Sunday, January 14, 2007

Weekly Review Jan. 7th to Jan. 13th

This week has seen several new developments in RPG theory, from whole cloth theory to a new podcast for learning RPG theory.

Derivative Works

John Kim describes one way in which RPGs can become derivative works from other creative medium. Borrowing from the Gregory Maguire's Wicked, he describes the art of taking a setting from one source of fiction and treating as a reality, thus exposing interesting questions, as yet, unexplored. This was a continuation of Kim's general investigation of derivative works from earlier this week.

Game Development Kit

Over at the Forge is a general description of RPGs, nominally as a design foundation. The Game Development Kit (GDK) attempts to describe RPGs in computable terms and extract out the structure of how players manipulate the game.

Let's Talk About Theory

Clyde Rhoer has begun a podcast meant to introduce people to RPG theory. As he puts it, he intends to get things 90% correct, due to the difficulty and volume of topics in RPG theory. The rest he hopes will be fleshed out by listeners and readers.

2 comments:

Stefan / 1of3 said...

Or to be more specific: "to introduce people to Forgian RPG theory"

Lest he wouldn't talk about GNS.

You should be careful with details like that, unless you want to lower your credibility.

Mendel Schmiedekamp said...

Stefan,

Clyde specifically mentions in his first podcast that he intends to cover other RPG theories after GNS and Big Model.