The Emperor's New Terminology

[George Moralidis]

Hello everybody. This is my first post, though I've been lurking in the Forge for quite some time now. First of all congratulations for keeping things so interesting (and civilized at the same time). I always thought RP forums were boring until I came across this one.

This thread is meant to be a follow up for Beware the academic jabberwocky! Some points raised are that sometimes terms are being used not very accurately, or that too many terms are being used for the same thing. An example is the use of "Illusionism" and "Railroading":

Illusionist techniques"
- it is meant to be techniques used to limit or direct the players choice. The "illusion" of it is hard to see, other than in relation to the way nervous game masters practise railroading, by making their players believe in the illusion of their choices influencing the drama. This is no sound basis for such a term. I'd rather see the attitudes towards railroading change, following a new understanding of what "railroading" is all about. The term "railroading" is much better, in my view, both in relation to the issue at hand, in relation to what constitutes effective language (concrete terms serve us far better than the academic "latin"), and in relation to the effect on common attitude towards these techniques. The negative connotations of the "railroading" term, is but a symptom of a negative attitude that have been allowed to develop, contrary to the evident effectiveness and benign effect of the tools in question. These connotations may best be worked upon by installing the term "railroading" with it's proper positive content.

I find it very probable that if left as is, the negative use of "railroading" will stand in the way of a sound exploitation of the proper railroading tools.

I agree with Tomas. The priority should always be given to clarity. If we can avoid negative connotations even better. Perhaps this could be achieved with the use of euphemisms. Euphemism is used when we name the Ocean "Pacific" instead of naming it "Dangerous" or when coastal cyclones are given a funny, familiar name. So this could be a technique to avoid negative connotations. Both "railroading" and "gamism" have been victims of their names.

Both Ron Edwatrds and John Kim have volunteered to write a glossary that would accomodate many different definitions of a subject, if i am not mistaken. I think that would be an excellent idea. I am not aware if this has already been done/is happening/going to happen. Please make a post if you know more about this.

If this takes place then ppl will be able to refer to e.g. scene framing (definition #3) or something like that when they are making a post.

If not then the best thing would be for everybody to explain their definition on scene framing in every single post they make.Otherwise a lot of confusion is created by assuming everybody uses the same terms.

So what i'm saying is:

[*] having a commonly accepted glossary that enables variety is good.
[*] not having one is good as well, as long as we acknowledge that and stop assuming that there is a glossary.
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If the glossary is written then people could even use keywords in the beginning of each thread, so that finding/classifying threads will be much easier. I hope I didn't tire you (too much). :)

-George

[Ron Edwards]

Hi George,

I finished the glossary and sent it to Clinton (the other Forge moderator) several weeks ago. We're now waiting on him to PDF it and post it.

The current version is a draft, and I planned to have it up for about a month of response. Then it'll get revised in one fashion or another, maybe go through another round.

So as you might imagine, especially after putting an amount of effort into the project that is almost certainly not going to be recognized, I'm kind of motivated to see exactly the same effects that you're calling for.

Things go slow at the Forge, though. Clinton and I both have a lot of real-life responsibilities. So the only thing I can recommend is that everyone has to suffer along with me, until the next step can be done.

Best,
Ron