Ron thinks old school gamers are damaged, drawing a parallel with victims of childhood sexual molestation.
I wish Ron wouldn't pussyfoot around like that, worrying about offending people, and would tell us how he really feels, man!
At least one fellow Forgie got really peeved at this.
Me, I don't know nothin' from nothin', as my grampa used to say. But I really enjoyed Piers Brown's response, the part where he suggested that the messed up stuff you find in RPGs is maybe something symptomatic of the whole culture -- I don't think this was the point he was trying to make, but I think that in an essentially scientific culture we tend to think of the world as a machine, whose parts we can understand and reduce to formulas, often ones on a high level of abstraction. The notion of RPGs as physics engines feeds into this World Machine view. I think it's an easy trap to fall into, especially for people with a theoretical bent.
Ron is talking about finding gamers especially stupid at grokking stories at stories, though. I've got no comment on that one way or the other, except to say that one could read the entirety of the Knights of the Dinner Table series as an extended example of the tragedy of that particular deficiency. And yet for all that I enjoy the hell out of KODT. :)
UPDATE: reading further, I realize that what I just said has nothing to do with his post. C'est la vie. He's not even talking about gamers in general, just "Storytelling" gamers, from a particular generation that I may or may not fall into. Not sure.
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I agree with Ron's post for the most part. I just wish:
A) It didn't start as a defense of Sorcerer mechanics in another thread. It makes the whole thing seem waaaaaay too defensive. A few posters rightly pointed out that Sorcerer is rather poorly written in spots, which could explain some of the confusion. That's not a real argument against Ron's actual point, but it's just too easy a target.
I mean, which sounds more likely: "The writing in Sorcerer is unclear," or "You don't get it because you're damaged!" Yeesh. Just because he's probably right doesn't make that any less crazy-sounding.
B) It would do one lick of good. The so-called "damaged" will gain nothing from a post like that. I'm not really sure who it's supposed to be for.
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