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Saturday, September 29, 2012

Sound and Fury

RPG

On May 16, 2012 Mel Beckman wrote a piece in iProDeveloper called "Is RPG Dead?" where he argued that it was. Readers of this blog will recall that it caused a huge firestorm within our community to the point that many were calling for Mel's head on a platter.

I was as shocked as the next RPG programmer that the language was dead, but all of the vociferous reactions left me cold. What was needed, I thought, were cooler heads and reasoned rebuttal; During this period a line from Macbeth, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", kept running through my head. One day a little poem came forth. I had originally posted it on Facebook on June 1st and now that the hub-bub has died down I thought I'd post it here:

There is much sound and fury in this tale whose hour upon the stage was spawned by Mel and the walking shadow RPG sits quietly in the mezzanine contemplating the maelstrom of which she is the subject. The poor players on the stage will strut and fret and expel their rage and in the end we all know that they will be heard no more, ultimately signifying nothing.

(Most of phrasing came from Macbeth's long winded response to the news, near the end of the play, that his wife was dead.)

Update 10/6/12

Once all of the initial shouting died down there were some very good posts written that rebutted Mel's assertions. I'd like to mention three of them here:

4 comments:

  1. @Father Joe

    Mel's article caused quite a stir in 400 circles... and I thought a few good rebuttals pieces came out after the fact. RPG may die when people stop using it, not when proclaimed.

    -John Andersen

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True indeed, there have been some very good blogs that rebutted Mel's points rather succinctly. I should have mentioned them in the blog post.

      Delete
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