I responded to this blog entry over at Game Foo, and I decided that it was long enough to merit a blog post – particularly because it bears directly on the history of Elsewhere. My own comment was as follows:
My project was a bit less elegantly thought out – it relied on a single central table, which was built on a logarithmic (or, more precisely, two logarithmic) scales – one axis for the Attribute score, the other for ...
After the jump →11
OCT2Share
Bankuei, over at his blog (which doesn’t have commenting on that post for some odd reason), has a few things to say about Narrativism. I’m not sure if it’s related to anything I said here – I wouldn’t make such a presumption of readership, and it doesn’t seem to follow – it looks like a post aimed at the Forge – but it addresses the point I made earlier this week:
“Narrativism”. What a loaded word.
[...]
“What is it?” ...
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OCT
Posted by: beh
I’ve been putting a lot of thought lately into the meaning of game mechanics.
What does it mean …
… when a player rolls dice?
… when we move a pawn across a board?
… this thing on the character sheet called ‘Strength’?
In puzzling all of this out, I’ve come across the converse phenomenon, which has become central to my formulization of Elsewhere: Creating a mechanic and then deciding what it means after it’s been created. Often in game ...
After the jump →Posted by: beh
A lot of things to dig into, so let’s get started. First of all, here’s a quote from Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, a decent entry-level book on complexity theory:
Most game players, alas, live on something close to day-trader time, at least when they’re in the middle of a game – thinking more about their next move and their next meal, and usually blissfully to the ten- or twenty-year trajectory of software-development. ...
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SEP
Posted by: beh
Over at his blog (which appears to have been hacked or damaged in some way), mythusmage posted this in response to my post that Mechanics are worthless.:
Brian offers his opinion on RPG mechanics in the above piece. I think he’s wrong.
Why, because he makes a common error regarding mechanics. He thinks that RPGs have multiple mechanics. So does much of the RPG community. RPGs do not have multiple mechanics, RPGs have one mechanic. All else is system.
What is that one ...
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SEP
Posted by: beh
So, after following this link on 20′ by 20′ Room, I wound up spending a couple of days thinking about bricolage, the art of combining whole (or parts of) found objects to create new, functional objects. I’d give you a couple of links from Google on the subject, but frankly the word is used much more frequently than the concept, apparently. Perhaps a francophone can do better.
The central idea that I’ve taken away from the ...
After the jump →Posted by: beh
This is partially cross-posted from a new Yahoo! group that I’ve joined. I liked how it came out, so I’m reposting it here, with some additional thoughts. Warning: Contains spoilers for the Firefly episode Out of Gas, so if you’re watching Firefly, be forewarned.
Part of theproblem of analytic thought in RPGs is that the language of analysis is woefully underdeveloped. This is mainly because the body of analysis on RPGs and RPG-like gaming is paper-thin. Most of the ...
After the jump →Posted by: beh
A kind soul, who I’m imagining accessed my .sig over at RPG.net (oh, by the way, I retired as an admin there, if you follow these sorts of things), asked about exegesis v. diegesis, which I posted about a while back. The following is my response to his questions, which are in italics:
My apologies if I use the terms improperly, as they are unfamiliar to me; however, in reading your piece, a couple ...
After the jump →In two past blog entries (here) and (here), I’ve been tracking and analyzing the use of diegetic and exegetic modes of narrative, as they pertain to playing RPGs. As a brief primer, let me define both terms as I understand them:
exegesis: The linear ‘plot’ of a narrative. Scene 1 is followed by Scene 2, and so forth to Scene N, which is the (usually arbitrary) end of the current narrative.
diegesis: The manipulation of the space/time continuum ...
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