Posting on The Forge

I recently posted to The Forge about Stone, Steel, and Steam. The Forge is the forum for indie RPG development and game theory, and it is vastly intimidating to post there, because for these people, game theory and design is serious business.

I've lurked the community off and on over the past several years, enough to know that I don't really belong. I feel like a reasonably bright elementary school kid that really likes animals and wants to be a zoologist when I grow up, wandering into a conference of university zoology professors discussing the mitochondrial RNA of annelids. So, when confronted with all these great and important scholars, operating on insufficient sleep and my brain still wrung dry from squeezing out the new draft of SSS on deadline, I couched the post in terms I hoped would let the community know this game addresses Serious Issues and deals with Complex Problems, and made an idiot of myself.

In my post I proclaimed myself a 'Narrativist' and the thread quickly became an argument about how the game elements worked "in terms of 'Story Now' play". Ron Edwards - the Ron Edwards, creator of GNS theory and co-founder of The Forge - entered the fray. It's like I posted up a screenplay and Jared Hess commented on it. I was literally dizzy from my first brush with Wikipedian notability. (Actually, Jared Hess was my Intro to Film TA at BYU, but he wasn't notable at the time, so it doesn't count.)

Anyway, it seems I've massively misunderstood some of the terms of GNS theory. I came across it sometime earlier in the decade, before I was seriously considering design. I know that the theory has moved on to a new version. I'm not sure if I fully understood the old version and the community moved forward and I didn't, or if I never understood the old theory at all. Either way, the terms are now stuck in my head and I have a working theory that uses the same terms, but all wrong by indie community standards.

I'm an amateur, but I'm not indie. And while the humanities major part of me does care about the layers and levels of philosophical constructs that make up role-playing games, the greater part of me would rather shut up and play. I challenge the conventions of the genre: the elves, the dwarves, the classes, the levels; but I'm not interested in questioning the conventions of the medium: the gamemaster, the dice, and the character sheets. Like Stone, Steel, and Steam, I don't fit into a convenient category.