thread: 2009-12-04 : TAKE IT TO YOUR BLOG, BAKER
On 2009-12-07, Ben Lehman wrote:
Roger: I think Vincent's saying something different from that. He's saying "don't reveal your mechanism." Which is "don't refer every act of resolution or establishment back to the social-contract level."
This is good advice. Referring everything back to the social level is a pit-trap.
As for revealing "what you'd get out of the game if you played it," in my experience that has no effect at all on whether people will play the game, or what they get out of it when they play it. Dogs says in the first paragraph that it's a game about judgment. People play it and then are like "OMG! It's a game about judgment!" Bliss Stage tells you over and over that it's a game about love. People play it, and write to me, and say "hey, Ben, so it's strange, but I think our game was, you know, about love."
An engrossing narrative (one where you're not constantly referring resolution back to the social contract level, for example) is, well, engrossing. People tend to forget about the end state, especially if they already knew it going in.
yrs—
—Ben
