Monday, September 17, 2007

Weekly Review September 9th to September 15th

This week has been an active one for RPG theory and related developments.

Fanfic, Elites, and Story

Ginger discusses fandom inspired online play, including the how goals of players differ between engaging story and simulating fanfiction. Also, she describes the effect of structurelessness on such games, and how they produce elites who covertly enforce their preferred style of play.

Jeepform Introductions

At Story Games, Emily Care Boss and Tobias Wrigstad have begun a conversation on the nature of story focused freeform RPGs, called jeepform. Related to the Nordic larp communities, this form of RPG focuses on strong constraints and responsive, story focused play, while avoiding explicit mechanics.

Guarding Yourself

Graham Walmsley discusses dropping your guard as part of his series on improvisation. As part of this he describes blocking and accepting as ways people raise and lower their guard during play.

Spotlighting the Unknown

Fang Langford returns to his discussion on moving the spotlight within RPGs as an alternate view of how systems work. In this case, he discusses the unknown as one way to draw the spotlight to a specific player, including ways that players introduce unexpected or unforeseen elements during play.

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