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Entry tags:	blog-a-day, new genres, roleplay-insight.com

Beware the treachery of words, Missus Sparrow....

"Beware the treachery of words, Mrs. Sparrow. They mean one thing to one person and the opposite to another" (p. 297), Ahab's Wife or The Star-Gazer: A Novel

Welcome to the 50th installment of my blog-a-day attempt. Quite a milestone to me; I really didn't think I had it in me. Time will tell; let's discuss this again when I reach 100!

I believe I am finally coming to a comfortable conclusion where I stand on jargon and terminology. Years ago, I started with the idea that anything can be described with simple, concise words. I imagined that a simple cant would open up the whole world of role-playing game theory and design to me.

How foolish!

I ran smack into synecdoche, misunderstandings and especially flame-wars. In my innocence, I really couldn't understand what the fights were about, but as everyone was doing it, I tried it too. And got carried away.

Later, I realized there was some problem with using jargon, so I stood against its use. Still learning, I was. Without some kind of special language, certain things cannot be discussed. It would be unwieldy to reconstruct a concept every time you want to discuss it. You can look down my blog and see some of this too.

Over the last few days a number of things occurred that clarified what I was feeling. It began a ways back with the early discussion of using genre theory to discuss variations in role-playing game paradigms. The two main points I bring from that is that a genre is a social construct and when challenged with specificity, it is defined by the social leader or 'alpha' as well as the idea that the word genre was something we each understood differently, but in most discourse we use it similarly enough that it's unnoticeable.

More recently, Moyra Turkington gave me something to really think about. She didn't so much as say how this blurry argot could be used effectively, but instead presented a very clear example. She had no interest in defining the word 'art' in terms of RPGs-as-art, but she did want to suggest what people might bring to a game that was to be treated as if it were art.

What I believe is that I can accept jargon and lingo and slang and terminology when used in this kind of context. So rather than asking, "What is role-playing gaming?" I should ask, "What is EXAMPLE if you approach it like it was a role-playing game?" This turns an argument over the exact sense of terminology into a framework for comparison of beliefs.

That's what I want.

F