thread: 2005-10-20 : The Fruitful Void
On 2005-10-24, John Kim wrote:
Ron Edwards wrote:
John, we agree on this point. However, I think you have historically been rather a pain in the ass about it, by not recognizing that a game may have "emotions" mechanics and *still* provide a fruitful void, perhaps one that you (John) may not be familiar with. Yes, this is a personal criticism, and I'd appreciate you actually reflecting on, rather than defending, your behavior.
Well, I've reflected on it. On the one hand, it's true that my best experiences have never been in games with strong personality mechanics. So that contributes to bias on my part. However, I've also generally defended them as a potentially fruitful choice. For example, one of my small contributions to Steffan O'Sullivan's Fudge was to convince him to add a "Personality Traits" section to it. cf. FUDGE Faults (from rec.games.design June 1993). I think a fair expression of my thoughts on emotional mechanics are in my old essay entitled simply "Personality Mechanics".
More specifically to this thread, I think that emotions mechanics can have a fruitful void—but that void will be different from the subject of the emotion mechanics.
