thread: 2012-02-11 : 3 Problems
On 2012-02-14, Roger wrote:
Alright, I'll unpack what I'm talking about here. I may have been a bit... overzealous in my original assertion.
What I'm trying to say is that issues like "hard to get together", "opaque content", etc, are issues insofar as people think of a game in those terms. It doesn't really matter whether a game is actually "hard to get together". It matters whether people perceive the game in that light.
Because if you can get people past those perceptions and into actually playing the game, a lot of these problems tend to become self-correcting. The game is easier to get together the more you play it and the more other people play it. The game becomes less opaque the more you play it. Etc.
I am psychically sensing you are not yet in agreement with me, so I'll offer you this thought experiment:
Consider these issues of opaque content, social footprint, and procedures and protocols, as a tabula rasa outsider, of the following popular constructs:
* Catholicism
* Amateur sports of all sorts
* Courtship
* Marriage
* Childbirth
* Work
I would suggest that even the average RPG is way ahead of these in terms of raw design. Hence I'm inclined to think it's not actually a design issue, nor something that a sufficiently-clever monkey can design his way out of.
