Theory From the Closet

Once upon a time, Zarathustra lived in the woods with a cool religious dude, and things were good. Then Zarathustra had the strange idea that he needed to give man a gift; he left the woods and the cool religious dude, and things got weird.

This Gen Con saw the end of the Forge booth as a place where wild haired designers, who don’t have strong connections to our community, could come and sell their first game at the largest RPG convention in North America, maybe the world.

I place no blame on Ron, or Vincent. Ron has been saying that the Forge will slowly wind down, and eventually come to an end, for years now. It started with jettisoning the more established folks, and this year the less established folks got the George Jettsons.

I wonder though; Is this what we want to see happen? Do new designers need to go back to starting their own booth, or trying to befriend one of the successful cooperatives? Two of those collectives disappeared this year, Pirate Jenny, and Play Collective, and last year we lost the Ashcan Front booth. Maybe Pirate Jenny and Play Collective are due back in the future?

I wonder if our community can survive the attrition of established designers that is due to occur? Or have we done like Punk, and Alternative, and gotten large enough that like minded weirdos formed their own thing, and splitting is just going to happen. The Kumbaya is over, and I go back to being a scene traveler?

This is cut and pasted from a post I made on story-games, anyway….
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I’m planning to do an interview with Vincent Baker on Saturday May 30th 9:30 PM (21:30) eastren, 8:30 central, 01:30 GMT. The plan is to take questions, we’ll be focusing mainly on Creative Agendas (GNS), but there might be some clouds and boxes questions, and perhaps a few other things. I don’t want questions here. I want to hear peoples voices. More about that later, but for now if you are interested you can look for Clyde Rhoer on Facebook, or follow radiofreeclyde on Twitter.

The plan right now is to use Skype. I can’t include a bunch of people as there is no control over who can talk, every person you add seems to increase the editing difficulty tremendously. I’ll announce via twitter and facebook when we’ve started talking, and again when were ready to start taking questions. Questions should be about Creative Agendas as that’s the focus of the show, if this works out perhaps sometime in the future we can talk to Vincent about something else.

Now if I can get it figured out and Vincent is okay with it, I’d prefer to use Talkshoe.com, as that would allow everyone to listen via streaming, and perhaps have more cogent questions.

This isn’t intended to be an argue with Vincent (or Clyde) show, you can do that later on the internet via whatever methods you normally employ, so approach this positively please.

Creative agenda is a lot more complicated than the other theory shows I’ve done. It’s going to be an additional day.

I installed Disqus  for the site today. Disqus turns the comments into something a little more like a forum, but not quite. Think of it as working somewhat like Vincent’s anyway blog,  but with the ability to track what the users say, across other Disqus enabled blogs. It’s fairly easy to start an account,  you can use a sign-in you likely already have, if you are like me and get frustrated by having to record another password.

You can read more here.

I was recently on Stabbing Contest again. I had contacted Ogre because there were some things I wanted to talk about publicly but didn’t feel Theory From the Closet was the appropriate vehicle. We talked about how not letting girls in the group doesn’t always equal misogny, the ethics of podcasts and money, how roleplaying is used as an exclusionary term, and frustration in the creation of a game. I think it was a pretty interesting show.

I recently talked with Ogre from the Stabbing Contest podcast and blathered so much that I have the distinction of having the first show he had to cut in half. We talked about games, punk, and perhaps touched on their crossing a bit. I insulted a good portion of punk rock and perhaps some other people, including myself. We also touched on some dirty words like Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulationism. I enjoyed it and it ran about two and a half hours long. Here’s a link to the post for the first part.

Theory From the closet will be offline for a few days starting November 1st, so I’ve been holding off putting out the new show. The computer this site is on is being switched out for a new computer in a new data center. My host is going through some changes, but the new computer should be faster so it’s worth a few days of inconvenience. As soon as I see that we’re back up I’ll be posting the show with Darren Watts from Hero Games, and we still have Jeff Lower, Ram Hull, Ron Edwards, Vincent Baker, and Jason Walters. After that Gen Con will be officially over. Heh. Then we get back to my lonely monotone.