thread: 2005-03-05 : Policy in the Face of Failure
On 2005-03-05, Chris wrote:
Hi Vincent-
There is no 100% way of communicating anything for 100% understanding all the time. Understanding is a meeting point between two places. You can communicate as best as you might, and people have to meet you half way.
Sometimes folks have no personal experience to draw upon, and that's why they can't reach you. Consider the inability of many folks to grasp Narrativism or Simulationism depending on their own play experiences. More words never make it as clear as actual play experience and relating it to that.
Then add in the fact that society in general has trained more people to argue on the principle of establishing dominance rather than information exchange and discussion. Even if that isn't how you personally run things, it becomes easy to be defensive surrounded by that kind of intercourse. Identity politics are part of our societal conditioning, whether we like it or not.
Failed? Only if our goal was to make everyone understand(if not agree). In which case we can look to several other figures who were much more persuasive in history and dealing with much more serious issues and failed to get their point across to everyone(say, Gandhi). Thankfully, we're only talking about games, and we're a lot less charismatic and persuasive. It doesn't matter what you're talking about, or how clear headed you make it, someone, somewhere will misunderstand due to accident, selective reading, or simple laziness and the desire to support or oppose it without understanding. Words are clusmy tools, but they're all we got.
But- as far as your blog, it's your blog, and this might be the best decision. Especially since all you added was a chart talking about what has been at the Forge for years now, and having to start completely over from scratch. Instead of progress and building on what was there, it was back to square zero. If you want to deal with that kind of stuff again, I might suggest that you just throw up some links and go, "Review THIS" :)
