Thorvald of Lym
A Little Sketchy
Think of Joe, and he will come. 
Remember, I ran IV; I know spam better than most.
In retrospect, my references to 'roleplay' and 'storytelling' are probably the wrong choice of words; Sonereal is closer to the mark when he talks about 'world building'. What I was thinking of was how all the diplomacy was 'open-ended', in the sense that roleplay and policy were blended together in a casual way. Back then, we didn't write pages and pages of expository interludes; they were short little things like out of a newspaper, current affairs, not written like a history text. For sure, it still exists in some way, even if the I&B series adopted the NES approach of veritable book excerpts 
p), but with a shift toward more mechanically-oriented games, I've found that a) there's a perceptible divide between "orders" and "speech", and b) the roleplay tends to favour embellishing the budget, and only covers intangible topics if there's time/a monetary incentive to do so. There's no room to grab a thread and weave an adventure out of it unless it offers a statistical reward. That Rouge Army/First Shadow hot potato from IOT3 would be unthinkable today.
Now, when I'm talking about co-operation, I don't mean everyone was playing as peaceniks, obviously; IV, as you said, was cut-throat from the get-go. But with the exception of the Usual Suspects, there was a mutual respect amongst the base that seems to have evaporated, at least in the recent games I've played. Remember, pre-IV, all orders were public, even the invasions; we trusted each other; there was a sense of camaraderie that tempered the in-game disputes. Nowadays some of the stuff is just so ugly, particularly OOC; if you have some free time and belief in human dignity to kill, read over the spats between Ailedhoo and Patriotic_Fool in The Space Race.
I guess what's frustrating me more than anything else isn't the shift in the style of game, but the sort of people who end up playing it. To adapt that lovely quotation from Chapterhouse: Dune, "Combat attracts pathological play styles. It is not that combat corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such players have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."
Remember, I ran IV; I know spam better than most.
In retrospect, my references to 'roleplay' and 'storytelling' are probably the wrong choice of words; Sonereal is closer to the mark when he talks about 'world building'. What I was thinking of was how all the diplomacy was 'open-ended', in the sense that roleplay and policy were blended together in a casual way. Back then, we didn't write pages and pages of expository interludes; they were short little things like out of a newspaper, current affairs, not written like a history text. For sure, it still exists in some way, even if the I&B series adopted the NES approach of veritable book excerpts p), but with a shift toward more mechanically-oriented games, I've found that a) there's a perceptible divide between "orders" and "speech", and b) the roleplay tends to favour embellishing the budget, and only covers intangible topics if there's time/a monetary incentive to do so. There's no room to grab a thread and weave an adventure out of it unless it offers a statistical reward. That Rouge Army/First Shadow hot potato from IOT3 would be unthinkable today.Now, when I'm talking about co-operation, I don't mean everyone was playing as peaceniks, obviously; IV, as you said, was cut-throat from the get-go. But with the exception of the Usual Suspects, there was a mutual respect amongst the base that seems to have evaporated, at least in the recent games I've played. Remember, pre-IV, all orders were public, even the invasions; we trusted each other; there was a sense of camaraderie that tempered the in-game disputes. Nowadays some of the stuff is just so ugly, particularly OOC; if you have some free time and belief in human dignity to kill, read over the spats between Ailedhoo and Patriotic_Fool in The Space Race.
I guess what's frustrating me more than anything else isn't the shift in the style of game, but the sort of people who end up playing it. To adapt that lovely quotation from Chapterhouse: Dune, "Combat attracts pathological play styles. It is not that combat corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such players have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."
