Cool & Clever?

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi all,

By the way, the definitions I gave above are for the video game work I'm doing.  I think certain players are looking for games (video and paper), to sate their appetite for coolness.

I'm not really one of those players. (That's why I had to make a note about it.)  One of my favorite RPG characters, for example, was a simple dock worker in a CoC game who simply had to find out what happened out to his daughter who vanished.  This was a Mike Nystul game...  We played it straight CoC -- with doom and insanity around ever corner.  Bill's determinatin and willing to press on when others with calmer heads suggested caution made him cool to me.  But he didn't really strike me as cool in the Matrix sense.

That said, I see the appeal of Neo and Indiana Jones and Batman.  And, since I'm doing a video game, I know where the market is for the kind of game I'm designing and I'm doing that.  'Cause that's my job.  

I just wanted to put my spin on this one: Not all games are gonna provide cool, and not all players need it. But many certainly do.

Christopher

[Ian Charvill]

The powerful thing about "cool" is that it's nebulous and user-defined.  Flares were cool in the 60s, but they most definitely weren't in the late 80s.

Thus, things don't have to fit a Matrix-style of coolness to be cool.  Cool is social, and it essentially means: stuff that I can get peer group affirmation with.

On one hand, the Fonz is cool, on the other he's a thirty-something loser who still hangs round with high school kids.

Given that gaming is social, and coolness is social, we may here be pointing towards just 'stuff that gets affirmation from the rest of the gaming group'.

[Jonathan Walton]

Given that gaming is social, and coolness is social, we may here be pointing towards just 'stuff that gets affirmation from the rest of the gaming group'.

And I'd argue that the stuff-that-gets-affirmed is most often related to the players' expectations of the game, so this leads back to my idea of the "idiom" of the game or genre of play.  Nice point, though.  This explains cases where something totally breaks the idiom (for instance, kung-fu Native Americans in "Brotherhood of the Wolf"), but is still "cool," because the audience is willing to bend their expectations and affirm something that doesn't quite fit.