thread: 2009-12-18 : Seed content
On 2009-12-31, Josh W wrote:
Some well meant drive-by comments:
original post- sometimes I love to use the media soup, especially if I've been surrounding myself with the more unusual corners of it. (corners of a soup? a weird picture!) Coming from totally different places causes more thoughtful pauses during starting setting creation, but can lead to some pretty amazing stuff if you all play the composite streight.
37- Rob I get that, definitely, but in the olden days games were closer to extreme 2 but didn't always work for what they were supposed to be for!
45- Ben perhaps that viewpoint is like the programmer who says "of course I made this program to suit my own needs, but all you need to do is edit and recompile the source-code" it's easy for you cause you do this stuff; the pool and heroquest have some of their strength because they don't do that. They are like blogs for people who really want a different kind of website, but don't know how to program any.
47- vincent, I think that second one is mist robed gate! (or at least a relative)
Here's my take on buy-in vs working play:
To me the example of the Android game is one of people wanting to play their game for which they have pre-established bye-in via their own esoteric processes.
But how to actually play it? Do those players shift from their specification to accommodate a designer? Preferably only if the extra voice of the mechanical structure is a nice addition. Do they grab-bag-hack a selection of other games together to make their new version? That's design, and a lot of people already do it, but the next tricky bit is finding ways to meld that stuff together: If you make a list of sub-systems, do they have a standard linking framework, or do they have alternative suggestions for attaching them to each other?
I suspect there is a whole category of people for whom playing an rpg is an expression of a creative desire, and they form groups based on that. Their engagement with the process is based on their hope that it will result in them producing something together that matches up to what they want. If they at least produce something together, well that's something, but really they are about how that something matches up with what they intended.
That's one version of a group having their own esoteric buy-in, I'm sure there are other forms, and no doubt compound forms etc etc.
But I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that sometimes we don't get captured by someone's gorgeous game, how ever much our designer egos might prefer it, we get captured by our own visions that we find a game (or hybrid of games) to serve.
How does that relate to the original idea, of giving a game some part for people to love? Well how about sometimes people bring their own thing they love, and that needs embodying, something to make it actual experience, and that seed defines certain features of the structures required to express it?
