thread: 2008-03-20 : Mr Foot Goes to Mouthville, part 2
On 2008-03-25, Jonathan Walton wrote:
Thor,
This is good stuff. Thanks for talking it out a bit. Personally, I think the reaction to Burning Empires says a lot about the indie games community at this point in our existence, and I'd like to understand it better.
I totally get what you're saying about the intentions behind the product and it's tragic that somehow those didn't get translated better into shared sentiments when the game was released. I think the community definitely shares a great deal of responsibility for not embracing and supporting BE as much as could have been done.
I think part of the reason BE felt alienating to a portion of the indie games crowd, especially folks who didn't previously have a strong relationship with Luke or the rest of you guys (like me) is that people decided, based on a cursory glance at things, that BE wasn't created for us, the members of the indie games community. It felt like it was something created by folks within the indie games community that specifically targeting mainstream roleplaying audiences. Like, when I picked up Blossoms, a year later, I was like, "Hey, this book is written for me!" where before I was like "BE is clearly aimed at people who play Those Other Full-Color Hardcover Games, which doesn't include me at all. Oh well. Place it back on the stack. Sure is pretty though, but most of those pretty games suck or aren't for me [note the bias there]." It was only later, when I heard about some of the neat scene framing guidelines, that I picked up a copy from my local game store. So yeah, I think your intentions towards the mainstream were completely misread in a fair number of cases.
Also, as someone who didn't really know you guys well, I wrongly assumed that, because the Burning Crew was running Burning Wheel all the time and most of the Burning Wheel folks seem to almost exclusively in the Burning Wheel forums, that Luke and his comrades were pretty much only interesting in Burning Wheel and didn't really care that much about what was happening in the rest of the indie games community. Now, in person, this has never been true. When Luke and other folks have stopped by SGBoston a few times, we've played InSpectres and playtested Crime & Punishment and done other stuff, which is what changed my feelings over time. It would definitely be a shame if we continued to divide ourselves into little cliques based on false perceptions of what people are and aren't interested in.
Hopefully, as a community, we can try to patch things up and reaffirm our support for one another over the next few months and at GenCon.
