Hi Mark, Chris, Cristoph, Willem, and Jake. Thanks for posting! Sorry for taking a while to get back to you.
First, some short responses. Cristoph and Willem, I owe you both a long response.
Mark W:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s totally ordinary to want external affirmation, and I wasn’t saying that “ordinary people” (whatever that means) don’t. I was just talking about two things:
1) Geeks, role-playing geeks specifically, and how the desire for external validation gets into a horrible explosive car crash with ineffability.
2) How external validation isn’t actually the core of coolness.
None of this is to say anything about non-geeky people (at all, really), or what they want or need.
(This is tangential, and not directly a response to you, just musing inspired by your response {and also a response that I deleted.}) There’s an interesting phenom going on here, actually. Whenever I talk about “geeks do thing X” people assume that I’m also saying “non-geeks don’t do thing X.” Which doesn’t follow (and, with the things I normally talk about, doesn’t follow in dramatic-as-hell ways.)
I think that says something about how geeks (particularly role-playing geeks) see themselves. Geeks are not people from a Gulliver’s Travels backwards land, that do everything the reverse of how ordinary people would do it.
Geek is not the opposite of human.
Chris:
Yeah, absolutely, about the isolated play networks. One thing I’ve noticed (and totally done before myself) is that a lot of people want to get huge numbers of people in their games, and end up with eight, nine, or ten person games that are rather unwieldy, awkward, and often contain large amounts of boring downtime.
The rest of it: I’m not totally sure. I think that dropping the socially clingy behavior would help, yes, but that’s a rather unrealistic goal (large scale social change is hard), and I’m not sure whether or not it’s tied to the wargaming cruft (as a lot of satisfying games of late embrace the wargaming roots of RPGs: and are no less successful for it.)
Jake:
Hi Jake! Welcome to the blogodrome.
I think that the point you raise is pretty important: because you’d had an approximate experience, you were in a much better position to understand what happened to me, emotionally, in the earlier Drifter’s Escape game. Approximating experiences is totally something I should write about.
