[Interview] never before seen by eyes of whoever

[Frank T]

Aside:

Although I liked all these games [i.e. coming out of Game Chef 2004] quite a bit, and I appreciated that most of the next wave of titles were indeed quite individually distinctive, I didn't like this hint at subcultural uniformity very much, nor the shared assumptions about play that seemed to be more and more prevalent in the designs.

This is a very good point, and one that quite succinctly summarizes my frustration with Story Games, the Power 19 and family.

Happy new year y'all!

Frank

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Troy,

Can you ask that again without jargon? The concept of discount means a fixed price, and MSRP isn't fixed. I know this flies in the face of all retail and marketing talk, but such talk seems based on lies to me so I can't process it.

Hi Frank,

I thought you'd like that.

[Ron Edwards]

Oh yeah, Gordon - as you know, I grew up a short drive away from Esalen. That's where my mom, dad, and stepdad rearranged their marriages ... three of them, actually, including the head therapist guy. My stepdad became the director of mental health services for San Benito County, and ran gestalt therapy sessions at home. One of the clients was the woman who gave me a copy of The Hobbit in 1974.

For those who don't know, there is not a lot of daylight between a woman giving birth in your bathtub and a gestalt therapy session.

[glandis]

So easily distracted... I meant to ask, as the main point of my post

The larger cultural "snap" or perhaps shift into a different dimension came in about 1982, and by 1989, everyone's memory was rewritten

Rewritten from what to what? I mean, I *think* I know what you're talking about, but I realize my experience is far enough removed from yours that I can't be sure.

[Frank T]

Oh, on the interview. I'll break a lance for the guy. He didn't know what he was getting into. I mean, we don't know who he is or what site he represents, but obviously his work and his site aren't into the kind of in-depth intellectual discourse you are into, Ron. Coming from the perspective of target audience, it doesn't really matter all that much whether he had read your articles or any Forge threads (I suppose he hadn't), but more importantly, his target audience surely hadn't. I do think he put some thought into his questions, from the perspective of someone who is aware of the Forge, anyway, Story Games, and some of the more popular games that are being discussed there, but who is still an outsider. I think with one possible exception, his questions were well-intentioned and not too boring actually. He was looking for short-ish, catchy answers that someone with a mild interest and an average attention span might read on their lunch break, or on their smartphone. He wasn't aware that you don't do that kind of thing (should he have been? I don't think that question bears much merit.)

As for the defensiveness, harshness, negativity and the question that provoked it, again, he had no idea what he was getting into. It was a provocative question alright, but I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was trying to open a door for you, to say something that would make all the people who read that quote and thought, what an ass, go, oh, well, alright then. If he had known you better, he would have avoided the topic altogether. But it is a thing that many people have heard about, maybe in some instances the only thing about you they've heard, so you have to expect people to ask about it.

In conclusion, I think he just had very different expectations than you had, even when he accepted your proposal of dialogue. You may call him lazy, lament his lack of journalistic due diligence, but the questions he put you weren't phrased lazily. He had put some thought into them. He just hadn't committed to the thing you wanted him to commit to. He wasn't like the people who normally interview you, who are typically fans or your work, and insiders. Were his expectations unreasonable? Let me ask a question in return: Were your expectations reasonable? Did you look at other interviews he did, or other interviews that get published on that website?

[Frank T]

Here, just as a point of illustration, I have taken your text and deleted about 2/3 of it, with no changes to the wording, except in the last paragraph, marked by []. I know you despise this kind of dilution, but if you try to read it unprejudiced, you may find that it would actually still seem a decent interview and that it would be quite worthwhile for "normal roleplayers" with a mild interest but no experience with independent games at all to read it.

http://www.directupload.net/file/d/3863/mdz89n4i_pdf.htm

[Frank T]

(Click "save" to read it without the annoying ad. I need my own webspace and the skill to use it...)

[Ron Edwards]

Sure, that's what he wanted. So what?

I stand by the due diligence. When he opens with a "do you feel bad about saying such a terrible thing," then he's already in hostile mode - "Everyone thinks this, now stand there before us and justify your way out of it." He needs to show me that he has even a smidgeon of receptivity to an answer. I didn't require a full dissertation from him - even a single sentence would do. Even "Gee, I don't really know." Anything to demonstrate to the reader that two minds were meeting here, instead of him hiding behind a perceived veil of "just representing the average gamer."

I didn't express the indignation that some other posters did, and I think you're wrongly assigning it to me. My interest in this thread is further developing the interview, possibly from the embedded counter-questions, not in slamming him.  However, your proposed submissiveness goes past my line. This is about basic human honesty.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Gordon,

Rewritten from what to what?

Amerikkka. I'm working on that this year.

[Dan Maruschak]

To do some more compare-and-contrast between the indie RPG scene and what I know about the corner of the indie video game scene that I saw: Many people in RPG land seem to hold to the idea that "there's no money in this" or that it's beer money at best, combined with the idea that "we know how to do this", i.e. that following the patterns of previous games in terms of structure, look-and-feel, etc., is a tried and true method. My brother's studio was formed from people who had been laid off from a AAA developer that closed it's doors. I think their POV was sort of the opposite: "there's money to be made here" and "the way the current incumbents are doing it isn't working". (Obviously the Forge had some stuff to say about what wasn't working in terms of publishing, but I think there are also issues of design and design methodology, and the Forge culture around those issues is more complicated). From what I saw, the successful indie studios had a pretty strong drive to get product out the door so they could get money to put food on their tables. It's probably true that there actually is more money in video games than in tabletop RPGs, but I wonder if there are some self-fulfilling prophecies at work, too. I think the fact that it takes a nontrivial amount of skill and talent to do the programming and art to even get a video game functional enough to be demo-able or screenshot-able also created a kind of "selection pressure" that separated out the people more likely to get stuff done from people who were just idly noodling. By contrast, in RPG land doing something like a Forge "First Thoughts" post has a much lower barrier to entry.

One big difference, which I attribute to differences in the medium, is that it's a lot easier to get "another set of eyes" on a video game. Many of them are single player, or fit more easily into the "let's pop online to play multiplayer for a while" video game culture, so people at one studio could more easily ask people at another studio to try the games an give some feedback. Seeing that this worked in that field is one of the reasons I'm mildly obsessed with thinking it would be nice if we had a stronger culture of mutual playtesting in the RPG design scene (especially now the G+ Hangouts have made gaming with geographically-separated people more feasible than ever).

[Frank T]

Hi Ron,

My bad. When you asked for comments, I thought you were asking for an opinion on what went wrong between you and that journalist. I should have known you better than that. In my defence, I haven't been around much recently. It's a shame though, as my edited version would be a damn fine interview with a bit of smoothing over, and it's not going to be read by more than a handful of people because you think it's too "submissive", or in reality, because you're too pissed about being confronted with Brain Damage.

You know what would have been submissive, and dishonest? For him not to ask about that quote, is what. And you getting all hung up about the phrasing of the question, refusing to answer it altogether? That's just taking the easy way out.

[Ron Edwards]

Horse shit. There's nothing I'd like better than to clear the air about the brain damage. In fact, just two weeks ago, I was confronted by no other than Jon Tarnowski recently about it, and I shut him up with the facts in two seconds. (if you check out his blog, you'll see a sudden 180 towards me in the posts since then)

1. I was talking about the entrainment to railroading coded as story-oriented role-playing.
2. That entrainment was so effective that it led to a whole generation of role-players unable to create stories at all - disabled, as far as I'm concerned.

I'll stand that in front of anyone who wants to talk about it, and as I've found, not a person on this earth objects to it once they see it.

All I require is someone who's able to approach me about it with a modicum of decency, as Jon uncharacteristically did in that instance - even merely admitting that they don't know.

[Frank T]

Not a person on this earth objects to it once they see it. And the ones who don't see it lack basic human honesty, have I got that about right?

(Don't answer that question, it was rhethorical.)

Well, I've derailed this thread long enough. Carry on.

[Ron Edwards]

Oh no, you're not getting away free from that. By "see" I mean the literal use of one's eyes to read, not "see" in some mystical sense of agreement. And the dishonesty doesn't lie in disagreement, it lies in refusing to look and holding on to what some yahoo said that they saw that some other yahoo said.

If anyone legitimately disagrees with me about what I actually said, regarding the brain damage, I haven't seen it yet. I am not saying it's impossible.

[Frank T]

Just because people acknowledge you are describing an existing phenomenon, doesn't make them agree about your conclusion that it is to be assessed as "hurt", "brain damage" or "disability", which was always the real hang-up. Not to the fucking RPGPundit, I'm sure of that. But I told it to your face years ago.