A Couple of Miscellaneous Notes

These are just a couple things I've been thinking about.

1) On rpg.net a while back I started a thread on Fantasy Heartbreakers:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=182565

I said there that I thought it wasn't possible to design a fantasy heartbreaker self-consciously. I guess I now think that I'm wrong about that. My reasons were not unsound, but it seems to me that the core of designing a fantasy heartbreaker really revolves around working out your issues with fantasy and fantasy gaming more generally, specifically D&D and/or its descendants. In this sense, both The Shadow of Yesterday and a game I'm working on, tentatively titled The Darkness Beneath, are in fact fantasy heartbreakers.

2) On the Ron and Vincent thing. I put in a lot of work to understanding the Big Model, focusing mostly on Ron's writings, but also paying attention to everyone else here. Once I sort of 'got it', I wanted very much to make a contribution. So I sort of stepped back and started considering things not so much from the psychological motives point of view (where a lot of Ron's writings start, IMO, though they're not limited to that of course) but from the point of view of what Victor's now calling the 'shared text' of the game, introducing statements as 'moves' in a game which establish make-believe facts in a game's imaginary space. I got a lot of additional insight out of looking at things this way and started preparing to write some stuff up on it, and then I took a second look at Vincent's posts and blog. I realized that this is more or less the shift of perspective that informs his work. Then I got grumpy because I wasn't doing something new and interesting like I thought I was; on the other hand, this seems to me to be a pretty darn strong confirmation, from someone who was invested in having a unique and distinct contribution to make, that Ron and Vincent are both working out of a shared general understanding.

Vincent, you also have a remarkable gift for expressing complicated ideas in plain language. I don't know if you have a passion for any scientific or philosophical subjects, but I think if you ever wanted to write a popular book on one and gathered the necessary knowledge (or have it already), such a book would find a wide audience in the general reading public.