thread: 2005-06-16 : The Forge and Me
On 2005-06-21, Ben Lehman wrote:
Paul—Hi! It's me. Ben. I designed a game at the Forge, too. Yup. I did.
I'm very well aware that the Forge is more than just a theory house. I've made pretty liberal use of the Publishing, RPG design, Connections and Actual Play fora, plus a lot of the individual publisher fora.
I'm curious what you mean by "A peer-reviewed journal would kill the Forge dead." If you mean "turning the Forge into a peer-reviewed journal would kill it dead," then you are correct, and that would be a shame. I don't think that is what Adam was proposing, either. If you mean "the existence of a peer-reviewed journal would kill the Forge," then I think that may well be a damned good thing—if it is that easy to kill something, it probably wanted to die. I don't agree though. What it might do is kill the Forge's function as a center for RPG theory, by providing a new center, but I gather that that's something that's been going on for a while.
Plus, and I am a dork for forgetting this, we already have a peer-reviewed journal. So let's maybe contribute and see how that goes.
The gaming community isn't full of folks looking for more work to do. It's full of folks looking to figure out how come their gaming isn't any damn fun, and what they might do about it.
It isn't? It isn't, say, full of folks who spend their free time writing essays about game design and game play? Like, to pick some names at random, Brand, myself, Vincent, Ron, Chris and others?
Saying we need to centralize this is pretty much the opposite of bad, although it might be premature.
And, yes, it is full of frustrated players who are looking for a better way to play, and the Forge has its evangelical missions regarding that, but I think perhaps it might be the best to seperate that shit from theory development at this point. We already know why their gaming isn't any damn fun, and we already know how to help them fix it. Hanging a carrot of theory development in front of their nose both drives off those that don't like such things and also gives a false sense of hope to those that do, because our theories are pretty much developed. It was a good way to operate 2 years ago. It isn't now. We need to seperate learning from research because, damn it, they are different things and they are, to some extent, poisoning each other.
Summary: It takes 2-3 years to get up to speed on Forge theory, given a few hours a day here and there sort of learning style. This isn't a long time by the basis of, say, an academic discipline, but it is a fair chunk of time. Confounding that learning with expectations of theory *development* is appalling, in terms of what we are asking.
Ed—I think it is pretty clear that there are some folks at the Forge who perceive themselves as strongly aligned "against" the theory of the place. It seems really odd to insult them by saying that they are part of our mainstream theory development.
yrs—
—Ben
