Paradox one: I'm an indie gamer who doesn't like indie games. Well, sort of anyhow. I don't regularly follow any Forge discussions (I don't speak, as ChadU puts it, their "crazy moon language") but I follow links to specific threads now and again, and I get a lot of the theory secondhand in various blogs and such. And Carl's been buying and/or downloading various games and so forth, so I'm seeing some of the results as well. That said, I have to agree with the post on 20x20 Room (http://www.20by20room.com/2005/12/qien_es_mas_mac.html), which observed that the more egregious "if you don't play my way, you're doing it wrong" sorts of posturing is, well, mostly just macho posturing. I imagine a lot of it is what I tend to do when I'm brainstorming: throw out absolutes, sometimes really off-the-wall absolutes, and see what the results are. I don't usually have as much invested in them as I make it sound, I'm just trying to get things moving in *any* direction, even if it's a wrong one at first. But some people seem to have a lot invested in it. Yeesh. At any rate, some of the indie stuff seems to be trying awfully hard to codify what has always happened naturally in PBeM. To a certain extent, this is cool for me, because I've never quite worked out why it is that it works in PBeM but I can't make it work face to face. But I've almost decided that the codifying never quite works not because the rulesmaking is still in the debugging, but because everyone's codifying *his* (or her, though I can't think of any indiettes offhand) own style, and not mine. Overall, it makes my head hurt. "Hard choices" and "playing like you mean it" sound good until I start hearing precisely what whoever happens to be championing it at the moment really *means*, which always comes down to "If you don't game like me, you're having Hurting Wrong Fun." Or rather, "you only *think* you're having fun, but if you'd overanalyze it you'd realize you can't possibly be." And don't even get me started on "if you change anything, you shouldn't be playing this game." Yeesh. The Greek tragedians called, and they want their hubris back... -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
