Adept Press

This interview was commissioned by a well-known pop culture site last summer (2014). As with a lot of interviews, I ask the interviewer to answer my questions too, in hopes of a back-and-forth that will not only really nail a topic, but will also make it a little more like a real dialogue. Not only would he not do it, he told me they wouldn't run it.

So, here you go (http://adept-press.com/wordpress/wp-content/media/summer14.pdf). I'd love some comments.

Hi Ron,

(I notice my opening paragraphs are less about the substance of your responses than the, um, tone and possible "image" they project. I leave them only in case you find them useful and am entirely comfortable being ignored in that area.)

Did you get any explanation on why no dialogue and/or why they chose not to run the interview? I guess the obvious (if short-sighted, by my thinking) is "we don't do interviews that way" and "since your response assumes dialogue, we can't use it." But if you got anything specific, and feel it's appropriate to mention, there might be something interesting to discuss.

I mean, many of your invitations to dialogue involve disputing the premises behind the questions, which I imagine an interviewer might find annoying. On the other hand, I basically agree with you about the need for clarification, so I'm not sure what to say. Question 1: maybe they're asking for a self-assessment about how your personality influences the way people react to your ideas. But since I, personally, neither love nor hate you, it's hard to not just agree that the question is flawed ...

I do find question 2 particularly difficult, both in the way it was framed and (more than in other cases) how you responded. Again, I basically agree about the need for clarification, but I can also understand the interviewer just wanting an answer to "do you regret/wish you phrased differently?" The last, "are people justified" question is kinda nonsense to me (or at worst, if considered malevolently, a version of "when did you stop beating your wife"); *maybe* "why do you think people feel justified in getting so angry?" is a version that could, in dialogue, get a meaningful response.

(Enough of that.)

I think the "preference and mood" stuff conveys what "priority" means real well and in and of itself means making this interview available is worthwhile. "Independent=creator-owned, published and controlled because I think that's a good thing" is also esp. clear here, though I don't get why that particular bit is sometimes so hard to grasp.

You mention Jared & his games plenty later, but I noticed his absence in question 9. There's probably other names too, and obviously I intend to attribute no malice to your omission, but that one leaps out at me for some reason.

I wonder about self-publishing as the ONLY "movement" - seems to me "games that will let me do story the way that I want to" was at least a sub-goal for many, MANY people (NOT all, nor all the time for all people who did have it) at the Forge. Attributing "improve Narrativist design" as A (not THE) Forgeish movement doesn't seem wrong to me, although failing to understand the limits of that, and the primacy of Independence, was/is all too common.

That's some initial thoughts.

Oh god, that poor journalist...  he asked the usual leading and superficial questions that fill most interviews, and instead of replying with some witty barter promoting your new book, you question practically every single thing he asked...  Journalists will be scared to approach you now!

More seriously: it's pity that he didn't reply asking some of the things you listed for him. One that I would be interested to ask about is this one:
"From my childhood and teens, I have a lot of personal experience with what are now called intentional communities, some of them notorious. I know exactly how they go off the rails. Ask me more about that if you're interested."

OK, I am interested!  :-)

I don't think I agree fully with what you wrote about communities (apart from agreeing that things like Facebook and other online "communities" are not worthy of the name and are instead actively anti-social), but I will wait for your answer to the question above, it could be that we don't disagree after all...

Hi Gordon,

He'd agreed to the dialogue premise before sending me the questions. I say that to almost all interviewers, they all say "sure!" and I think only one or two people actually did it. Mostly they run the interview as initially returned, leaving it looking sort of weird, as if I'd stalled questions.

He was quite specific about why they were killing it: too negative, too harsh, too defensive. As if opening with a direct reference – with no critique of it – which included a decade of solid invective and descriptions of physical harm toward me did not demand a defense. My defense of course, beginning with "have you any idea of what you're talking about."

My frustration here is that I have found very few interviewers who practice anything like professional due diligence. It's why I tell them now that I won't answer "tell me about how you started the Forge" questions or "gee what do you think of role-playing." It's as if they see XYZ posts and references in some echo chamber somewhere and decide to represent the most superficial zeitgeist they can. I'm now in the business of making interviewers do their damn self-appointed job.

Quote*maybe* "why do you think people feel justified in getting so angry?" is a version that could, in dialogue, get a meaningful response.

You're kinder than me. My answer to that would be "Why are you asking me?"

Good call about Jared. It's like the Seven Dwarfs. I can always name six of them but not the same six each time. I should go through the text and alter a thing or two here and there, noting it as a change.

QuoteI wonder about self-publishing as the ONLY "movement" - seems to me "games that will let me do story the way that I want to" was at least a sub-goal for many, MANY people (NOT all, nor all the time for all people who did have it) at the Forge. Attributing "improve Narrativist design" as A (not THE) Forgeish movement doesn't seem wrong to me, although failing to understand the limits of that, and the primacy of Independence, was/is all too common.

It was a frequent creative goal only because of the historical gap in real RPG texts and hobby discourse. It wasn't a dedicated goal at the site, and I took pains to support and help people regardless of the creative priorities – in fact, often putting less time into games that were heavily Sorcerer-like or perceived to be Ron-like because (i) a dozen other people were on hand to provide good advice and (ii) I often did not trust the writer not to be currying favor, even if he or she didn't see it that way.

Best, Ron

P.S. Uh-oh, Moreno just characteristically pinpointed a hard one. OK, I will start composing.

So, intentional communities. That's what you say now instead of "commune." Maybe co-op (short for cooperative, for non-native English speakers).

There were thousands, maybe dozens of thousands of them, across the United States. Some simply meant a group of people bought into a mortgage together and committed to living there as a chosen extended family. Others were almost completely separatist and considered themselves to be an exiled mini-nation, a chosen reservation-in-reverse. You could find almost anything in the spectrum between these extremes.

My own home was a bit of one, at the more ordinary end. My parents rented rooms in our house to local students and part of the deal was that they really lived there, becoming part of our family activities and general routines of life. One detail of that was that I'd give up my room during the summer and leave town for the mountains, so that arguably, my mom and stepdad were more committed to the other tenants than to me in day to day terms for a fourth of the year. During the school year, I effectively had a rotating cast of older siblings, who stayed the same age.

In "the mountains" was a radical camp which had begun as a Quaker retreat/summer camp in the 50s, but was now about as close to the feared dangerous-hippie naked black-people-too stereotype as you can get. I lay claim to being one of the longest-running attendants, not continuous but beginning at about age two as a staff brat, then many years as a camper (typically three sessions) and then a counselor. It was very much its own intentional community and by modern standards was terrifyingly cut off from any kind of rescue or technical capacity. It was completely low-tech; there was no service staff and we cooked over fires. It's astounding no kid ever died there. Life at camp was organized by tribes, each including at least one male and one female counselor, each with the full age range of campers from 10 to 17. The kids always included a fair proportion of group home and street kids, mixed in with the rest of us. It's one of the reasons why I was such a foreigner in ordinary American life, even on the California central coast (which counts as "northern" in California language; that's a matter of who's stealing the water) which is already foreign to most of the U.S.

My mom taught pregnancy and childbirth classes all the time, and sometimes would travel to various communes around California to teach people how not to die. This was an interesting example of perceived hippie and woo-woo material that did in fact get adopted into mainstream medical practice after a couple of decades of political strife (i.e. my childhood). When my wife and I had kids less than a decade ago, I was amused to see the prenatal classes at the hospital feature the same material that I'd mimeographed and collated for my mom thirty-five years earlier, considered at the time to be radical and scary. Yes, a woman gave birth in our bathtub at one point. My bathtub, as I saw it. Anyway, I went with her on these trips and stayed in all sorts of places, including the famous Black Bear Commune, as it happens at the same time that Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were living there – as he and I found later when we sat down to figure out where-all each of us had been.

My oldest stepbrother (born 1949) was a former Weatherman and general dissident, and by the early 70s had decided that he could simply not live any kind of ordinary life in the U.S. (his mother actually defected to Cuba). He was very skilled mechanically and was therefore solid gold to any rural commune, as he could keep the sump pump running and similar stuff. He joined Synanon sometime in the early 70s, and we visited him there pretty regularly – including and right through its infamous media period and its eventual decline in numbers and effectiveness. I'd stay there for a weekend or a week, every few months on and off, for let's see ... about age 12 through age 17.

The interesting thing about Synanon, and also some other fairly gaudy or notorious examples like the People's Temple and the Rajneeshpuram, is that they had a really high turnover rate. The idea that they kept people and refused to let them leave is confined to a couple of custody cases, not to the ordinary membership. I have the numbers somewhere in my Amerikkka research, so might be mis-remembering, but I don't think Synanon's current membership was ever more than a few thousand people – but it wouldn't surprise me if a hundred thousand or more had spent a fair amount of time there, say a year for a given person during its run from the late 50s through the late 80s. Anyway, I stress, these communities are the most powerful and effective when a lot of people are showing up to join, and a lot of people are simultaneously leaving on good terms.

Was life there pretty intense and different? Sure. Everyone lived in dorms. I always stayed with the kids my age, which meant pretty much recovered heroin addicts and street prostitutes. Everyone worked, everyone attended classes (in the kids' case, perfectly reasonable academic ones). There were scheduled Games, and impromptu ones if someone felt like things had gone to shit in some situation. The Game has a bad rep and I saw my share of its abuse, but it's also true that the techniques are still alive in most effective drug-rehab and other contexts, with the serial numbers scraped off. Say what you like about Synanon, but its rehab techniques didn't have any shitty 10% stats like AA, it was way up in the high percents like 60-75, and that's for hard-core low-rent unrecoverable heroin people. It was full of hippie talk and unbelievable local jargon, but by God everyone worked harder and better there, day in and day out, then I've ever seen in any other voluntary context. "Work" in the professional middle-class sense is a complete joke by comparison.

My take was to cope with the simultaneous insight and bullshit very carefully. That was the primary problem with 70s culture, activist or not, people running numbers on each other all the time, with the presumption that if a person was dumb enough to swallow it, then they didn't deserve consideration. Very, very hard on the younger members of the community and culture. The Vietnam generation had nothing on mine when it comes to cold cynicism and a general suspicion that everyone is lying; they'd at least grown up with Eagleland in their eyes before getting slapped down. I hated the meanness of it all and still do, even while preserving as much of the era's sense of constructive alienation as I can. Nobody in that subculture had good personal boundaries, and so developing "feelers" to discover others' limits became a necessary skill for me in adult life – I'm still pretty bad at it, and still can't shake the "only too far is far enough" mentality although I do try.

As for how these things go wrong, that's going to be a profile in Amerikkka. It has a lot to do with what I said in the interview: the leader becoming actually the leader instead of someone whose ideas are attractive to people on their own decision, often after he loses his immediate partner or close friend who can tell him when he's full of shit, often when a clique forms around him that "takes care of him" and wields the real power, seizing upon some notion and treating it as a holy decree. When Diedrich crashed and burned in Synanon, taking the Farmworkers' Movement with it; when Jim Jones went loopy in the years prior to moving to Guyana; when whatsername at the Rajneeshees started bugging everyone's cabins and poisoning people, it was always this weird little clique who really made the decisions – never the "main man" who's always wrongly painted as a Svengali.

My goal with the Forge was never to become that guy, in part by knowing this whole thing had a goal which defined its potential end, and in part by spraying the forming me-centered  clique with social acid every year or two, very much on purpose.

That'll do to start.

Wow, now I really want to read Amerikka right now (and I call dibs on the translation).

You say that you were as foreigner in ordinary American life, but at the same time, the places that you describe is totally American, in the sense that there was nothing similar anywhere else. I had to search wikipedia a lot reading your post, and it made for a very interesting reading, describing a totally different, alien world. We get a lot of "americana" from every media here, so much that it seems sometimes that America is more familiar that another part of Italy. But that part is practically never touched. From what little I know about it, it's not something that happen only here, the rewriting of the past is global. Do you see it as successful? I mean, apart from the media representation, in real life, talking with people, they usually know what you are talking about or it's like you lived in a world that never existed?

About the Forge: I think it would be better to start another thread at this point, because my observations about the Forge would go in a totally different direction from this, but at the same time I would be interested reading more about your life experiences.

I am trying to rein my usual temptation to go rambling on and on for pages, so I will try to keep a "one question at a time" approach, and my initial question is this: seeing that I think you agree with me that forums are not a real "community" at all, why do you think that what apply to a real community would apply to a internet forum, too?

Let's keep both "me" and the Forge/interview talk in this thread.

I lived in a world that never existed, according to everyone else. The larger cultural "snap" or perhaps shift into a different dimension came in about 1982, and by 1989, everyone's memory was rewritten. I am often dismayed by how this obviously fictional representation is experientially so accurate. Fortunately a few books and events show I'm not alone, like that brilliant book about disco I was talking about last year. One of my personal reasons to stay close to Palestinian activism is because the people in it are so grounded in a reality which I can understand.

This component of U.S. radicalism in the 60s-70s has strong European roots. It goes back to German naturalism from the 1920s and 1930s, associated with anti-war communism and certainly in support of the opposition to Franco in Spain. All the same stuff: rural living meets intellectualism, milking the cows and then writing plays, complicated community council meetings to decide what we do when someone does something stupid, constantly re-arranging marriages intentionally or unintentionally, naked all over the place ... Markus Wolf was brought up like that, did you know that?

I don't know if I've mentioned this before in our conversations, but my family was also military. My father was the Naval historian in Saigon through the worst/weirdest period of the U.S. presence in Vietnam.

I am not sure if I understand your community point at all. I'm saying that a real, deserves-the-name internet community is possible, but is very likely not to be (especially if you call it one from the start), and even if it is, is likely to descend/degenerate into many community's crappy fate.

My current notion is that by intentional community we need to mean community with purpose, and once that purpose is done for a person, he or she should leave, and once it's done for the community, it needs to end.

I noticed the page views for this thread skyrocketed yesterday, more than would seem possible from repeat viewings. It'll be interesting to see how what I've said here bleeds elsewhere.

Ron,

I'm seeing a number of parallels in the independent video game movement that I saw in the independent RPG movement that you led.  Have you followed it much?  Are video games even something you care about?

Peace,

-Troy

I don't know anything about it but am interested to learn. Tell!

Quote from: Ron Edwards on January 07, 2015, 11:46:31 PM
I don't know anything about it but am interested to learn. Tell!

These are my own perceptions, so understand that these statements come through that lens. 

There is a very similar 3-tier model in video games.  A company like Iceberg (http://www.iceberg-games.com/) fulfills almost exactly the same role Alliance did/does for RPGs.  It's a video game "publisher."  In the video game world, a publisher does not create the games, it just distributes them.  I'm working with a guy who is publishing his own independent video game right now.  He told me that he and his dev team were approaching Iceberg about distribution.  I asked what the terms were.  He told me that Iceberg would take 50% of the sales price for itself for both in-store and online sales (more on this in the next paragraph).  I encouraged him not to go with Iceberg as I thought it was absurd to give them that much for doing something I felt his team could do on its own and because of the lessons I learned at The Forge.  The decision wasn't entirely his, since the whole team is involved in producing the game.  Thankfully, Iceberg rejected his game.  The team decided instead to put the beta version of the game up for sale for those who are interested in paying to playtest, and in the first three months of it being on sale they made back ALL the money they have spent so far on programming, art, and 3D rendering/animating.  It was like I was seeing The Forge all over again.  So that's one parallel.

A second is STEAM (http://store.steampowered.com/).  This is, more or less, the Drive-Thru RPG for video games.  It is a MASSIVE online seller of video games in digital format for PC, Mac, and Linux.  Most (but not all) of the big games are on it.  It is also very hospitable to independent producers.  STEAM does take a 30% bite out of sales, but they do offer a lot of additional services for game producers beyond just hosting an online market.  There's a number of them, and I'll detail them if you ask.  But is more than just an online catalogue.  The main thing it does is, like Drivethru, it raises visibility and gives people a place to sell their games.  Now, getting back to Iceberg for a second.  This is where it and companies like it are really insidious IMO.  That 50% I mentioned earlier that they take, comes out after STEAM's.  So the game developer actually gets a mere 35% of a games retail price if he/she goes thru a publisher.  Yikes, right?  Sadly, so many developers, including indie ones, feel they need a publisher.  Here's an article about one studio that went through Iceberg and is touting how many game sales they had: http://www.gamewatcher.com/news/2014-08-12-steam-autumn-sale-surges-amplitude-s-endless-series-over-1-2-million  Just remember, Amplitude only got 35% of whatever those 1.2 million games cost at the time they were sold (and that includes when the game is "on sale" on STEAM which is very frequent).

A third parallel I see is a burning desire for video games to go beyond what traditional producers (called AAA studios) have given. Check out this video about sex in video games from a very well-regarded youtube channel called Extra Credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP6gXZPVgD4  It's a bit older, 2012.  But these guys are still doing these types of videos to this day.  They are still pushing for developers to broaden the types of issues and depth of issues video games address.  They also encourage developers to invent new styles of play.  I'm not sure video games will ever get as flexible as tabletop RPGs, but you can see the same desires that drove you to write Sorcerer and Vincent to write Dogs are alight in video game fans and independent developers.  Here's another good article from Polygon (a popular video game news site) that also talks about video games as a medium for more than just traditional play: http://www.polygon.com/2014/12/15/7396089/gaming-is-an-easy-target-for-censorship  I can provide further links if you ask for them.

A fourth parallel I see is Unity (http://unity3d.com/).  This is doing for video game development what PDF did for tabletop RPGs IMO.  Unity is a video game design engine.  It does a lot of automatic programming for game developers so they don't have to program every single line of code.  It can shave YEARS off a game's development cycle.  The best part is, they just charge you one time fee for using it.  Other engines in the past charged a fee AND a 5-10% royalty per game sold.  Unity provides a format for independent developers to produce and package their games that the public can consume.  Just like PDF, Unity games will work on almost any computer including tablets and phones.  It has kicked the door down that was keeping so many from bringing their games to market.

A fifth parallel I see is the market is becoming more interested in independently produced games.  Kickstart has helped.  It gets people financially and emotionally invested in games.  Gaming news sites like Polygon and Gamasutra have also started covering indie games, which has had a positive effect.  It reminds me of how the perception of independent games changed at GenCon after the first couple years of the Forge booth.  Suddenly, it wasn't weird to get an indie game and indie games were getting a lot better.  The same acceptance is happening in the video game world right now.

There are some things that aren't the same.  There's no Forge type place for people to discuss play and design.  At least, not that I have found yet.  There's no IPR that is catering just to independent producers.  It may be that it's just not time for those things yet or that video games don't need those things.  But right now, the situation reminds me a bit of how you describe the mid to late 90's where you were finding RPGs on Geocities, playing them, and giving feedback to the designer who was shocked someone actually played it and also the early 2000's when we were all struggling to figure out the publication process and how to sell our games.  It's the wild west at the moment, and a lot of independent designers are still pushing the envelope in new styles of games like Kentucky Route Zero (http://kentuckyroutezero.com/) or remaking the games of their childhood (http://www.roguelegacy.com/).

Anyway, that's the best I can give right now.  If you have more thoughts or questions, I'd be very interested in them.

Peace,

-Troy

My brother was part of an indie video game studio for a while, which merged with/was acquired by a bigger games company, GarageGames, which I worked at for a while after it got a huge infusion of cash by becoming a subsidiary of a big corporation that was interested in breaking into the games field. (GarageGames tried to foster a "hey indies, talk to each other and form mutually working relationships" environment with web forums and an annual convention, sold low-cost game engines, and was trying to be a sales/publishing portal for independent games. I'd say that "the Forge + IPR" could be a decent analogy for what they wanted to be). According to my brother, at the time he was selling games each sales channel was more or less independent from each other in terms of audience -- offering games on each portal was purely additive and didn't seem to cannibalize sales from any other channel, so even if the portal's share of the sale was high it was usually still in the studio's interest to do business through them. I've long wondered if something similar is true for RPG PDF sales, e.g. does offering something on DriveThru give you access to customers you wouldn't have gotten by any other means, or is the customer base clued-in enough that they decide on what titles to purchase independent of what sales platforms they're available on. Also, it's been a few years so what was true when my brother's studio was operating might not be true about the current environment.

Hey Ron

I think you're very good to have tried to even answer those questions, I find the assumptions behind some of them particularly gross, and the questions overall don't really cover the body of your publications. It's not something I'd find very respectful, if I were you.

I hope I don't come off as patronizing with the following. Maybe you could polish this pdf: take out the questions, organize the stuff however you want, expand on some of the questions you're asking the interviewer yourself and perhaps explain some of the things you reference (like Moreno, lots of them are lost on me without extensive research), and publish it as a memoir of sorts. Like a Spione or Shahida book, without the game. I'm always running after all the threads concerning your historic recaps of the state of publishing and design in the US and trying to see how that compares to Europe (at least French-speaking Europe), I'd love an accessible (the Forge archives are good for Moreno and me, but the rest of humanity?), structured and unified read on that. I also absolutely loved your insights into intentional communities and your developments here.

Cheers
Christoph

Thanks Troy and Dan! What strikes me hard is the very quick and unfortunate transition from vibrant, grassroots interface among people to a distribution/marketing nexus. I may not have made it clear that I do not like the little nuclei of sales-points that inevitably form in these situations. Even the ones that start well go badly within a year or two, and IPR is an excellent example. Even if IPR were to have remained what it started as, I'd still be unhappy with it if it were the only one. If we must have these things, there should be a dozen of them, preferably short-lived. Notice how quickly in your accounts - and here I'm describing the culture, not what you personally are saying - people shift from "look from what we're doing here" to "new hip sales-point available."

Christoph, it's a nice suggestion in terms of your interest in what I'd say. I can't see it as practically or financially viable. My only hope is that some other interviewer uses this document for a jumping-off point.

On the interview: Agreed to dialogue and then didn't? Then I guess there *isn't* anything terribly interesting to discuss, just a data point about how (some?) web articles/sites/writers work. I'd say it's a shame, but the impression I'm left with is the interviewer didn't really care about the questions/issues, so it's only a shame if you (Ron) get stifled - which, clearly, you're not. I'm probably more interested in simply what YOU want to say about looking back at the Forge, or at "story" or "damage" or "Nar-as-movement", anyway. The chance that dialogue could have produced some of that, though - I guess I'm sorry that opportunity was missed.

On indie computer games, CRPGs in particular: historically, the intertwining of Temple of Apshai/Ultima/Wizardry/etc. and D&D is fascinating to contemplate investigating, but I'm not sure how. By my understanding, early CRPGs were quite independent in many ways. Independent of TSR, initially, with their own legal stuff that swirled around that, and the same complex feedback D&D had with fantasy fiction. Independent in the Forge sense of creator-owned, sometimes (Richard Garriot being the poster child, I guess). But in the present, I point to Jeff Vogel (http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/) as required reading at the intersection of contemporary, "indie", computer, and roleplaying game. ASIDE: In the fascinating "Surviving In the Post-Indie Bubble Wasteland!!!" entry, he both dismisses and then reclaims "indie" as a term, explaining it as when a game "feels like authentic communication from another human being." He cites Saint's Row IV as an example of a big-studio game that still feels indie. All I know about Saints Row IV is that Jason Blair was one of the designers - so maybe not entirely an ASIDE.

On growing up in the 70's and intentional communities: I'm fascinated by how easy it is for me to paint my experiences as way, WAY diluted versions of yours. The overlap this time is the summer camp thing. Dial back the intensity of the diversity a bit, and the um, radical-ness? by a lot, but - yeah, I was there too. Mine (surprise!) still exists - www.incarnationcamp.org - although I'm not sure that site (maybe on purpose) captures what it was like in the 70's. And the culturally-known guy that turns out to have been there at the same time as me is (I just discovered) New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Both RPG and "communities" connections continue. A few years back, I tracked down this book (http://books.google.com/books/about/Fantasy_Encounter_Games.html?id=UuunAAAACAAJ) as the likely source of RPG-like activities the counselors led us through at the camp. Apparently, the author was involved in the Human Potentialities movement and Esalen. Those things meant nothing to me through the 80's, but I learned about them when I moved to California in '91.  My friends who'd moved out earlier were involved with the Forum (successor to est), and ... well, my conclusions about such things are similar to yours, Ron - especially as regards simultaneous insight/bullshit and the need for an end.

About the international aspect: we're talking some years earlier, but looking at the history of many of the bands in #ronprogrock, it's clear musicians from US "communes" had no problems traveling to Ireland/England/Germany/wherever and living in a "commune" there - and vice-versa.

Ron,

In all those years of selling Sorcerer, did you ever discount your price on a hard copy?  How do you feel about discounting price on RPGs?

Peace,

-Troy

Aside:

QuoteAlthough 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

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.

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.

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

QuoteThe 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.

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?

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

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

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.

Hey Gordon,

QuoteRewritten from what to what?

Amerikkka. I'm working on that this year.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...)

Quote from: Ron Edwards on January 10, 2015, 10:35:20 AM

QuoteRewritten 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.

Thanks Moreno. You guys remember Vincent's discussion at Anyway about status, right? He called it Status is your toy! (http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/726) 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]

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.

Hi Dan,

Quote... 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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

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.

Hi Vincent!

QuoteOverwhelmingly, 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.

I'd love to be pointed to some of these. It's easy to see and become disgruntled by the extractive ones - remember, I've been dealing mainly with crowdfunding for over two years, which has the appalling emergent feature of being extractive to both the project and the backer.

You see something about game design in this discussion, or, a thing that's going on which, as a process, is relevant to game design? OK then. That signal from beyond the Fringe didn't make it to me, so I'm interested in what you're seeing.

Hi Gordon,

Quote
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.
...
... 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

That is the vaguest thing I ever read. Something had some kind of influence sometimes? Remember Doonesbury and Jerry Brown? "A verb, senator! We need a verb!"

(editing this in: whoops, it was Ted Kennedy, during the 1980 campaign (http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com/strip/archive/1980/01/23))

Hello

Following along intensely at home, having a hard time keeping up. Can somebody please give a definition or a synonym for extractive? It's absent from the Cambridge and WordReference dictionaries, with the Oxford and Wiktionary placing it in the context of the (mining) industry. It seems you use it in a figurative sense I'd love to pin down. For the while being it seems to mean "bloodsucking, exploitative, selfish and dastardly".

Ron said:

Quote from: Ron Edwards on January 14, 2015, 06:08:41 PMThat is the vaguest thing I ever read.

I see your point. I think the problem is I'm trying to describe the space where I see something could fit without having anything (much?) personal to put in that space. I'll see if I can come up with something.

Hi Christoph,

Quotebloodsucking, exploitative, selfish and dastardly

Nothing wrong with that description! But Vincent and I are referring to a specific economic meaning, which is to say, getting into a situation in which people are paying you just because they're alive. You're providing nothing that requires any particular work or process on your part, they're not getting anything they couldn't have had for free or done for themselves, what they do get is either already available or deceptively unusable.

The term in this sense has been usefully applied to property concepts in modern life, such that people have to do this simply to have somewhere to live.

Ok, thanks!

Since the conversation has died down somewhat, there's a question I've been dying to ask for about ten years and never had the chance! (This is of course a poor attempt at pathos, since I've known your email address all that time.) How many hours of sleep do you need per night? Not talking about how many hours your children let you have, but how many you need to be operational. Before your recent career change, you were a university teacher, prolific author distributing his own work AND the moderator of the fucking Forge (I have an inkling of how much time that consumes...) How did you manage?

I've been trying to think about how to answer this question, Christoph. I've found that when I list the stuff I don't do, which I see other people doing which takes up a lot of their time, then they get angry as if I'm telling them they're wasting their time, are stupid, or any number of other offended claims. I've also found that if I list a couple of personal skills which happen to help me, then they get mad because I'm putting myself above them. So there are a few details of my life that make all that diverse effort possible, but I'd rather not go into it.

Then there's the point that it ultimately didn't work, especially in terms of actual benefit to Adept Press. Fortunately I've brought that around, as for the past four months, the business has actually yielded a steady income into the family's account. It was also pretty bad in terms of my health, which has deteriorated sharply since commencing with breathing problems around 2006 if not before.

Oh yeah, don't forget, before the health thing, intensive martial arts guy including teaching ... so there's another thing in that list of stuff I was doing at once.

Not much of an answer, I'm afraid. The literal answer is six hours a night for functionality. Seven preferred; any more than that just annoys me that I lost some time that day. But since sleep deprivation was a big part of that breathing problem, it's likely that for at least five years, I'd have been lucky to achieve one solid hour of real sleep per night.

Hey, that's another interesting All About Me thing. The sleep doctor was horrified to discover what was happening to my blood oxygen levels, and the data from the sleep study indicated I was waking up literally every few seconds throughout the night. Plus I would stop breathing entirely sometimes, even while awake, just walking around, doing things, living life not breathing. Anyway, about that waking up, apparently if a normal person has this problem, they either receive help soon or they go insane - whereas I, as the doctor discovered, have the odd capacity to go into REM when awake. So I'd get barely my necessary quantum of REM, thus would not deteriorate into a shivering mass, but still be sleep-deprived in terms of fatigue and oxygen-deprived from the breathing hassles all the time. And this went on for over five years.

I was always convinced Ron had made a DEMONIC PACT for time management skills.

(Enjoying the discussion of the non-interview.)

Thanks Ron. I'm sorry to hear about these health problems, that's quite bad indeed. I hope you can overcome them.

I guess I could commit on my honour to not reacting negatively (or even not react at all) to your time-management secrets, but it's a public discussion, so I understand. At least now I know you're actually an undead, and that you'll be trolling our descendants with self-deprecating remarks about brain damage for generations to come!

The experiential background to past occasional statements about community, power, sexuality, communication, and politics became very clear.

Great read.

Has anyone ever looked at start-up or corporate culture in terms of functional/dysfunctional leadership dynamics like those that can play out in intentional communities or other intensively involving social organizations?

Quote from: Erik Weissengruber on January 27, 2015, 01:29:07 PMHas anyone ever looked at start-up or corporate culture in terms of functional/dysfunctional leadership dynamics like those that can play out in intentional communities or other intensively involving social organizations?

It is, I think, more concerned with other things, but - considering InSpecters in that context has some value. On a personal level - I gasp in horror and say, "only because I had to!"

Of course, Freemarket