is okay because sick stuff in Movies seems to be popular is one of the weaklest defenses I've seen in the whole discussion so far.


- Ed C.

Quote from: KoltarTrying to claim sick shit in RPGs is okay because sick stuff in Movies seems to be popular is one of the weaklest defenses I've seen in the whole discussion so far.

Actually, I was wondering if linking such games to Torture Porn would be a useful attack.

I like a good spot of good clean violence like 300, but I've not seen things like Saw, precisely because the thought of just how nasty modern CGI could get rather frightens me.

Certainly, theres a market for some really nasty comic books:

WARNING! NOT SAFE FOR WORK! FULLY PORN! I'M  NOT KIDDING!!!!!

http://www.nazirape.net/

FOR GODS SAKE DON'T CLICK ON THAT IN FRONT OF YOUR OLD MOM!!!!!!!!

Cross those with Kong level production values.......

I mean, okay, sitting around with your friends making child molestation jokes (do you want to see my puppies little boy... one of them's got a wet nose... Oh! Hes thrown up!) is possibly comparatively innocuous and inevitable, but good god, this can get seedy.

Quote from: John MorrowThat said, this is exactly the reason why many people object to the idea of giving players experience points primarily for killing things and taking their treasure.  It can encourage psychopathic behavior in order to gain the reward.

I'd agree here, but instead of talking about psychopathic behavior in-game between characters or NPCs, I'm busy talking about sociopathic behavior in-game between players. Therin lies the rub...

Quote from: Pierce InverarityMighty generous of him to let others partake in the endeavor.

No, you have to pay.

Quote from: Vincent Baker himselfOr, sometimes, you see the violence implicit as a possibility in a given scene, and you're like, "crap. I knew my character was capable of brutality, and here it comes." Then your pirate's stats destabilize and the reward system tears away on history, bargains and ambitions like it's supposed to anyway. Also all good.

Ah! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!

Oh, come on. You thought of it too.

Quote from: Kyle AaronIf you look at Uncle Ronny's essay on the topic, he specifically says that

Ron had an opinion, Ron did not write dogma that is strictly adhered to.

Quote from: Kyle AaronThe Forgers are very dogmatic about their theory, unless applying it could make them have to say that their own games are bad.

Honesty, nobody I know spends this much time worrying about theory-purity or -rigor. To me and most people I know, "system matters" is the by-now-trivial, but at-the-time-not-so-trivial notion that game design can influence resultant play, so keep that in mind when you design. It seems like you're expecting a level of attention to theory that is relatively rare these days, either focused at our own games or at others'.

Quote from: RobNJHonesty, nobody I know spends this much time worrying about theory-purity or -rigor. To me and most people I know, "system matters" is the by-now-trivial, but at-the-time-not-so-trivial notion that game design can influence resultant play, so keep that in mind when you design. It seems like you're expecting a level of attention to theory that is relatively rare these days, either focused at our own games or at others'.

Ah-heh.

No one you know? Try criticizing the theory... you'll find people popping up everywhere to lecture you on the fine points of theoretical rigor.

Oh, sure -- Vincent can get the theory "wrong" all over the place, since he's a friend of the theory. Anyone else who's willing to play along is given significant leeway, also.

But here's the thing: part of the reason the theory is crap is because the folks using it don't apply any standard of rigor to their own usage. They don't look at what the theory actually says. They don't ask questions (if you ask questions, in many places, you get moderated and the thread gets shut down).

If I liked the theory, I'd demand that *everyone* use it rigorously -- but that would break it. It would become clear that it fails several significant tests (modeling player behavior, modeling immersion, explaining why popular games are popular, etc.).

It would break or mutate the theory into something that didn't work to suggest very narrow focus games with limited GM authority are actually what people need (it's clear, even to theory people, that those games aren't what they want/buy).

When people with serious reservations about the theory understand it and apply it better than folks who claim to use to design games, it's time to re-think things.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: Kyle AaronBut then, I'm not the one saying "System Matters". A simple requirement of any theory is that it should be internally consistent.

Kyle, "System matters" is one of the few good bits that came out of the Forge. It's just a pity that most Forge-designers don't know what to do with their own bit of wisdom.

I think that, again, you're taking it to an extreme as if system was all that matters. That can't be. Roleplaying games remain an exercise of creativity and part of that is filled by the participants' imagination.

Vincent Baker's position seems pretty simple to me. He readily admits that the book will probably lead to "evil" acts. He's just not responsible if someone wants to explicitly throat-fuck boys. The game and the twisted person contributed to the situation. I doubt the person who came up with that sick shit would have done the same in a Miami Vice-type 80s game rewarding other themes but at the same time, it does take a particularly fucked up mind to narrate throat-fucking. Even in a game such as Poison'd.

It's like WotC's Book of Vile Darkness. If you use it with your players, it will certainly contribute to an evil atmosphere but how vile it will be remains entirely up to you.

Quote from: RobNJHonesty, nobody I know spends this much time worrying about theory-purity or -rigor. To me and most people I know, "system matters" is the by-now-trivial, but at-the-time-not-so-trivial notion that game design can influence resultant play, so keep that in mind when you design. It seems like you're expecting a level of attention to theory that is relatively rare these days, either focused at our own games or at others'.

Well yeah. It never really was much more than an excuse to beat people over the heat with how, scientifically, their favorite game sucked.

Now, if only they could get over the Rebelious Freedom Fighter bullshit...

Quote from: HaffrungSo the esophagus-fucking was done out of fidelity to history?

Do you actually read what people write before setting up strawmen?

Temple's point was that the game itself wasn't the main issue here. Some people's characters committing distasteful acts and broadcasting it on the net doesn't automatically mean the game has no redeeming features. Otherwise we might as well condemn pretty much every rpg out there.

Was there any defence of oesophagus-fucking? Not that I'm aware.

Thanks for playing.

You can tell who is only here for promotion.
By the stench.
And the Avatars.