thread: 2009-07-27 : Resolving Player Conflicts by Reconciling Their Interests
On 2009-07-30, Carsten wrote:
This morning on the way to work, i listened to Narrative Control 28, where I found a difference (hippy vs. engineered games), which appealed to me and which frames my pigeonholing of the roleplaying term in an interesting way.
So , to use that difference, i come a very hippy standpoint and I keep discovering all these very much engineered games, with their explicit player involment, scene framing and what not else. This makes me think that in out hobby, at least in some interesting strata of it, a good deal of development has taken place, leading way beyond the baseline hippy ol'skool "roleplaying". I very much adopted Paul Thevises term "story game" for it and tried my hand at devising subcategories here:
"narration rights" games (like houses of the blooded and inspectres), or mor liminal game like Dont rest your head* or Dogs in the Vineyard*. I had this "insight", which i belive still holds some truth, that it might not be helpful to lump everything togher under the broad category of roleplaying. It was from this point of depature i asked "is this still roleplaying?" meaning "is this not so evolved from baseline hippy playing that we should give it another name and acknowlege the gap?". I'm not implying here that any game is "better/worse" by nature, I just think the difference exist, as between say the Civilisation board game and Dominion, both are palor games, but the term has become so broad that is does tell us very little about the game.
To continue the car metaphor from above, i instsited that driving a racing car shouldn't be called "driving" anymore, it's "racing". I've come to see that that was rash, but I want a category system where both driving sedans and racing cars are distinct.
* from what I've seen of them
Vincent:
i would very much like to take a closer look at your games, but they are very hard to get here in germany, and due to personal circumstances i can't use paypal.
However, your name keeps cropping up as i continue to study they "engineering" techniqes developed by the indie scene, and your blog seems to nicely focused on what interests me. You also implied in comment 23 above that you are "into this" and with that I can very much empathize.
but to be less of a pain, I will think twice before posting any comments now (although I think i still owe you those "storming" comments)
