I mentioned yesterday I might delve into this a bit, but first a weird note. I was talking to people about sub-leasing for the summer, and one of the places I went to talk to people at I met someone who I knew of from work. I think this is the first time I’ve ever crossed paths in real life with someone I’ve taken a complaint from with the police. So here’s this guy who has no idea who I am, and I happen to know way more about his personal life than I’d like (because people making complaints want to tell you everything). It was, I admit, somewhat disconcerting. Anyway, enough of that.
You’ll note that in my title above I have “RPG theory” in quotes. This is because I’m beginning to see just how tied together the RPG theory and the specific publishing model advocated by the Forge are. This isn’t a bad thing, really, but since I’m becoming more and more disenchanted with the Forge publishing model I’m simultaneously growing disconnected from the community.
Here’s where that disenchantment comes from: The Forge model is heavily focused upon audience publication. That is, a big part of Forge-style publishing is publishing a game to be read and played by people you don’t know. Which, like I said, isn’t bad. Writing for an audience is no bad thing, and it can, when done well, be really helpful for the audience too. However, it’s not really what I’m interested in.
I’ve come to realize that I just don’t really care all that much about presenting to an unknown audience. I want to write games for me to play. Games for me to play with my friends. I’m not really all that excited to write for people outside of that group.
Which leads to a difficulty. People inside my group of friends share a lot of assumptions with me. That means that I don’t have to explain a lot of things, I can just rely on them to know them already. This is not true for an unknown audience. For the unknown audience I should assume intelligence but ignorance. It’s not that they’re dumb, they just haven’t been exposed to all the ideas they need to have been exposed to to get what I’m doing.
The sort of writing you need to do for the unknown audience, the sort of writing you need to do to reach enough people to make it worth your time and effort to publish on paper, is significantly different than the sort of writing you do for your friends. The Forge, for whatever reason, places a lot of value on publishing for the unknown audience, and thus on writing the sorts of game texts that will make sense to them.
This, I think, is the driving aesthetic behind the community even today. After the Forge “diaspora” most people are still thinking in these terms. Which, again, is cool. It’s just not what I want to do. I think that within this community aesthetic any theory is intended to support the goal of publishing for the unknown audience, and I think that the theory that has been developed for it works really well at that.
That’s why I think I feel disconnected: I don’t really share those core values and thus don’t really care all that much about what the community is up to. There are, of course, exceptions. I know Jon’s been talking about “communities of practice” forever, and that’s the sort of thing that makes me go hmmm. But it’s sort of on the fringes, not really part of the community in a lot of ways because it doesn’t support that core publishing aesthetic.
Thomas
Well, you can’t really expect different from a place where the model is eventually releasing your game and at least calling it even, monetary, if not succeeding beyond that.
Unless you have a very large group of friends with whom you game, you have to assume they don’t have your assumptions (hah!).
I am finding it my bane. I write games, and my best friend can understand them instinctively, grokking them. Whereas other people complain they can’t understand how play goes, or what play is.
I guess not all of us are cut for “publication mode”, but then again, it can be a good training for writing publishable papers.
Sure, but my point is that there are perfectly valid models which don’t involve the publication thing. Like I said, I’m not opposed to the publication model, but I do think it’s somewhat unhealthy that we don’t seem to be have much support for other models. There are a lot of people out there I think have great ideas but aren’t cut out for the Forge paradigm of publishing, and there’s no one telling them that they don’t have to be.
There’s a lot of support saying “you can publish” and that’s awesome, but there’s not a lot of “Hey, you can publish if you want, but your game is just as good if you don’t.”
Thomas
You might be interested in the half-baked discussions on SG and the Forge, while they are mainly geared to make sure games are ready for publication, their lessons, and applications thereof will probably benefit “Not for publication” games as well.