Discussion of Social Contract theories at the Forge
M. J. Young:
Ron, I apologize for misrepresenting your position on this. I think I "get it", although I still feel that the absence of a forum specifically for theory discussions makes it much more difficult for theorists to participate meaningfully.
--Mark
M. J. Young
Ron Edwards:
Depends. Nothing's wrong with posting entirely theoretically, then appending some actual-play accounts to illustrate what you mean by certain terms. Even - or especially! - terms which seem to you to be entirely obvious.
See, I think you and others are making it too hard on yourselves. "Not theory? Oh no!" It's still theory. It's still everything theory is. I'm merely calling for enhancing communication by descriptions of real play to clarify terms.
Best, Ron
M. J. Young:
I think what is most problematic for me is the volume of material in the Actual Play forum that is not at all theory-related, or is so loaded with details of actual play as to make it challenging to get to the theory aspects.
You probably will remember that I did not emmigrate to The Forge so quickly as most of those who were involved in the discussions back at Gaming Outpost. I had concerns about how much more time it would take to cover these forums adequately--and eventually when I did come, I found that it did take a lot of time, several hours every day, to read all the threads even on the subforums to which I limited myself and to respond intelligently to those to which I thought I could contribute. The Forge was not the only drain on my time, but I was not getting work done on actual game design and writing, so I had to cut back. In a major reorganization of my entire approach to Internet work, I reduced my visits here to one day per week, and was able to keep up on everything in those select forums in what was considerably less than the total weekly time it took to do it daily--my posts were more focused on specific aspects of threads, as others would give the responses I would have given in many cases, and I would not become involved in a daily back-and-forth with anyone.
The advantage, then, of the theory forum was not so much that it was all theoretical, but that it separated those threads which were specifically about discussing theory (with or without an actual play basis) from those which were really just descriptions of actual play. I'm sure that I would enjoy playing in many of these games, but I usually skip descriptions of what happened in other people's games when I'm reading in other forums. It's a lot of reading, a lot of trivial detail. I never did master speed reading (it is remarkable that I got through Law School with honors, but in truth most of the good students read much less than most of the professors expected).
So my objection is not that I don't want to read or post actual play materials, but that I wish there were a convenient way to distinguish those actual play threads that were part of a theory discussion from those which are really just recounting how a game went. I would read the former, if I could rapidly sort them from the latter, but I find that combining them all in a single forum makes that very difficult.
I would be quite happy with a Theory forum that had an actual play connection requirement; I'm not very happy with theory relegated to a forum in which all the threads are Actual Play without a theory requirement. It's just too much volume of extraneous material for me.
Again, though, I fully respect your decision to run the site as you see fit.
--Mark
M. J. Young
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