[Interview] never before seen by eyes of whoever

[Ron Edwards]

That's a point of disagreement I accept and always have. However, it comes down to definition rather than finding a flawed logical sequence or disagreement about what historically and functionally happened. I'm happy with the definition I used; saying "I don't accept that definition" is fine.

[Frank T]

It's not just a semantical difference, you know. But let's not dwell on this old hat, unless you absolutely want to.

My point is, I hate to see you building yourself an ivory tower (at least that's what it looks like from over here). If you're doing it to protect your own time and sanity, I can appreciate that, but if you're doing it out of principle, well, I'll say there's a thin line between having principles and just being stubborn.

[Ron Edwards]

This isn't semantics. Semantics would mean we're talking about the same thing but mistakenly think we disagree because of the words used.

Definitions means we look at reality differently and therefore disagree about the phenomena. The level is disagreement is deep enough that we're not going to resolve it through ordinary argument. I respect definitions differences and when they show up, I don't try to keep arguing and expect the other person to do the same.

I said "definitions" for a reason, because I am not pulling the customary dodge of "oh that's semantics." I don't do that.

[Moreno R.]

Hi Ron! I'm sorry for the lateness of this reply, but I was busy in the usual internet drama (I will never learn...)

Returning to the topic of The Forge as a community, did you read this essay?
http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Like the author, I had a lot of experience with unmoderated usenet newsgroup, and recognized the patter he described. And when I did read it, I was already reading the Forge, and I was seeing some of the problems listed.
People familiar with how the "Gente che gioca" forum works will recognize some of forum rules in that essay, but it goes in more depth than that. That essay is the guideline I used with that forum (or I tried to use, because I was never the only guy in charge there). I even used "Parpuzio" and similar terminology to build "barrier to enter" as indicated in the essay, resisting every effort to make the forum "more welcoming to everyone" (something that would have destroyed its usefulness simply to increase the user's count), and I have to say that it worked very well in keeping the community smaller and more cohesive)

Looking at that essay (and at my experiences) and at the Forge, it's clear that the very "reason of being" of the Forge would have destroyed it without a lot of continuous effort by a few individuals to keep it alive. And that it's exactly what happened. (You can really see the sudden drop in the forum life and usability when even a single person left. For example you can really divide the Forge in a "with Mike Holmes phase" and a "post Mike Holmes phase", they are easily noticeable. And when, at the end, you were practically the last one of that core group of designer, and did not post for over a month...  nobody else did, these is a month when nobody posted anything on the Forge)

Why? Because the very reason for the Forge, as you said many times, required that there was no barrier to entry, and that the Forge was built to help the new guy that post his first game idea on the "first though" subforum, and that he was more important than the "core" membership.
What this meant is that The Forge worked as a funnel randomly moving over a wild terrain. Somebody had always to continue to fill it with water, or it become empty and useless, and most of the water will be wasted anyway on barren soil. And at the end you get a lot of new plants to grow, but you can't do it long, the plants will have to find new sources of water or wither when you stop filling the funnel. (and, to strain a little more the image, the plants themselves have no reason to put water back into the funnel only to help other plants that they don't even know)

When I realized this, I did understand that if that was the reason for the Forge, it could not be done differently, but at the same time I realized the reason why it was a finite effort (and its incredible it lasted that long)

-----------
Turning back the clock to when I "discovered" the forge (2006), I don't think I can describe how it felt (but I think that a lot of people felt the same way when they did). I had passed years trying to talk about rpgs in the middle of maddening communities filled with morons and assholes (and I realize that even my contribution at the time was not very high-level, but that was the normal level of the conversation). At the time I was convinced that intelligent discussion about rpgs was really impossible in a public context, and there it was, and entire forum dedicated to it! it was like the holy land, home and the treasure island, all together!
I found, at the beginning, a real barrier to entry: the requirement for posting were much more strict than the ones I was used, and I felt the pressure to post "intelligent" things (apart from the forum rules, I didn't want to post unworthy things in that holy place!). Even after that, when I was more relaxed and already did know a lot of the regulars, I thought a lot about posting in any thread, much more than in any other forum.

I was so excited to have found the forge, that the meager amount of posts to read every day was not enough. So, I embarked on the mad project of reading all the forge. From the beginning. (something that was very useful when later I wrote summaries and lists of threads)
In hindsight, it was not so much "mad" a project. I followed the Forge from 2006 to 2012, and the number of posts dropped considerably after the first years, I could have easily read one days of older posts for every day of new posts. So why I dropped that project after having read only the first year? (and stopped, and started again, and stopped again and so on for a while, before dropping the project totally)

Why? Because I discovered that at the time the forge was still not the forge I did know. THAT Forge would be born the day the theory sub-forum were closed and (most important) was introduced the rule that you could talk about theory ONLY in actual play terms. That was the rule that built that barrier to entry. Before that, I found a forum much more similar to the ones I did know before: a lot more bullshit, posturing, and a lot less actual play.

But this the start of another long rant, it's better if I stop here at the moment, and hear what do you thing of this post, before continuing (see? I told you that I was trying to curb the length of my ranting posts...)

[glandis]

Rewritten from what to what?

Amerikkka. I'm working on that this year.

Sigh. I guess I should have known that was the answer. If you could say it short-hand, you probably wouldn't be working on Amerikkka, so I need to be careful what I ask for.

Back to the interview ... I guess I mourn the lost opportunity; the chance that dialogue could illuminate some of the sticky issues touched on. But I suspect "illuminating sticky issues" isn't often high on the priority list of interviewers. Another option would be for you to just open up a thread here saying "Ask me about ...", but the whole own-turf issue is tricky. Sigh, again.

[Ron Edwards]

Thanks Moreno. You guys remember Vincent's discussion at Anyway about status, right? He called it Status is your toy! I seem to recall it was influenced by someone else's article about dynamics at a workplace, but that link is eluding me, and there were also two discussions led by Matthijs Holter that Vincent links. There was also a subsequent G+ thread with much fingering of butts.

Everyone has his or her take on this material, but I'll start with a flat agreement about the "race to the middle" quality of status acquisition, and add the personal spin that the word "community" or even "group" is helpfully split between a real one and a fake one.

Here are some embarrassing points about me. I do not map to any intellect/emotion personality metric (which disturbs people who like them), nor to any named syndrome, but I probably have some kind of social disorder – and yes, I know, everyone feels alone, everyone feels misunderstood, and that's not what I mean. I mean that in many cases, I have to negotiate the status-expectations of a social situation, especially the most normal ones, as if I were a sociopath, faking my way through it and wondering what in the world the space-aliens are going to do next. Whereas strangely, in other social situations – particularly when concrete emotions and problems are involved – I am extremely intuitive, observant, and inspirational. I'm an unbelievably bad fellow professor and a remarkably good, off-the-scale good teacher. In day to day get-along hang-outs, I'm an insensitive and frustrating friend, but in any kind of situation, mild or extreme, fun or dangerous, I'm the empath-rock who can get you through. It's no surprise that I have managed to avoid the former (ordinary) social situation as much as I can, or if forced, as with today's get-together for a kids' birthday party, I transform it into the more concrete and as I see it authentic situation as fast as I can (it worked).

I state this because I not only don't do well in this "race to the middle" status process, I don't even see it. I wouldn't even know it was happening except that now I'm over 50 and have plenty of repeated instances to ponder, revealing my role – or obnoxious emergent anti-role – in such a process. The very idea of affirming a perceived group value or identity-tag, as something I'd do in order to be ... in? ... the group or to get ... something? ... in it, never occurs to me. Even after I learned it was there, and figured out some of what Matthijs and Vincent are talking about on my own, I still can't utilize its mechanisms. I have no reactivity in these terms. I don't even feel stress about not "doing well" in it because I'm so [arrogant? stupid? insensitive? choose your own term] – my only knowledge it's there comes from when someone gets upset at me for not caring about it.

The net effects are extraordinarily consistent, workplace after workplace, activity after activity. One is that I quickly gain recognition for ideas and acts, and make strong friends via one-on-one ties up and down the whole social scale in the group. Another is that about exactly 20% of the people in any organized social situation hate my guts, to a degree little short of outright hoping I will die painfully in the next two seconds. Other variables show up too that are more intimate. But I doubt that this sort of self-inspection is interesting, so will move to the point.

The point is my extension of Vincent's references, which in my opinion were way too oblique, to what happened at the Forge. You can probably see that his "toy" section, IV in his outline, makes no sense to me at all. I can't see how one sentence leads to another, I can't imagine doing anything he's talking about (aside from his accurate description of me founding the Forge), and I find literally zero inspiration in his recommendations. I'd rather stick a fork in my eye than even try to get into a head-space in which any of that makes sense.

However his I-III points speak loudly to me, and I repeat, I want to talk about real vs. fake. People reading this know I always saw the Forge as a war effort: to get independent creator ownership into the light, to recognize what it had already done for this odd social/creative activity, our small "a" art, and to advocate for people to get out and away from a distribution and sales method that was hopelessly broken. The interest in how what we did worked was only a subroutine of that – I could have had those discussions with my friend John Marron on my lonesome and been just as happy (I mean, except for the value of all those minds and designs – I'm talking socially). That larger effort and its valuable subroutine were the utility community.

Keep in mind what I said above, that I don't even perceive what I'm talking about next. It's based on some conversations between me and Paul, in which we talked about status anxiety, the thing I can't see, the intense need, desire, and fear associated with the ... thing.

If you're a status-anxious person who's newly arrived in some social endeavor, and a status-anxious person who's already there, who has currently neatly ensconced themselves right in the middle, goes ahead and says something - anything! - in a thread with you ... then you think "the group" has done something to you. Maybe you think it's moved you up or put (or kept) you down. But the problem isn't what "happened," it's failing to understand that nothing happened.

I'm repelled and fascinated – in a definite train-wreck, naked dead people way – by the notion that the status hierarchy presumes genuine "brownie points" which are really held by, say, Mike Holmes at the early Forge, or who-knows-who at the OSR blogs or whatever. There aren't any such brownie points. But if you start acting as if there were, particularly pre-adjusting your own behavior based on the brownie points you think Mike has ... and if a bunch of new and/or similarly-inclined people are doing the same thing ... then this "race to the middle" occurs.

The question is, how in the world do these status-anxious people codify "the values of the community?" It sure as shit isn't the same as the enforced values of the moderator (Vincent made this point, accurately). Mike's posts were respected and replied to with respect because he made good, high-utility points in them. Similarly, and Moreno is right on the mark with this, I only managed the moderation I did at the Forge by having enough people - at least some of the time - abandon the status game and take on the informal role of "good examples." Not to mention ruthlessly stomping on behavior I didn't want to see. And Mike, specifically as a person who held me in no special regard whatsoever except as a fellow gamer, voluntarily accorded with moderation because he valued the larger utility and its subset, and knew that modeling this accordance was good practice for anyone observing it. It had nothing to do with me holding more "points" of any kind than he did.

What I'm saying is that the many-times-repeated "Forge values" - as I saw and enforced them - aren't the same as the "community values" that Vincent is talking about and which I think are grossly misnamed. Those aren't values. What he's talking about are a weird, recursive construct which a number of people "know" but cannot bring themselves to say, and who are all in a sweat to affirm ... or in some cases, to take on the incredibly obvious role of "insider-dissenter," usually through obfuscation or minor disagreeableness. But they've invented these "values," or at least use one other - the similarly status-anxious - as constant complicit sounding boards in order to try to perceive them. That's why when he says "the middle," I must stress that there isn't one, that all of this is a big circle-jerk with no center and no directions, nowhere to arrive, and nothing, nothing to get out of doing this.

So you get two Rons, right? One who is a participant in the utility activity, to some extent a leader thereof in the positive sense I posted about earlier, and in relation to the site, moderating direct and demonstrable social and intellectual behavior, irrespective of persons. And then there is this other Ron (whom, I stress, I never see) who is this awful unpredictable god, clearly arbitrarily, even viciously "picking on" people - because what he says isn't matching the perceived "community values" at all, and people who feel as though they've earned ("earned" in this weird no-one-says way) safety from criticism are getting - OMG - "singled out."

How many, so many times did I see people run right into brick walls doing this. Fang Langford, who could never even imagine that he was already accepted, already being listened to, already being provided with the best feedback anyone could give him. Chris Pramas, the poor fool, wandering in with the presumption of the whole status-portrait from GAMA and the so-called industry. Andy Kitkowski, whose founding of Story Games I can date directly to a prior discussion at the Forge in which he admitted to posting for attention, and who even described the new site as the place for the Forge's cool kids to hang out in a space like RPG.net ("cool kids?" I wondered – "we have cool kids?"). John Stavropoulos – did he even ever post at the Forge? I can't recall; my searches turn up his names in playtesting lists and mentions, only. But if he didn't, I think I know why: he lives and breathes this status anxiety. Clinton's account may differ, but I tie every one of our staunch alliances and agreements to the utility and every one of our frustrations and disasters to the status game when it sucked him in.

It's a real issue for publishers and promotion. I hope I'm unique in being so oblivious, because my disability or whatever it is is probably a serious impediment to the success of Adept Press. Paul (forgive me for this personal comment) may be similar to me in some ways, about this stuff, and he's finding ways to make social media work for him, and I'm kind of following his lead. I think some of us know all about it but treat it like shit on shoes, like Keith, Tim Koppang, and Nathan. I'm always surprised and a little weirded out by the skill some have with dancing in the status raindrops, using its dynamics successfully without buying into it, like Luke, Vincent, and Jared. Then there are people who both seem to buy into the status anxiety completely and yet are master managers of others' anxiety, creating almost a niche in this fake social space, like Fred.

What's wrong with it? I think a lot of things are wrong with it. I think posting in this context makes people stupid and I think ultimately creates exclusion – needing enemies and religious icons just as in the link Moreno provided. I think it reinforces the false dichotomy of creatives vs. fans, which then turns into designers vs. customers, ultimately resulting in the financial condition of extraction rather than recompense for utility. (It is the ultimate marketing dream to have your product be the ticket to "more status," which is to say, part of the group, closer to the nonexistent middle, with no reference to its utility whatsoever – basically, it means people are throwing money at you for no reason at all. This phenomenon too, as I see it, is the enemy.

Yeah, I think status anxiety and its attendant illusory "climb to nowhere" dynamic is toxic. Vincent's presentation is too nice by far. This bullshit is the breeding ground of identity politics and thieves. it's fake, useless, incomprehensible, and above all, addictive.

[edited to fix a little grammar - RE]

[Dan Maruschak]

Hey, Ron. I think that when reading Vincent's stuff about status you need to keep in mind that those posts themselves can be status moves and are not necessarily accurate descriptions of the phenomena in question. My personal POV is that the effort to deny that there were any Forge values, while well-intentioned, created an environment with lots of kinda-maybe-sorta values which is a playground for status-hackers. Somebody who isn't high-status feels semi-constrained by things that might be rules, and high-status people can break "rules" knowing that the ability to break rules and get away with it is characteristic of high-status people. So there's a kinda-sorta rule that people aren't supposed to talk about RPG Theory anymore, but Vincent does, and uses that as a marketing tool for his stuff. The post-Forge community is politically left-leaning but not explicitly so, which has made it fertile ground for the anti-Desborough and anti-ZakS witchhunts of the past few years -- hunting heretics is a strong status move because it signals your own piety and gets people on the margins to start self-censoring since they don't want any grief to land on their heads. There's a reverence for exoticized foreign stuff, so people can be praised for engaging in the nordic LARP scene while there's still some leftover stigma for White-Wolf-y american LARPing.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Dan,

... the effort to deny that there were any Forge values, while well-intentioned, created an environment with lots of kinda-maybe-sorta values which is a playground for status-hackers.

I agree. But the Forge itself, that very environment and website, often found itself sandblasted by me to clear the joint of such things, and I stand by its integrity about that, compared to any other website. People who complained about status games there were frequently those who couldn't believe any such thing couldn't exist, so it must be there, and they couldn't see their way to competing in it, so it must be sneaky or unfair in some way they couldn't penetrate. One of my favorite posts was from Sean, or Calithena, when one day he wrote about me and Mike's dialogue with him, "If I just read what you've written exactly as it's stated, then it makes a lot of sense." This was a huge leap for him, simply to deal with a post as what was in it, and not as a maneuver that he had to suss out and guess the right counter-move for. He couldn't handle it as time went by.

You keep talking about high-status. I keep saying, there isn't any such thing, not in that environment. (In other workplaces, there are people who maximize their advantage via playing the status-anxiety game. In academia, we call them deans. It's the primary skill of many commercial execs. But that's exactly what I kept sandblasting at the Forge.) It does no good to say, as Fang often did, "You would say that, you're one of the in-crowd," punctuated with much sniffling and cursing. In a utility-based endeavor, there isn't any high status. Even power, which I exerted as site moderator, is not the same thing; it's only effective insofar as its utility is recognized.

The idea such a status-game was absent was beyond them. I get a lot of this "but it was too there," and I keep saying, only in your own anxious mind, only because you kept trying to make it happen.

I agree with your descriptions of the post-Forge situation, and as I see it, the Story Games situation from its inception, and you'll notice that I haven't participated much in any of it. I can't stand it. Even when the people involved are sincere and often do some great work, I find myself in space-alien land after even one or two posts and give up. I don't think I've ever managed to make it through a thread at Anyway, although many of Vincent's opening posts are really interesting to me.

[ndpaoletta]

As someone who participated more at the Forge than at any other forum (except, weirdly, a Hunter: the Reckoning in-character messageboard play-by-post game thing) AND someone who's more attuned (?) to status-y stuff, it seemed blindingly obvious to me that the people who got really angry, argumentative and such (up to and including huffy "I quit" posts) were also some of the people who would get the least use out of the forums, because talking in specifics about observed things and drawing conclusions through the lens of our experiences is kind of inherently non-problematic unless you intentionally problematize it by digging into "motivations" or "intentions" or other nonsense.

To this day, you'll see that posts about actual stuff that actually happens, or that people are actually working on, tend to get silence (or, at best, silent +1's and "cool!" responses). It's hard to make conversations about that. It's much easier to talk about what people are talking about, and how they talk about it, and what their intentions are and blargle what a waste of time.

I will also note that that Hunter forum game went through exactly the cycle of "value-based decentralized community" to  "personality driven toxicity" that you're describing, Ron. I think it was a formative experience for me that I was going through that at the same time that I was watching you stabilize the Forge around endeavor-based principles (though, as we've noted, still personality-based in large measure, I think).

Anyway. Some thoughts from another perspective. I'm fascinated by this discussion so far.

[Dan Maruschak]

Ron, I think you need to make a more nuanced distinction between what you wanted it to be, what you were endeavoring to make it be, and what actually was. Remember that the community is the people, not the specific forum policies, etc. I understand that you think it was silly that people had particular ideas in their heads, but you have to acknowledge the reality that lots of people had those ideas in their heads. Also keep in mind that since the community is the people, not just one website, your sandblasting was never the final word on the subject. There's a paradox in trying to have the shared value of hating shared values or being part of the tribe that hates tribalism.

There's a bit of a political dimension to this, too, in terms of beliefs about the malleability of human nature. Your approach seems to be that the only purposes that shared values can serve is status gamesmanship and that the only purposes that categorical distinctions can serve is toxic identity politics and tribal warfare, and therefore they must be ruthlessly stamped out. An alternative POV would be to view some of these things as pretty deeply ingrained parts of human nature and therefore trying to stamp them out is a fool's errand, that they may serve other purposes than the pathological, and the more productive approach is to try to channel the impulses in positive and productive ways.

[Ron Edwards]

Thanks Nathan.

Dan, I think you should reconsider telling people what they "need" if they have not asked you for it.

To the content: our views differ. I think your presentation confounds my real vs. fake categories. Everything you're saying about shared values is fine, insofar as they are actually community and actually values, expressed in actions and connections. I'm talking about stress which arises from things which are not community, and not values. You won't get anywhere arguing for the validity of the latter in terms of the reality of the former.

More human nature later, perhaps.

[glandis]

The basis of the Forge-as-project/community/whatever, and then everything (like story-games & anyway) that continued after the Forge ended ... status in community, real and imagined ... Ron's personal self-examination ... this is all so rich, and so big, I'm not sure what to say. How to meaningfully contribute. Which is a familiar feeling from various times at the Forge, but in the absence of the Forge's structure, it's even harder - which is maybe an interesting pointer to something the Forge did right. I'm gonna fall back on just calling attention to bits and pieces that provoked a meaningful reaction from me.

Ron - first of all, respect for putting the self-examination out there. I've no idea how hard or easy that kind of thing is for you, but I'd imagine trending towards at least a bit hard is more likely. And (of course, and again) respect for what you accomplished with/at the Forge. What I wonder is if the people who, in your words, "couldn't believe any such thing couldn't exist" might be right. I mean, I'll support and applaud the sandblasting. Certainly, 'abandon[ing] the status game and take[ing] on the informal role of "good examples"' is something I sometimes tried to do at the Forge, and I emphatically consider it a good thing, even when it fails (a certain Gamism discussion comes to mind). But all that, even when successful, may still leave room for "real" values more related to status than utility to develop. Maybe that's what Dan is talking about with human nature, and if so, maybe you're already thinking about how to respond to it. The important thing from my perspective would be to acknowledge that what you and the Forge did in the face of the issue was pretty darn good, but maybe also admit it - like ANYTHING would - sometimes failed. I'm not sure how useful raking over the details of the failures would be, but that may be the expectation some people have.

(BTW, I think it's because the interview ALMOST gets into this kind of difficult, fertile ground that it seems such a lost opportunity.)

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Gordon,

If the observation is that people did apply these bogus status principles (although that is definitely not the right word, it's more like a lack of principle) at the Forge, then obviously, yes, of course they did. I listed some names myself. I'm not saying no one ever sprayed the place with this bullshit, only that I maintain it was the just about the freest place of such bullshit one might have found, and stands up in comparison today.

If you're looking for structure for this discussion, I've been applying the idea that anyone picks up on any of the questions I tossed back in the interview, or anything he asked that you think I didn't address, and we'll just do it here. It seems constructive so far.

[lumpley]

Hey Ron.

Further down in the anyway thread, I say that even if a community's values are creative and innovative, its status system is nevertheless necessarily stagnant. "A force for creative entropy," is how I put it. So I'm right with you on that.

I think that it'd be a mistake to look at the post-Forge indie rpg explosion and see it as dominated by status, though. It'd be as big a mistake as looking at the Forge and seeing it as dominated by status. Overwhelmingly, as far as I can see, the people who create worthwhile things still do so by forming genuine, functional creative relationships, unencumbered by the bullshit of status. Including functional, creative, non-extractive commercial relationships too, crucially.

As always, status-anxious people see these creative relationships as cliques and faddishness.

Your self-inspection is interesting! It gives me a twitchy intuition about game design, out on the edges of my thinking. About how you can design a game to take off or design it to slow burn or design it to blip and disappear. About the ways in which designing a game means designing small group social architecture (to borrow Paul's phrase), versus the ways in which game design depends on small groups' existing social architecture. Hm!

-Vincent

[glandis]

Ron -

As best as I can understand it, I basically agree with you about the "status thing", and the Forges' (relative) freedom from it - especially as regards the fundamental "self-publish, damnit!" mission. And, knowing you a bit, I'm pretty sure you're aware of at least *some* of the subtleties involved in the other, um, "uses"? people put the Forge to (furthering Nar design, negotiating with your play group, improving your own play, etc.) Some status-bullshit, sure - and for some folks maybe that was VERY important - but also (and I speak personally here) incredibly rewarding insights to take to my own RPG play, period.

I guess my concern is about the middle ground of stuff that's maybe not self-published-focused, maybe tainted a bit by badstatustuff but not really about that, maybe with other problems (worth talking about? and maybe what the interviewer/others are asking about?); but also with value to at least some people. I'm pretty sure you acknowledge those things, but it's easy to read some of what you're saying here into a utility-conversation vs. status-bullshit, real vs. fake dichotomy that I think misses important stuff.

So, not quite just that people did apply "bogus status principles", but that subtler status-y (and other) influences were involved and might be worth discussing. Like, the mere fact that people (me, quite often) were using the Forge for something other than the strait-forward self-publish mission maybe created a tension - not always problematic (especially in the "how it works" subroutine), but maybe sometimes.

Your structure makes sense, and seeing it explicitly stated is helpful to me. I'll re-read the interview with that in mind, and see what happens.