Anyone who's followed me online know the degree of disgust I hold for Forge style designers, i.e. those out to make the next big thing or change the hobby. Those who think of gaming as ART, the endless (and I hold destructive) search for GREAT things in rpgs.
Gaming isn't the only thing where this type of split occurs, indeed one may say that it afflicts any human activity. There are always those seeking great meaning, intelligence and art in ways that most people just don't concern themselves with- and thus in the end they will by any real measure fail.
Consider this article by George Orwell on Good Bad Books as an example of this. Here's what I consider the key statement:
"The existence of good bad literature — the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously — is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration. I imagine that by any test that could be devised, Carlyle would be found to be a more intelligent man than Trollope. Yet Trollope has remained readable and Carlyle has not: with all his cleverness he had not even the wit to write in plain straightforward English."
Yes, I'd rather be a good bad DM, player and designer than in the end an overblown and in the end forgotten and useless artist- no matter how much the critical elite may look down upon the former and exalt the latter.
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Thanks for this post Gleichman. It really articulates part of my own opinion on Forge-style designers that I simply couldn't put into words well.
I call them "the indie master race." It's really a bizarre landscape when you go into their forums and find their embarrassing and supposedly revolutionary new ideas, like making RPGs that males are not allowed to play by the rules, and so forth, as well as the glorification of minimalism that goes on there. A friend of mine the other day had the displeasure of purchasing the smallville RPG thinking he would get a game, but unfortunately what was sold him was a "storytelling experience" with relationship charts as character design. He didn't know anything about Forge-style games until he accidentally bought one, and was rather confused and displeased.
A "Good Bad Gamer" – a moniker I would be happy to adopt as well.
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