Friday, January 12, 2007

Monthly Review December 2006

One of the threads in theory developments in December was creativity and decision making. Early on, at Gamecraft there was a discussion about RPGs as a medium. In particular the advantages and disadvantages of the RPG medium largely stem from the creative flexibility of structured imagination and the mixing of creator and audience. This idea returns with a discussion on The Forge about creativity loads among players, as well as, a discussion on Gamecraft on the GM's apparent responsibility to provide high quality creative content contradicting a lack of authority to make those decisions.

Later on, Carl Cravens suggested that decisions must not be so important that they paralyze or so irrelevant that they mean nothing to the players. Lastly, Matt Snyder offered an approach to making situations and characters more compelling, specifically ensuring that no character has full information of the situation. This ensures that decisions are more engaging if only as examples of the way real people make decisions.

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