Weekly Review July 22nd to July 28th

This week has seen discussion of the relationship of system and setting, as well as investigation of some boundaries of RPGs.

The Solo Fringe

Fang Langford describes some activities bordering on RPGs, but lacking the social component. Starting with social bluffing and other confidence artist type situations, he extends these to more social RPG-like activities, such as alternate reality games. Similarly he considers model building activities, such as model railroad as other ways of generating imagined spaces, shared or otherwise.

System and Setting

Over at RPGnet and Gamecraft are discussions of system and setting (and to a lesser extent, genre). The former surveys designers about how they approach system versus setting design. The later deals with focused design versus more generic views of system, culminating in attempts to describe how well a system fits a setting or genre.