thread: 2013-09-23 : Game Texts on the Object of the Game
On 2013-09-23, Gordon wrote:
I took a look at a bunch of old games, and was reminded/astonished at how much of the text about this kind of thing reads as (bad, usually) marketing/advertising rather than, um, text actually explaining anything. I'll see if I can find an example that is non-the-less somehow interesting to post here.
As a long-time roleplayer, I *think* I get the object from each passage, but it's SO hard to try and filter out all the "stuff I know" about RPGs in general and each game in particular that I'm not sure I can focus on just the text passages.
Explicit vs. implicit - I'm not sure how to apply that. The particular passage from Spione leaves "we're creating stories" implicit. But (from TSoY) is "enable a type of fantasy" explicit or implicit? I mean, there are a bunch of details about that type, so it's pretty explicit - but left implicit is what we do with that "enabled" fantasy.
Similarly (from BtVS), "create a tale" is pretty explicit, unless you start asking "but how? who/when? what kind?" Explicit IF you can assume a bunch of answers there, but implicit otherwise.
Not sure if that's helpful - I'm floundering on focusing the questions.
