Weekly Review October 7th to October 13th

This week has seen further activity in RPG theory, including yet another RPG theory related forum, Story 'Prov.

Jeepform Versus Larp

Emily Care Boss continues her discussions on jeepform, a story centered form of play developed among the Nordic RPG communities. Specifically she contrasts jeepform with larp, another major focus of Nordic RPG theory. She describes how while both are theatrical, larp is a distributed experience and jeepform keeps the players and their story unified.

Hierarchies of Control

John Kim sums up recent discussion about the social context of the GM. He then continues by describing the interaction of hierarchical structures of authority in games and how its presence delineates creative control, and sometimes its absence can lead to other forms of dominance.

Evolving Rulesets

Chris Chinn describes one effect of the RPG supplement process, namely giving RPGs rule which change over time. He suggests that this tends to form distinct sub-communities, as different changes are accepted or rejected by a given social group, unlike similar effects within CCGs and MMORPGs. He also suggests that looking at those other games may provide an insight to better use evolving rules.

Supporting Play

Over at Story Games, Mike Holmes examines the question of how game theory and related approaches can be used to understand the claim that a RPG design supports a specified kind of play. He suggests that to address this question it is first necessary to delve deeper than simply removing what gets in the way, and further to evaluate how much the intentions of the players may matter versus the influence of the system.