This is a really useful essay. One thing I think might be missing in the ideas expresed above (though this doesn’t invalidate them) is the role of power. Defining a genre is a way of privileging a certain way of interpreting texts. This can be a problem because:
1) People want this power. It creates coherent communities without the organic fussiness inherent in gradual, face to face practice.
2) The idea that a genre is a subjective exercise of power (or, dare I say it, “power/knowledge”) reveals its arbitary nature.
3) #2 subverts #1.
Nobody likes being told that as cool as their particular bag seems, it’s still the result of arbitary statements designed to support a power structure. This is always true, too. Attempts to protect your power either lead to some form of intellectual dishonesty or some kind of openly arbitrary refusal to engage anything outside of the model. Big Model adherents were doing the former and now they do the latter. Plus, of course, people don;t want to believe that there’s a corcive element in forming communities, because people want to be nice.
Power really is “the elephant in the room” in any thinking about RPGs and why you can’t really dismiss an “anarchist” (or un-scare-quotey anarchist) critique. The natural defensive reaction is to accuse any such critique of nihilsm, but that doesn’t work either because the anarchist perspective is about the degree to which any game supports a functional community in exchange for the coercion inherent in agendas and genres.
To my mind this is really the central question of RPGs. What’s the payoff for imposing certain frameworks? How broadly applicable is the answer? For example, I can’t really justify running Exalted anymore because the whole model of discourse inherent to the game is just too big a pain in the ass. I can engage in intertextual play with the game and get some cool things out of it, but I’m not gonna run it again.
A big challenge that arises from this and that applies to genre is, “To what extent are you prepared to accept critiques?” As you can see, critiques are natural. Regarding them as crazy aberrations arising from bad design just means that critics either act like assholes (because there’s no reward for intellectual honesty) of end up with a forced, artificial playstyle (because the game or GMing will only support X). Any exploration of genre has to accept defiance and deviation as a normal thing.
I like what you’ve done. You’ve given the Big Model a sensible context and opened the door to a more varied set of models. But here’s the thing: It doesn’t change points 1, 2 and 3, which still loom large in the community. Until key members admit that there’s a little bullshit going on to keep people chatting on t3h Internets, I don’t see how practice will proceed from your rather admirable set of ideas.
One b in Robins.