thread: 2011-04-25 : We are creative equals
On 2011-05-03, Josh W wrote:
As one of the nitpickers, sorry if I'm making a grind out of this.
I was going to hold it back until you said "If you wanted to play by this principle, you would." and the original version of that post more explicitly called you on that.
Ok in the literal sense that's true; anyone can shoot off in some random direction, but if we're talking about someone following that principle to get to a game a little like yours, then a bit more of the path would need filling in.
There's a big gap between good ideals and functional or semi-functional play, and even before you get to the details of techniques, your play seemed to have certain sacrifices being made to produce it's awesome bits. Flag that up, and people can choose if they want to make those sacrifices.
Seems to me that's pretty important but implicit; what you don't care about is almost invisible, but it might matter to anyone following. It seems to me that your play (maybe all types of play) can be tagged with what is important to play, but also what is able to be lost during play. Even better if you can say what you did find you did lose and didn't care about.
Putting my earlier post into nicer form, and more like a direct quote, perhaps your game was "We will treat each other as creative equals, even if that means stalling the flow of play to make things satisfactory to all of us"
Finding the "price" of a kind of freeform in these terms helps everyone who's enamoured with it see the advantages of their current games, possibly skipping hassle, and allows those who make mechanics to design to complement the flaws that kind of free play has.
I can see you're really not that interested in helping people pick up a kind of play you feel you've moved beyond, and probably not keen on tearing into a pretty fun part of your memory to produce it's flaws.
But in between that, having a sort of "beautiful within it's limits" approach, you can give that game's magic it's place cognitively/structurally as well as historically, "that was that" rather than just "then was then".
