Everyone who cares already knows, but… The Forge closed its doors on both its RPG Theory and GNS-specific forums. Not that anyone really needs it, but I figured I’d enumerate my take on the pros and the cons of the move.
The Upside:
- The Forge will gain tighter focus for its stated purpose (the promotion of independent RPG design and publishing).
- It may push some pure-theory participants at the Forge into actual design and publishing.
- It may dispell some of the undeserved (and some of the deserved) criticisms of the Forge, thereby bringing in new particpants who will hopefully bring cool new ideas game designs.
- (This is the big one to me) It will almost definitely foster a much-needed exodus of serious theory discussion to a location that better suits it. (That is, the Forge really wasn’t a great place to discuss theory, it just happened to be the only place – sort of anyway).
The Downside:
- Some smart people who have stuff to contribute will drop out of the field completely with the loss of a central gathering place.
- We’ll see an initial fragmentation of discussion. Those who stay in the theory game will break up without a unifying central focus and I predict we’ll have a sore lack of cross-polination, at least to start.
- One of the avenues that has been bringing people into the design (and to some minor degree, play) of RPGs is gone. I know that some of the participants at the Forge who are designing these days wouldn’t be doing it if the Theory forums hadn’t caught them and held them long enough to get involved.
Do the upsides outweigh the downsides? Well, I’m not sure myself. My tentative answer is “no”. Theory discussion has been moving out away from the Forge for a good year or so now, and I think that we were months (at most) away from some sort of centralizing effort. (At the risk of spilling the beans early, I am enmeshed in just such a project at the moment.) I think that the move Ron made was good, but premature. With another six months or so we could have had a solid, well-organized theory group established outside the Forge which would make the transition much more of a formality. As it stands it’s kind of left folks in a lurch. Of course, at the same time it’s provided a sort of kick in the butt to get things rolling faster than they would have otherwise, but I fear that this will result in some slap-dash, suboptimal solutions that we end up stuck with for years because they’re easier to put up with than another shift in location.
I suppose time will tell.
Thomas
One thing about your last line that catches me, and makes me wonder..
What if the Forge was originally fully of slap-dash, suboptimal solutions?
The important thing is to make a start and see it through, I think. Once you’ve got something set up, then you’ll be able to optimize it.
Right. You need a nexus first, so people won’t get too dispersed; and then you can improve it over time.