thread: 2006-01-13 : Push and pull aside, co-ownership
On 2006-01-13, Vincent wrote:
Mo, in marginalia: So the deliniation is: there's a conceptual game and you can feel free to design concepts and context to aid your discussion of theory, but there's no actual game, so there is no constraint on the example but that which you impose on it for the sake of discussion? "Don't tell me that Joe Gamer can't/won't/doesn't, tell me ways to apply it so Joe Gamer could?"
Okay!
Yes. Very yes.
Only, "tell me ways to apply it" is to say, go design a game. Bring me a whole game design! And that's not what I'm after in this thread, in any thread on my blog.
So instead, leave the game design work aside for now, and step this way: "Assume that, yes, there are any number of ways to apply it so that Joe Gamer would dig it, we can design those games if we're inspired. Yes. Now, what does that say about roleplaying? What does it say about our designs, individually, AND taken as a body, AND as a craft? What does it say about Joe Gamer?"
This makes MT go "Hmm. Oh. OK."
That's an entirely different product of thought. I'll keep that in mind.
Do you want to see the process through design to get to what it says about our individual and collective designs, the craft and the target? Or do you just want to see what it says about those things?
This makes LP go "Differing Modes"
Okay, so there are at least 3 different modes. a) The designer / theoretician mode, which is what I think Vincent's using (and this may be 2 modes I'm conflating), b) the GMing mode, e.g., will it fly in my group?, and c) the reviewer mode. c) is not appropriate to this 'blog in this context. I have used c) where it is appropriate, in an actual review of an actual product, to say, "X would not work because Y player would do Z and A player would do B, and why the heck does the author need X, anyway?" In the absence of, well, an actual game, there isn't anything to hang an actual review.
