Alas- a lack!

Small but vital correction
Footering @fB as you do, I just this afternoon remembered the film I'd left out of yesterday's list of screen gems from my 2009-10 new year's festivities: Slumlord Millionaire. This unfortunate error has been corrected.

The film is every bit as good as the hype would want you to imagine, believe me! Normal service resumed ASAP. ;)

Related@RD/KA!
- An embarrassment of riches #1: Boxes of tricks

Pwnage and ownage

A bloglag starting with a long weekend visiting family has stretched out to more than twice as long as that thanks, above all, to the 'block'. Efforts to break on through had finally awakened a glimmer, but it was still a slog. Thank goodness then for Badger's visit last night.

Glorious carnage!
This phrase could so easily've applied to dinner as much as to the games that followed. I was cooking haddock with bacon and mushrooms, one of my favourite quick recipies from Good Food for Busy People- a book which delivers exactly what it says on the cover. Tasting while stirring everything together for the final five minutes' cookoff I immediately knew something was wrong. Sure enough, I had grabbed the wrong jar of red powder from my spice cupboard: those 2 added teaspoonsfuls of paprika were actually cayenne pepper; a disaster in the making on a par with the great pepper catastrophe of 2008.

This, that and the other

I've got various ideas simmering away at the moment, looking for the hooks that'll make them into stories. Meanwhile, it's time for another pot pourri...

So it goes...
I warned you yesterday dear readers, of my intention to follow through on the story of the controversy generated by the RPGpundit's 6th November blogpost about FFG and its GW RPG licences. El pundito posted his 4th installment today. To keep this brief, I will just make a few points:

• This post is a succint example of the hate-filled bile (here aimed at two of his favourite targets- RPG.net and the so-called "Storygames Swine") and overweening sense of self-importance which have defined the pundit's hyperbole from day one.
• The pundit's excuse for "not post[ing] this link" (to a Storygames thread)- his "policy of not providing assistance to the Swine in promulgating their filth", is lame almost beyond words:

1. Embedding links is so easy that I cannot help but imagine the man with the red flag from the early days of the motor car.
2. The pundit's persistent unwillingness to enable this technologically trivial cross-checking cannot but cast further doubt on the credibility of his commentary.

• The pundit's celebration of the publicity the whole affair has garnered cannot be said to have proved my speculations of yesterday, but I believe they remain valid and open.

There will be more I imagine. :-\

Something rotten? But where?

I feel I have to tread a careful line with this post. Why? Because it'd be so easy to get snarky about the storm in a teacup the RPGpundit generated with his recent blogpost about FFG and WFRP3, all the while forgetting that I am part of it all myself by virtue of making not just one, but two posts on the topic here at RD/KA!. For example, I could make some cheapass jibe about how el pundito has managed to pad the whole story out into 3 posts (#2 and #3) on a blog whose reputation for padding is surely second to none, but that would be to enter into pot and kettle territory don't you think?

All that said, I cannot but suggest that a measure of gentle ridicule is called for in respect of the tone of wounded innocence our 'intrepid' self publicist conjures under the title of 'Responding to The FFG Controversy', as if said controversy (spread now across 3 threads: FFG's own WFRP3 forum; theRPGsite- the Pundit's own forum; and RPGnet) wasn't entirely the intended outcome of his own efforts in the first place.

If controversy was the Pundit's goal, then why am I getting involved? Does this not mean that I'm giving him what he wants I hear you ask dear readers (Andy, I'm thinking of you in particular here!). That's as may be, but I have my reasons.

To begin with, I feel I have an obligation to follow this story because I took it up in in the first place. That may sound strange, but that's what happens when you start reporting on stuff: you feel the need to follow through.

In addition I must confess to having a soft spot for the Pundit (pauses for the obvious jokes to flit through readers' minds); I'd hardly be keeping tabs on his blog to this day if I didn't, don't you think? Seriously though, as I wrote more than 3 years ago, the Pundit was the individual most singularly responsible for inspiring me to take to blogging, for which I remain grateful. Precisely where this fits in the cocktail of reasons prompting me to return to this story is as invisible to yours truly as it no doubt is to everyone else, but there you go.

On top of those more personal motives I feel compelled to point out something that has, at the time of writing, been missed by all concerned on the threads linked above. That is to say: the Pundit's own motives. I believe the Pundit essentially gives these away in today's post on the controversy (#3 above) when he includes the link to Brett Bernstein's post of 10/11/09 on 'Brett's Blog' over at Precis Intermedia. There Brett reminds us of what he points out in the RPGnet thread inspired by the Pundit's original rumour-mongering: that the Pundit's second RPG - GnomeMurdered - is soon to be released by Precis Intermedia, as is RPGPundit's Guide to Game Mastering. And there you have it in my opinion: the whole thing is just an advertising stunt by someone who has already revealed a genuine talent for internet self-advertisement of the lowest sort.

What this might reveal about the initial rumour is straightforward enough. If we take at face value the official FFG statement that there "is nothing accurate in this fabricated post whatsoever", then we have to ask ourselves about the rumour's credentials. Was there a genuine email? Or did the Pundit just make it up so that he could generate some timely publicity? That is speculation on my part but, having followed the Pundit's online career these past 5 years I for one believe that he quite capable of such lies and deception in pursuit of his selfish interests. You, my dear readers, must make up your own minds. ;)

Related@RD/KA!
- Stuff and... nonsense?
- This, that and the other

In which I just must bitch and moan a bit...

When I was a kid, I played several classic family strategy boardgames, like Risk, Campaign and Diplomacy. Older, and into wargames, my interest in WW2 and my taste for multiplayer games meant that I was keen to find a multiplayer WW2 strategy game featuring economic planning and development as well as battles.

Pretty much the only kid on the block back in the early/mid-80's was Rise and Decline of the Third Reich, designed by John Prados and published then by the old Avalon Hill. The merits of this game are evident in its lasting success - it's still available some 35 years after its initial publication, from Avalanche Press.

I must confess I never really liked the look of Third Reich, and my single, short play with someone else's set didn't change my mind. I might've liked the game more if, as is commonplace in today's digital age, I'd been able to study the rules in advance, thus having the 1st clue about what I was doing as the Russian player in those crucial early days of Barbarossa. But maybe not, because my main issue with the game was that the rules seemed to me to be burdened by too many special cases and exceptions, for the sake of being both historical and open.

Still looking to scratch my WW2 multiplayer strategic itch, I bought myself a copy of Udo Grebe's Blitzkrieg General at Claymore several years ago. That was a flop. I found the rules so opaque to understanding that I've not even punched out the counters, which sadly puts Blitzkrieg General in the same class of untouched unplayables as ASLSK#1 & 2, great title notwithstanding.

That past left me primed and ready when I paid my first visit to a new acquaintance's flat recently, there to find displayed on the kitchen table what I can only term the splendour that is the Axis and Allies Anniversary Edition, released to mark the 50 years of games under the Avalon Hill brand. I just knew it had to be mine as soon as I saw it.

Visits to my FLGS proved fruitless, both telling me that it was out of stock at the British distributors (quite remarkable for a game released only on 18th November last year). To ebay it was then. Purchase duly made, I began my wait for my goodies to wend their way across the Atlantic. And herein lies the fly in the ointment of this otherwise happy tale.

The pound has collapsed in recent months, with the result that this game and its postage and packing were expensive. I could live with that. No one was forcing me to click on the buttons confirming my purchase after all. But what ticked me off was having to make a 3-hour round trip to my local Parcelforce depot so that I could pay an additional 25% on top of all that, for customs duty and 'handling'. With attentions focussed on the giant scams of multi-billion dollar financial frauds and bailed-out bankers' bewildering bonuses, spare a thought for the smaller-scale but ongoing scam that is customs and excise. Curse them! ;)

Just another Firefox update?

Sitting geeking and spodding as you do, the Firefox update alert popped up, too quick for me to click it before it popped down again. So it was off to the Firefox page to grab the download. Following the process through its simple steps, I was reminded of an essential paradox about the whole business that is never far from the back of my mind, one I believe sits at the heart of broader realities of which Firefox is today perhaps the exemplar.

My point here is that downloading updates without a 2nd thought has become like eating and drinking, and all that goes with that - something you do reflexively, because it's an essential part of merely operating. And for most of us (ie. those no more code monkeys than we could be grease monkeys) there really is no choice but to accept those downloads at face value. Heck, most of us are waiting for the damn downloads just to bring the products we bought up to the specifications we were sold.

I know I am in respect of Windows Vista, which is a bit more stable than it was when I first bought it more than a year ago, but whose irksomely unstable Windows Explorer continues to bug the shit out of me now as I reported it to be doing last April. So OK, the shift- and ctrl- multiselect options now work properly, which has helped me learn new ways of handling files as I move them from folder to folder. But you have to ask some hard questions about how Microsoft's coding teams are organised if they've failed to address in the space of a year bugs such as: there is no way to set the new Folder->View options at general levels; eg.

• Set all the subfolders of a given folder to view like 'this'.
• Set all folders with tags A and B to view like 'that'.
• Tag A supercedes 'this'.
• Tag B doesn't.

No, I still find myself repeatedly having manually to set the Folder->View options to my preferred settings. I seem to be making some headway, in that a lot more folders look the way they should, assuming that I've visited them before and set them to view the way I prefer. Although I'm still not really all that confident that folders aren't just returning to factory presets or to random settings whenever I leave a given Explorer window.

I've said it before, and I'm saying it again: I've had enough of my lovely machine being screwed-over by running a Microsoft OS. There are better products out there that I could run on my PC.

Regular readers might be surprised to read that I'm still running on Vista at all, after that rant and the follow-up post of May 2008. The sad truth was that I hit a hiccup which defeated my meagre resources. I was left with no recourse but to stick with Windows, because I didn't need to learn anything new to use it. That is to say: for this user seeking ICT products better than those of the big kid on the block, the all-too-well known 'code hump' of Linux was just too much, even in the simple forms in which it appeared in Ubuntu.

And this has precisely what to do with my claim made above, about Firefox's exemplary status in the paradox our download dependence creates?

That paradox I believe is that this download dependence is the heart and soul of the strengths of the Open Source project, of which Firefox's Mozilla is a part. This is paradoxical because it is the selfsame download dependence that appears malevolent in its corporate guise.

Old hands at RD/KA! will remember my longstanding interest in the wider potentialites of the internet, as witness another bold statement dating right back to my very first week. Readers who facebook might already be aware that learning coding skills sufficient to enable a contribution to the Open Source project is something I'd like to do.

So, to answer my title's question. No, this wasn't 'just' another Firefox update. Why not? Because it's set me off on a track paralleling that I'm already on with UK Games Expo'09, namely using RD/KA! to support my efforts towards goals wider merely than itself. In this case that's getting me off Windows, onto Linux, and into training which will help me learn some fresh computer coding skills. Expect to hear more. ;)

Start the week @ RD/KA!: Microsoft Vista? Gah!

When my old computer was dying on me last year, I decided to hold off buying a new one until the new Windows OS was out. Don't ask me why, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. Oh how I wish I hadn't! Microsoft Vista is quite simply the biggest crock of shit Microsoft has ever sold me.

Off-the-shelf hardware ingenue that I am, I went online and chose a Dell Dimension DM061, powered by a Intel Pentium Duo 2.8GHz, 1014MB RAM chip. I've had no problems with Dell as Dell (expect perhaps they gave me that irritating update checker which reguarly pops up not to allow me to install upgrades?). No, my problems have all been with Windows Vista.

As ever with a Windows OS 'upgrade', the new chrome is nice, eg. the new 'View' and 'Sort' settings in Explorer offer genuine utility in accessing folders full of a large number of different file types, or would if their coding hasn't rendered the entire OS utterly unstable. (And I'm betting that the idea was probably lifted from the Mac in any case, just like so much else of the Vista chrome appears to be.) Here are some of the more minor bugs my Explorer demonstrates:

• Folders in Explorer reset to random view and sort settings each time I enter them, so I have to click about to get the desired view setting I want over and over again.
• The shift- and ctrl- multiselect options have stopped working except in my Open/Save dialogue boxes.

The upshot of this is to make file management incredibly frustrating, and, in the case of the malfunctioning multishift, so laborious that I feel as if my machine has regressed to pre-GUI days.

Serious as these glitches in Explorer are, they are minor compared to the extreme bloat that is Vista's main crippling flaw. The 'blue screen of death' used to be the hallmark of the horror that was an unstable Windows OS, now it's the 'Not Responding' message which appears with depressing frequency and usually for no apparent reason. Defragmenting and virus scans take forever too, sometimes literally 6 or more hours, as if the disc hadn't been defragged or checked in weeks.

So as if Explorer wasn't already bad enough, it can lock up and freeze the whole machine trying to move 2 or 3 PDF's from one folder to another, and it will stay locked for minutes before it clears. That's 1 Meg RAM @ 2.8GHz, freezing over a few Meg's of PDF? WTF?! I've learned, when organising files in Explorer, to hit cancel and try again when this dread box turns up. It's usually quicker than waiting for the box to freeze and lock up explorer.

And on top of all that, Badger told me about a story going round that the latest Vista patches- which naturally enough I've downloaded automatically, as you do- have actually made a bad situation worse. I can vouch for that, particularly over the freezes, which definitely seem to me to be getting worse.

So I've had enough of this shit. I'm fed up spending money on a fancy new computer only to find it performing increasingly below specification. I'm no computer whizz, but I know these machines should be working better than this. I'm moving to a Linux OS as soon as I can. Badger tells me that it's easy to test Ubuntu without making installation decisions which might cause problems. I'm going to investigate this soon. ;)

Curse you RPGpundit, curse you! (A fairy tale in 3 parts, #3)

Part 3. ...But a champion nonetheless
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

So, gentle reader, by now you will know how the RPGpundit's rants at TheUruguayanGamer led to our aging gamer shouldering the burden of his own blog, and of providing a more subtle critique of the 'swine' than the pundit's own pungent denunciations. And you might remember that, even as he felt that the pundit was losing his touch, JMcL63 began to appreciate just how much easier it is simply to denounce the roleplaying theorists as a bunch of wankers than it is actually to subject their thinking to a thorough-going refutation. Moreover JMcL63 was only too aware of how the whole issue was a storm in a teacup's teacup, of surpassing little interest outside a tiny circle of gamers, and of even less consequence than that. In short, our aging gamer felt that his own self-appointed quest was quixotic, to say the very least.

Our noble aging gamer pondered this dilemma long and hard even as he remained a regular reader of the infamous pundit's pithy column. And then, in a twist of fate of the sort beloved of storytellers everywhere, the pundit himself unwittingly retrieved the situation that bedevilled our scrivener.

The self-appointed 'Wielder of the Flaming Keystrokes of Truth' made one of his occasional forays into a new gaming ecommunity where he thought he might be able to find a new home. The place was Nutkinland: The RPG Site. A revival of an old forum, the RPGpundit himself called the place "The Last Best Hope of the RPG Community Online".

It wasn't long before the RPGpundit- with the help of his new 'proxy army'- was waxing scatological about his by now familiar betes noires, and demonstrating his ever unerring ability to get right up some people's noses. And it wasn't long before the owners of Nutkinland saw- in the pundit's self-appointed mission- the makings of a ruse which they could use to generate interest in and traffic through their newly revived old haunt. And so they co-opted the RPGpundit and his most vocal antagonist into 2 opposing camps, hoping that setting them against each other like cocks in a fighting pit would lead to a prodigious flamefest the memory of which would live long in the annals of the gaming ecommunity.

The Nutkins' ploy proved a damp squib and would've been long forgotten, save for one lasting consequence: the thread Pistols at dawn, in which the RPGpundit engaged in a lengthy debate with one Levi Kornelsen. Here, surprise, surprise, the pundit proved that he could indeed engage in a prolonged exchange of opinion without resorting to cheap shots and ad hominem abuse (although good old Anglo-Saxon scatology was another matter!).

And so dear reader, our little tale approaches its conclusion.

It dawned on JMcL63 that the RPGpundit had largely succeeded in his self-appointed mission to rally opposition to the swine- our aging gamer's determination to scratch his own itch in his own way in his own good time was sufficient proof of that. Our noble aging gamer soon even accepted that, however quixotic his personal quest might seem, and no matter how surpassingly irrelevant the entire debate might be to the wider world of roleplaying; that these simple facts aside, the paradoxical truth was that the RPGpundit had largely picked the right targets, and had dealt with them appropriately. Strange to relate, foul-mouthed abuse had been precisely the order of the day, and the world of roleplaying did indeed seem to be a better place for the pundit's scatological tirades.

So, for getting in there first to set out your stall with the 'f**k you, you wankers' tirades; and for leaving those who come after you with the more complicated (and far drearier) task of rational refutation, I say, "Curse you, RPGpundit, curse you!" ;)

Related@RD/KA!
- Part 1. There came a questing knight
- Part 2. A flawed champion...

Curse you RPGpundit, curse you! (A fairy tale in 3 parts, #2)

Part 2. A flawed champion...
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

The months passed and JMcL63 read more of the RPGpundit's rants. Our aging gamer began to perceive that this guardian of all that is pure and good in roleplaying was not without his flaws.

JMcL63 was struck first by the pundit's foul-mouthed vitriol. No lily-liver himself, our aging gamer just wondered if what the internet really needed was yet more of the abuse of strangers for which ecommunities were already well known. Moreover, our aging gamer reasoned that it is one thing to announce over and over that someone is shit- hoping thereby perhaps to convince people by dint of repetition; but that it is quite another actually to prove the point by virtue of reasoned argument.

If JMcL63 felt that the RPGpundit suffered from the fact that scatological polemic instead of reasoned argument was his weapon of choice in his self-appointed quest against swinedom, our aging gamer also eventually came to doubt the validity of the pundit's defintion of the term 'swine' itself.

At first JMcL63 (and no doubt many others) thought that by 'swine' the RPGpundit was referring to the pseudo-intellectuals of the artsy roleplaying school. As time went on however, the pundit came out with a defintion of 'swine' that included anyone for whom roleplaying was too important in their lives. Our aging gamer was unimpressed with this because it seemed altogether too self-serving.

In the first instance it let the RPGpundit off the hook for his own swinism. Yes, the internet's most famous scourge of roleplaying swine was not above a touch of narrativist idiocy himself. In the pundit's case, this was his insistence on solving the problems of all hitherto existing superhero rpg's via the introduction of 'protagonism', which for the pundit represented a superhero's ability to win against impossible odds so long as they were in their own comic, and were therefore the coolest character of all.

Beyond that, our aging gamer felt that- all appearances of an ex post facto construction aside- the RPGpundit's definition of 'swinism' would just allow the pundit to tar with the 'swine' label anyone whose attitude to roleplaying was different from his own. This is, in fact, what JMcL63 thought happened when the RPGpundit chose to add Green Ronin to his hate list, a decision that always seemed to our aging gamer to have little to do with their being anything like the genuine swine against whom the pundit had railed so venomously.

By a strange irony it was at just about this period when JMcL63 believed that the RPGpundit was losing his touch that the second of the enduring consequences of the pundit's blog was visited upon our aging gamer. Deciding to complement the pundit's scathing polemic with rational analysis and detailed refutation, our aging gamer started to investigate the very games theoretical culture against which the RPGpundit had railed so long and hard.

Irony compounding irony, one of the places JMcL63 visited as part of this investigation was the Forge, domain of the dark lord Ron Edwards and his GNS school of roleplaying theory. Our aging gamer had visited this site the previous year after hearing about the GNS theory at Worldcon 2005, something he wrote about in his very first post to RD/KA!. A quick scan of this site rapidly convinced JMcL63 that it was well worth ignoring until, in a final layer of irony, RPGpundit's rants at Edwards' expense drove our aging gamer to investigate the site the better to refute its ideas.

Entering the world of roleplaying theory JMcL63 soon found himself in a miasma of cod academicism and grandiose restatements of old nostrums and of the blindingly obvious. Digging deeper our aging gamer felt himself losing his grip on the sound precepts of good clean fun. Worse still, he realised that this material had got under his skin, and he would never be quite free of it until he had subjected it to a thorough dissection and detailed refutation, a task he shrank from even as he raged against the would-be reinventors of roleplaying.

So, for making roleplaying theory into an itch I'd rather ignore, but still must scratch, I say, "Curse you RPGpundit, curse you!"

Related@RD/KA!
- Part 1. There came a questing knight
- Part 3. ...But a champion nonetheless

Curse you RPGpundit, curse you! (A fairy tale in 3 parts, #1)

Part 1. There came a questing knight
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

Once upon a time there was an aging gamer. Of all the constants in his life, gaming was one of the most important. From his childhood days onwards playing games had been the source of some of his most cherished memories and most enduring friendships. This hadn't changed even after the first sight of greying hairs and the onset of creaking bones, although now our aging gamer had the wonders of the internet- where he went by the name of JMcL63- to add to the pleasures that games had long provided.

Our aging gamer JMcL63 might've continued for many years in this vein- playing his favourite boardgames, running his roleplaying campaigns, and pottering about on the internet gaming community- were it not for a fateful missive sent him by an old friend. The letter contained a link to an article entitled The Generation of Swine is Alive and Well in Online Forums, written by one RPGpundit. Little did JMcL63 realise, as he chuckled over the RPGpundit's words, what a fateful moment this was. Little did JMcL63 realise, as RPGpundit's TheUruguayanGamer blog became a regular read, that this introduction to the gaming blogsphere would prove to have lasting consequences for our aging gamer.

For the RPGpundit was a man with a past and a man with a mission. Finding himself exiled from several corners of the gaming ecommunity the RPGpundit had decided to set up his own corner of cyberspace in which he could rant and rave to his heart's content without being subject to the stern hand of forum staff. That was the RPGpundit's past. To lay low rpg swine everywhere- that was his self-appointed mission.

JMcL63 could identify with the RPGpundit's desire for his own platform from which to give vent to his own opinions, albeit for different reasons than those of the RPGpundit. And our aging gamer shared the pundit's disdain for the pseudo-intellectual posturing of artsy roleplayers, the RPGpundit's 'swine'.

The first enduring consequence making the RPGpundit a regular read was not long in coming: a mere 12 days after first reading the pundit's vituperant words our aging gamer made his own entry into the blogsphere with his own "Roll dice and kick ass!". Little did JMcL63 realise what he was getting himself into when he posted his first words all those months ago.

Gone were the carefree days when our aging gamer could simply browse his favourite gaming forums, adding comments here and there when the fancy took him. Now he was faced with the burden of generating regular comment to keep his blog alive and kicking. Worse: it wasn't long before he was faced with the horrors of the same old front page appearing day after day when even just popping in to say hello to remind his readers that he was still alive; when even something that simple was too much effort.

So: in memory of those long gone simpler days; and for being the person singularly most responsible for this aging gamer's inviting the blogging monkey to take up residence on his back; I say, "Curse you RPGpundit, curse you!" ;)

Related@RD/KA!
- Part 2. A flawed champion...
- Part 3. ...But a champion nonetheless

General gamism

The emperor's new clothes? The state of roleplaying theory #2

A funny thing happened on my way to this article
I lost the plot. Seriously. This 2nd article in my look at current roleplaying theory was intended to be a pithy refutation of the essential underpinning of today's indie roleplaying theory- the idea that roleplaying is an art form. But, reading up on some of Ron Edwards' articles at the Forge amongst other stuff, and trying to familiarise myself with the indie blogsphere- a.k.a. 'the diaspora'- I found myself losing focus.

It was mostly because I was trying to cram up on several years' of debate in a few afternoons' haphazard reading. I was also having some difficulty in filling the gap between my own thinking (which dates right back to the mid/late 80's, before the whole storytelling thing took off- which I essentially missed BTW), on the one hand; and all this new narrativist stuff, on the other. Plus, to be perfectly honest, just like when I first heard an account of Edwards' GNS theory in a lecture at the Worldcon last August, I was finding useful insights in some of the ideas, even if they were just reminding me of stuff I used to have a notion of when I was an occasional GM and regular player back in the 80's.

More than that, I began to understand what it is these narrativists are on about- which had been my purpose in any case. I even began to wonder, to a certain degree, why 'mainstream' roleplayers make such a fuss about this stuff. And then I was rescued by Ron Edwards himself. I'm referring of course to his infamous- and already widely discussed- 'brain damage' thread at the Forge.

The fuss, and what it's about
The thread which caused all the hoo-hah spun off from here, although Edwards clearly hadn't coined the term there, to wit:

Now - your set of examples is more or less a diagnostic board of what I've been calling, with various reactions 'round the internet, brain damage. There are so many bent/broken features of creativity and interaction embedded in those examples that it'd take a textbook to lay them all out in a way which shows what's really wrong.

Yes - "wrong." Since brain damage (which I think is literally the case) seems to get right up people's asses as a term, I'll analogize to limb-based physical limitations.

But brain damage wasn't enough, no. In the major thread itself, Edwards went on to develop his analogy:

Now for the discussion of brain damage. I'll begin with a closer analogy. Consider that there's a reason I and most other people call an adult having sex with a, say, twelve-year-old, to be abusive. Never mind if it's, technically speaking, consensual. It's still abuse. Why? Because the younger person's mind is currently developing - these experiences are going to be formative in ways that experiences ten years later will not be. I'm not sure if you are familiar with the characteristic behaviors of someone with this history, but I am very familiar with them - and they are not constructive or happiness-oriented behaviors at all. The person's mind has been damaged while it was forming, and it takes a hell of a lot of re-orientation even for functional repairs (which is not the same as undoing the damage).

Before examining quite how despicable that statement is, it is worth considering exactly who this storm in a teacup is about. Here is one of the many discussions that sprung up about this thread across the indie blogsphere (in as thorough a search as I could manage I counted 10 in total, 9 of which appeared to be part of the indie diaspora). Here, from the above-linked thread, are the words of Clinton R. Nixon, Edwards' closest associate at the Forge:

Not to get too about the Forge here, but he [Ron] is under an obligation to me, expressed financially through my continued hosting and maintenence of the Forge. He is under an obligation to the community that was built by him and others, as they have built him up and put him in the position he is in. Do you think anyone would be talking about his theories without a continued and vital community surrounding them talking about them outside the confines of one forum? While elections were not formalized, he is pretty much a duly elected president of a movement and community. And that position comes with responsibility and obligation, most certainly.

And here is how Nixon felt about Edwards' remarks:

I'm not really planning on posting to the Forge again any time soon: honestly, I can't morally justify being a part of a community with those sorts of attitudes.

And that's only one remark in which Nixon expresses his utter dismay at this turn of events.

Remember now, this is Edwards' explanation of why people can't understand the rules of his rpg Sorceror (winner of the Diana Jones Award in 2002 no less): they're functionally brain-damaged to a degree that parallels physical handicap or even the trauma of childhood sexual abuse.

To put this in context, leave aside for the moment the sexual abuse analogy. Let's just imagine if someone had said that gay men couldn't understand romantic love because they were brain damaged by their own sad experiences, that brain damage being the source of their 'deviant' sexual predilections? Or that woman deserve to earn less than men for the same job because their brains are functionally inferior? Or that black people aren't fit to join polite white society for the same reason?

How many of those who made excuses for Edwards' remarks would let ideas like that pass unchallenged? Why then were so many of them willing to bow down to this sort of misanthropic bile? RPGpundit at TheUruguayanGamer deserves credit for calling out one Levi Kornelsen on this point recently.

The tragic irony of desperate measures?
When I originally read the thread, my first considered reaction after the obvious shock was that there was a pathetic air of desperation about the whole thing. Consider: as I mentioned in #1, RPGpundit reported last December on the closure, by Edwards, of the 'RPG Theory' and 'GNS Model Discussion' forums at the Forge. At the time, the pundit took Edwards' own reason for this decision largely at face value:

This forum is no longer available for posting. It has served its purpose: to develop a sensible framework for discussing play, and the children of play, design and publishing.

In other words, all other comments notwithstanding, the pundit accepted Edwards' decision as an arrogant expression of self-confidence from a secure position. This was fair enough on the basis of the evidence at the time.

But seeing the cheap shock tactics Edwards employed in his 'brain damage' thread, I was reminded of the classic tactic of sectarian leaders: namely shocking the faithful with some abrupt U-turn or other dramatic and unexpected manoeuvre. The purpose of this is to generate a psychodrama that will bond the faithful all the more strongly with their glorious leader by instilling fear in them, then comforting them with your strong and implacable leadership in the face of the pseudo-crisis you've carefully conjured up.

If this is the game Edwards was playing, then why, I asked myself? What was the source of his perceived insecurity? This made me reconsider Edwards' reasons for his decision to close his forums last December. I was thinking about this while I was trawling through the indie blogsphere, and I was struck by a possible reason: the indie diaspora itself.

I mean to say: the Forge was instituted in 2001. Readers will already know of its position in the roleplaying ecommunity. Clinton R. Nixon has told us what it has meant to Edwards, and what Edwards means to it. In its own terms it was very successful. Now imagine the impact on it of the rise of the indie blogsphere: suddenly what was a tightly knit community held together at one virtual location and through one man's vision spins off more and more independent sites, which start to become little communities of their own.

At the same time, it is quite possible that the closed 'RPG Theory' and 'GNS Model Discussion' forums were becoming counterproductive from Edwards' point-of-view, because he was constantly having to defend his theories, and was undoubtedly in danger of tripping himself up. Or maybe he just got tired of all those brain-damaged bozos asking him stupid questions which showed that they had understood nothing they'd read in his major works (it's tough at the top I guess). I don't know, I'm speculating here, but this could be verified if anyone really wanted to sit and read their way through a pile of dead Forge threads.

In any event, what I am suggesting here is exactly what the RPGpundit said last December:

So here Ron has set his dogma. Why now? Probably because he has nothing more to say, and leaving the theory open to ongoing discussion would only result in two things: people pointing out that the theory is full of shit being the first (and by far the least dangerous to him), and the second being followers of his coming up with heretical alterations to the theory that stole his own thunder (and that's the clincher, the one that he's really nervous about).

Well, like I said, the first is verifiable. The second is verified: the FUNnel model, and the AGE Model Core Document v 1.a are just 2 of a few challengers to the Edwards crown I've found recently. The first is too crude to give Mr. Edwards sleepness nights. The second is an example of another threefold model, one "which emphasizes an ecological perspective of gaming"(?!). It seems that, just like in the earliest days of roleplaying, people who're copying each other have to borrow each other's acronymic stylings too.

That's it for now. More on this just as soon as I have time to put it together.

Related@RD/KA!
The emperor's new clothes? The state of roleplaying theory
- #1: General gamism
- Roleplaying as art? Not for me
- It's art Jim, but not as we know it!

Gamers and the internet? Gah!

I despair of gamers sometimes, I really do.

There has never been a better time to be a gamer. Never. Having taken an unsuspecting world by storm in the mid/late 70's, the modern gaming hobby we know and love has suffered trials and tribulations, but is now stronger than ever. On top of all the great games of all kinds being played by more and more people, we also have ICT: the most powerful technology that everyday bozos like ourselves have ever had at our fingertips.

More than that, I have a theory that it is this very ICT which actually makes rpgs capable of being what they really are. Let me put that another way: I believe that rpgs are one of the great popular cultural advances since rock and roll, a true sign of our times; and that it is the same ICT technology that makes this blog possible that will allow this still youthful cultural phenomenon to fully mature. That might seem an odd thing to say about 'pencil and paper' rpgs, but it is a theory of mine all the same.

So I have been really, really irritated by the 'debate' occasioned by Ryan Dancey's review of WFRP2 to which I referred the other day: 3 days of hysteria demonstrating all that is worst about life in cyberspace; including a 44-page thread of 438(!) posts at RPGnet, a place whose name can still send shivers down my spine when I think of the images- of Hammer horror peasant mobs armed with sharp farm implements and torches- conjured up by their past reactions to people trying to talk about the HERO system. I am not going to bother surveying this material here; check it out if you dare, but don't send me your therapy bills, because you have been warned!

Here though, are some choice remarks made in reply to Dancey's original review on GamingReport.com itself (got to find a fix for that URL problem)

"what a load of rot. games workshop have NEVER had anything to do with TSR. WFRP is NOTHING like D&D. NEXT TIME YOU THINK ABOUT DOING A REVIEW, DON''T! you have no idea what your on about!"

This anonymous poster clearly hasn't been reading his White Dwarfs, which have [the rest of this post got lost somehow?!]. ;)