Another small post on RPG Theory

So, after a little more thought on the matter, as well as reading today's rpg.net big thread and the Big Model glossary document, I have a few more opinions or points to throw out:

1. I vaguely remembered the whole Turku thing, and the glossary certainly reminded me of it. I thought it was genuinely awful at the time; I remember characterizing their agenda as 'Gamers against fun'. I begin to suspect that the entire Forge-based realm of theory is, at it's heart, a radical reaction to the Turku 'movement', and that is what causes it's biggest weakness: a near-total rejection of Immersionism. It's only when you lose immersionism that the impossible thing becomes impossible; a key feature of being a protagonist in a story is being trapped in, as Howard might complain, a world you never made, in control of nothing but your response to it.


2. One generally suspects nearly all game designs are attempts to react to, and pre-empt, the sins of one's worst GMs (and scenario designers). So rules-crazy 70's games were all about GM caprice, and much of the Forge's favored methods are reactions to heavily railroaded games in their pasts...but collect too many game designers in one place, and you begin to accumulate a critical mass of anti-GM karma, to the point where many of the games strip the GM of various segments of his authority, or even do away with the role altogether. But directorial powers have a strong tendency to disrupt any sense of immersion. But, of course, that sort of play, while certainly enjoyable in it's own right, has passed so far into storytelling that the very concept of 'Role-playing' has become lost. (Indeed, I am deeply surprised that the Forge's terminology hasn't declared 'Role-Playing' a verbotten term itself. One supposes that only the trouble of having to change domain names has spared it...)