Heck, Jonathan and Shreyas would like to be seen as being in full-scale rebellion most of the time, I get the feeling.

My aesthetic principles only feel like rebellion to you because you are from a design paradigm that you percieve as dominant and threatened. If you weren't my friend and I didn't believe that your motives for saying this were cool, I'd think very poorly of you for it. From over here, it just looks like I'm doing my own thing, what I want to do, and I figure it looks weird because no one else wants to do it.

Posted By: Kynn

Posted By: Mike HolmesAll of which is not to say that we don't like newcomers. In point of fact, new folks become part of this group all the time. I daresay that even Kynn is nearing being "in" at this point.

I'm not sure I agree with the idea that I'm close to being "in."

I am pretty sure that the "even" in front of my name makes me want to fire off a "fuck you all too."

I'm also pretty sure part of why I don't become "part of" something called "communities" is because I dislike all of this type of bullshit that goes on. I'm sort of lost as to why I'm singled out here, but then again, I am not sure I give a damn.

Damn, man.

I am astounded by the way that you can agonize on Knife Fight over whether a game you're designing may take unfair advantage of a repressed people and co-op their belief system (which I find a noble and ethically conscientious, if somewhat impractical, line of thought by the way), and yet when it comes to actual, person to person (if not face-to-face) communication, you just don't seem to give a shit.

Mike's not talking about some stupid clique or creepy cult. He's talking about people who are friends with each other. That's all he really means by "community." He says that he's starting to consider you a friend, and you literally tell him to fuck off. I'm pretty damn sure the "even" just meant that it's somewhat surprising, because he hasn't interacted with you a whole lot. Seriously, what's up with that?

Posted By: KynnI daresay that even Kynn is nearing being "in" at this point.doesn't sound to me like, "Hey, Kynn, I like you," it sounds like "we're such an open and accepting group that even someone as bad as Kynn can join!"

Ok, I'm brand new here and even* I read that as "we're such an open and accepting group that we recognize that someone like Kynn who hasn't been here long is making valuable enough contributions to the group -- even though, in this thread at least, those contributions take the form of rather vehement disagreement."

It seemed like a very positive statement to me.

I really hope that you just misread it. Because the alternative that's implied to me is that maybe you've got shit going on in your life that's leading you to interpret everything in the worst possible light--I've been there, and it sucks big-time.

Dan, I'm sorry if you're astounded by all this. I don't understand where you're coming from, either, though.Mike's not talking about some stupid clique...--...people who are friends with each other.That's pretty much what cliques are anyway, but I still don't get it.

People who are friends with each other are a group of friends. Groups of friends only become cliques when they start cementing their insecure bonds of friendship by actively excluding everyone else. I'm usually pretty sensitive to that sort of crap, and I really don't see it going on here.

This just seems like a group of really cool people.

* Heh. "Even."

With all due respect, I think we're now way away from the original discussion — perhaps because it is less threatening to discuss other things. The original issue was not "Is it wrong that we are friends and game together and developed our own short-hand code!" The discussion is about the the fact that, even if there are fifty or a hundred people or even 300 in this band of siblings (to reuse an unrelated thread title) or this clique (to reuse the term used above), it's still a small group.

Sure, small groups develop their own code and in-jokes. My gaming circle does too. But the discussion are opaque to anyone not buying in — because they are part of the circle, because they want to join the cool kids, because they went back and read the reams of previous discussions, whatever — >99% of gamers who read the discussion move on because they find it obscure, pretentious, tedious, or simply empty.

That really wouldn't matter if it wasn't that this style has become associated with "indie games." As a result, a lot of people who might enjoy these games are simply not even interested in trying. It's particularly bad when the jargon creeps into the games themselves, because it confirms the impression that the games themselves are just for a small group, and its jargon isolates it from the greater community.

As a side note, I do not subscribe to the idea that jargon is necessary to the discussion of specialized topics. I do a lot of technical writing in my job (i'm an engineer) and a characteristic of the reports I work on is that we try to hunt down jargon and kill it. Even though we write technical reports that are meant for jargon-lovin' people, we write them so that any interested layman can follow, without dropping technical quality. I expect my games to be less work to comprehend than my work!

Let me try a different metaphor.

You design a piece of software, or a can opener, or what not. You put it on the market, and you even have discussion groups talking about making more kitchen implements or software and offering some support. After a few years, your products are virtually unknown. Yes, they have made a little headway and they work pretty well, but your tech support, your marketing, and your designers are really just the same persons; they're very enthusisatic about the products, but their discussion is held pretty much in in-house jargon. The user feedback is all too often along the lines of "I tried but the instructions were in Japanese," or "The service was terrible," or "Who?"

Is your solution to ask that the user learn to speak in-house jargon? Is it to shrug and applaud barriers to entry? Is it so work on some form of embassy to users to make the product more approachable? Other?

and ultimately, this harms RPG discussion, because it serves as a barrier to entry.

That is demented. I have never heard something so crazy.

Does the English language harm discussion here because it is the language everyone posts in? I do not think it does. If we didn't have some common language, then there would be threads here in Hindi and Portuguese and Swiss German and Polish and Tamazight and Mandarin and Jiwarli.

Then no one would understand anyone else, and no communication would ever happen.

Barriers to entry are good. They prevent crap like that.

When it comes to jargon, you choose to use a more complicated language because it provides some small ease to you and those who speak it, but makes it hard for others to follow.

This isn't correct.

It provides significant "ease" as you call it, and also has the benefit of creating a barrier. The problem with this particular barrier is that the keys are too hard to obtain, not that the barrier exists at all. It enables the Usenet custom that Mark mentioned above, when it works correctly - it forces/allows people to enculturate to a new group before they can participate.

Comparing a pretty dispersed community to Usenet is a false comparison.

The reason you wait before jumping in on Usenet is NOT because you're looking to learn, for a month, what specialized lingo they're using in sci.space even though you're an astronaut.

The reason you wait is because you want to understand the dynamics of the group interaction.

If sci.space (I don't even know if there's such a newsgroup anymore, but whatever) uses language which is going to be unintelligible to people who work at NASA, to people who are involved in amateur astronomy clubs, to people who are undergraduate astronomy majors, and so on, then you're dealing with a separate problem from simply the September influx of new folks.

(What's more, Usenet groups are a really, really awful model for how you'd want discussion to happen. I am disappointed but not surprised that some people continue to hold up those as examples of kind of community you want to build. Yuck.)

Posted By: shreyasIt provides significant "ease" as you call it, and also has the benefit of creating a barrier.

Why, apart from stubborn elitism that demands that other people learn "our terms" to be proven worthy of airing their views, would anyone consider a barrier to be a benefit?

Why is it so vitally important that people be "forced" to grasp a huge body of knowledge (which some guys just made up, i.e. the proven "I pulled it out of my ass" method of generating knowledge) in order to have the supposed honor of speaking to you?

Why do you cling so much to the notion that barriers-before-participation are more desirable than open communication?

(PS: You all love me and I am part of the in-crowd now.)

Posted By: shreyas

When it comes to jargon, you choose to use a more complicated language because it provides some small ease to you and those who speak it, but makes it hard for others to follow.

This isn't correct.

It provides significant "ease" as you call it, and also has the benefit of creating a barrier. Theproblemwith this particular barrier is that the keys are too hard to obtain, not that the barrier exists at all. It enables the Usenet custom that Mark mentioned above, when it works correctly - it forces/allows people to enculturate to a new group before they can participate.

How isn't it correct? The only difference is you seem to believe barriers are a positive aspect of a community. I can't wrap that around my head, it's like saying you want the community to stagnate and slowly die off as new members are turned away at the door.
The problem I see here that you take as granted that the jargon and theories are canon when they're obviously not. Someone came up with them. It's cool if people want to use them, but enforcing their use doesn't really help.

Posted By: shreyas

George, you're not reading me right at all.

I agree wholeheartedly that the jargon as it exists now is problematic in a serious way.

But that is not an inherent property of jargon.

Well then. We agree. I too, don't think jargon is useless. The point I'm trying to make is, enforcing a jargon or terminology that is completely made up and theoretical has no positive aspects at all.

Umm, put me down as wishing I had said every single thing that Anemone said. ;-)

Posted By: buzzI guess I'm not seeing the issue as being as critical as some since I didn't find any of the existing jargon much of an impediment. Maybe I'm good with jargon, I dunno. That, and, if anything, people at the Forge, like Ron, explicitly tell me to leave jargon behind and just talk plainly. I then do, and it works peachy.

Regardless, the thread has gotten pretty unproductive and un-fun at this point.

Amen to all of those points.

I kind of lean with the jargon folks on this, though not particularly strongly. If, say, 60-70% of the people on S-G can communicate much more easily through the use of shared referents, that's a good thing.

People invoke game-mechanics here all the time without much explanation. "Oh, that's like Keys in The Shadow of Yesterday" or "Yeah, okay, so what you do is, you create a game that uses fan mail--you know, from Primetime Adventures." Or, "I really like the click-and-lock stuff from Capes but I also love the initiation scenes from Dogs in the Vineyard--and this is my proposal to combine the two of them." In these instances, it's not jargon per se, but it's still impenetrable: but now the barrier to entry is based on economics rather than attention span. Why is one kind of exclusion infuriating, yet the other has gone unnoticed after almost 200 posts?

In any event, it's handy to refer to something complicated and abstract with a single word or phrase.

Posted By: misubaYes, but what theydon'tsay in your examples is "Oh, that's like Keys," without telling where the term is from or even giving any context that the term refers to a mechanic from a specific game. Indeed, every one of your examples gives the crucial context to figure out what's beig discussed. Also, none of your examples includes a jargon term; the jargon doesn't seem to get sufficient contextual clues enough of the time.

Mike, I put the context in those examples so that people would understand my point: regardless of where the mechanic comes from, if you don't own or play the game, you're boned. In the wild, so to speak, people use things like fan mail, bangs, keys, etc. all the time. In principle, these are just a different kind of exclusionary language, and aren't too different from Forge Language. "Kicker" has effectively become a jargon term, even though it's a highly specific game mechanic which (I believe, and I could be wrong) is unique to Sorcerer.

Posted By: jhkimWell, Sorcerer has a bunch in its main text: Bangs and Kickers, and later Relationship Maps, Bobs and Weaves.

As far as I understand the time lines, most of the special terms in Sorcerer were not jargon when Ron wrote them. They were just special terms in Sorcerer. Other people adapted them for game theory discussion and used the techniques in other games. It's not like they were general jargon that Ron decided to use in the game he wrote.

Edit: Oh, James said that yesterday.