Is this place still active?

Crezth said:

Anyway my assertion from day 1 has been that nobody likes modding NESes, therefore it cannot be said to be a fun hobby for people. So either something has to change or NES is forever doomed. Pick your poison. Most of this lot have chosen the latter because the former is too hard. Me, I prefer hard alcohol.

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I was involved in this community for a long time in several roles. My favorite was running games. That was also the most difficult. Large complicated games are very hard to run. They are terribly time consuming, players come and go unexpectedly increasing the time required, people complain about rules and content, and the job of producing quality updates is just plain difficult. As I see it NESing failed, first, because good games are hard to run and keep going. Few people have the time to keep it up. I certainly didn't. As players grew older and RL tugged harder at their sleeves, fewer games took life.

The second reason is that many of the smart, creative people who were here couldn't manage to be nice. Personal animosity got the better of folks and brought the house down too many times. Those strident voices fought the wrong battles for the wrong reasons and lost the war.

Lord_Iggy said:

The tone of our discussion here is really, really weird.

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The ripping off of scabs can produce a pain that is quite close to pleasure. But I am enjoying the reprise in spite of the lingering malaise.

The Strategos said:

The downfall of NESing was never caused by some existential failure to come up with a Platonic ideal of NESing because there was never a Platonic ideal with which to begin. The great philosopher of NESing, Wittgenstein, has already given us all the linguistic tools we need on this score.

Let me give a short illustration. When I am asked by a person "would you like to play a game" unless I am so bored that anything will do I would respond "what game do you want to play." I might be perfectly willing to play, say football, but unwilling to play chess. But unless I am unbearably pedantic, I don't try to argue that football is a game but chess is not.

Now say I really want to play football, but we don't have enough people to play. If I really want to play football, I have to build a coalition: Sarah just wants to do something athletic, so while she's would rather play baseball, if everyone else agrees she will play football; Jim will play anything Sarah plays (he is just in for the social club aspect of being around Sarah). Meanwhile Paul would rather play a non-athletic game, so he tries to build his own coalition with the ensuing compromises.

Even at its height, NES never had enough players and mods to give everyone their first choice game, everyone had to make sacrifices and build coalitions to cobble enough willing players and mods. One person preferred fantasy but was willing to play a non-earth/non-fantasy, another wanted 19th century alt-hist but was willing to play 20th century history. One person was only interested in writing stories but could work together with the person who liked "realism" because it gave them a stable setting from which to write stories, another person liked person-to-person competition but could work with the previous two because of the rules and mod allowed his good orders to be competitive with the other person's good story-writing. At some point people would decide that they compromised so much that they lost what made them fun- I quit my fair share of NESes for that reason.

All that to say, I am not sure what making a strict Platonic definition of NESing would accomplish. Maybe one person successfully creates a perfect definition that encompasses everything you enjoy about NESes, congratulations and good luck finding enough people who share your passion to make a great game (No, seriously good luck, I hope that everyone can find something they can enjoy). But I don't see why it is so important to insist that football is a game but not chess (or End of Empires is a REAL NES but LifeNES isn't).

Now if you merely want a mod to place a one sentence intro to their game: "I have designed this game so that people who enjoy writing stories and competing with others will have fun" to establish clear expectations for both mod and player, sure have at it, I support that. But that suggestion doesn't seem to me to be that controversial.

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Great post.

Birdjaguar said:

As I see it NESing failed, first, because good games are hard to run and keep going.

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Yes. So the objective should be to make running good games easier. This is a natural solution to this problem which many of us admit is a valid problem if not the single most-valid problem in the hobby.

Lord of Elves said:

@Crezth, what you propose would necessitate that moderators of certain excluded game types take their games elsewhere, effectively exiled certain types of players from the community. You're just trying to clear the way for your new clique, by your own admission

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This advice applies to everyone's agenda. I have, in fact, laid out a variety of weaponry and maps indicating the location of long-lost tools and destructive technologies that would allow victory by any and all cliquettes reading this thread. I am not part of a clique and have no desire to construct a clique.

Let me try to be more clear about the way I envision the definition problem to connect to the health of the community, which I will define as "the ability to sustain activity," which I will define as discussion, development, deliberation, and deliverance of public interaction exercises that people call NESes. Intuitively we understand what I mean by activity because we've seen it before but that's a far cry from defining it absolutely, which I'll get to in a second.

NES is not big. Even at its biggest, on the order of about 100 individuals, it could only sort of sustain activity. It was "frothy," but not hot; as in, there was a lot of activity but not any sustained energy, with things rising and dying all the time like bubbles in a pot of boiling water - frothy. If NES was a car club, this would be OK because a car club mostly consists of passive activities like appreciating cars and thinking cars are cool. But if NES involves an active hobby, an activity, which is the centerpiece of the entire structure, then you require ongoing activity to avoid dissolution.

Pragmatically speaking, when you're at the low-energy state of an active activity, you have two options: grow membership ("increase froth") or focus intent ("increase heat"). Solution #1 and solution #2 that Strategos provided earlier, you will recognize. Now consider the activity is neither well-defined nor preconceived so that option #1 is a difficult aim in itself to achieve. So you need to leverage the limited resources that are used up in the activity (time and mental energy) more efficiently by greasing the rails and improving their avenues of action. Think of it as a wide-ray beam that you want to focus into a fine laser so that you can cut through steel, or whatever. You need focus and you need direction, elements provided either through great leadership (inherently uncompromising) or strict regulation (uncompromising on whatever compromises comprise it). Theoretically a small organization of hardcore dedicateds could sustain some measure of activity - I guess this describes #nes - but bunkering down feels more surviving than thriving.

Solution #2 as Strategos called it specifically calls on compromise to construct our MO and use that to focus our efforts, but it sort of goes without saying that compromise is generally the worst option. I mean, there's a reason people say compromise sucks and leaves everyone unsatisfied. That goes triple for hobby funtimes where I don't want to play in a NES unless I'm interested in it and in a very specific way. Maybe some people are like Strategos and can play any NES, any time; but most people are certainly not like that, and you can argue the different schools of NESing thought, far from being sympathetic, are actually mutually antagonistic.

So maybe we didn't need to atomize the car club, but the car club already atomized itself because the nature of the activity made it so. The forces splitting us apart, natural forces the result of natural phenomena, were stronger than the forces keeping us together.

Yes. So the objective should be to make running good games easier. This is a natural solution to this problem which many of us admit is a valid problem if not the single most-valid problem in the hobby.

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NESing isn't a printing press. You can't stamp out good updates, or stories, or orders, or diplomacy. There is no easy way to replace hard work. Even if you make a ruleset that automates the crunch, you still have to write the update. There's no magic button. You seem to want a system where we plug in numbers in a spreadsheet and the NES updates itself, regardless of genre. But that'll never work, nor would anyone actually want that.

People don't sit down for roleplaying games together waiting on a spreadsheet to dictate their actions.

Luckymoose said:

NESing isn't a printing press. You can't stamp out good updates, or stories, or orders, or diplomacy. There is no easy way to replace hard work. Even if you make a ruleset that automates the crunch, you still have to write the update. There's no magic button. You seem to want a system where we plug in numbers in a spreadsheet and the NES updates itself, regardless of genre. But that'll never work, nor would anyone actually want that.

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It's pretty common knowledge that stats is where people die. You see it again and again: people (mods) complaining that updating the stats, keeping track of them, and making them persistent and consistent is a lot of work. And it is because it's basically accounting with dozens of interdependent clients, each of whom want something different, and some of whom want things that are mutually incompatible. You'll notice that SysNES2 and BirdNES showed that stats could be automated. This didn't really restrict the potential of the players to weave interesting narratives because the function of stats is not to dictate outcomes but facilitate decision-making. This is why the ultimate task in any NES is not to weave narratives nor is it to automate stats but to reconcile players' orders with each other and the game world.

In a theoretical "pure narrative" NES, all that would matter is the story be as interesting and engaging as possible. Orders nor stats nor even what the players want is important as the end goal is, well, a book. And books typically have a single author, you know, because that's the best way to consolidate vision. Because people disagree and at the end of the day some people have to be told to go away. This fact casts serious doubts on whether "collective worldbuilding" in and of itself is achievable next to Diplomacy wargame-style "send your orders" stuff.

Now then, it's known that a lot of what our games involve can be mathematically modeled and many of these models are pretty good or at least transparent enough that we can argue about and tinker with the parameters. So if your choices are "economy points," a robust economics simulation, or a mod arbitrarily deciding that the Russian serfdom is a manufacturing superpower because he or she doesn't understand economics, which will you choose?

I mean, if you want to make stuff up, okay, that's fine, but don't act like you're doing high art in the process. You can make fun of spreadsheets all you want, but any situation where you can imagine the "game" requires lists of "stats" or rules of inference for combining any two different elements, you're talking about data and algorithms. Methods for storing the former have been around since the dawn of time, from clay tablets to Microsoft Excel; and methods of utilizing the latter have never been more widely available or easier to learn and implement.

1. Never had trouble updating stats compared to actually writing the update.
2. Co-authoring ain't so bad.

I had a pretty automated stat system in which I entered new turn data and my spreadsheet spit out a copy paste for each player and non player by area. When the orders were well done, stats were 10-20 minutes per player with most of the time spent reading the orders and making notes for the update. It was all the rest that consumed me. I spent about an hour per nation writing an update. For 30 players that was about 30 hours of time. It was great fun. Until it wasn't.

Luckymoose said:

1. Never had trouble updating stats compared to actually writing the update.
2. Co-authoring ain't so bad.

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So let's dissect what goes into making writing an update difficult and put the lie to (1). I propose that writing an update for the sake of narrative and narrative alone is, in fact, no different from ordinary writing of a short story, blurb, or novel; the "difficulty" here resides solely in the writer herself. On certain days, when inspiration strikes, she can find it a breeze to whip out 10,000 words; but on other days, when she must force herself to write, the task weighs a little more heavily. Every career writer must learn to write without the spark of inspiration if she plans to write reliably and hone her skills. To date, there is no algorithm that can construct a functional novel. Bootstraps, intelligence, and creativity are necessary.

However, when you don't put any genuine effort into your work, or when you are content to take half-assed measures and shortcuts, you can turn a monumental writing project into something more manageable. It's not my place to pass judgment on the writings of NES but I have, in my time, seen plenty of people write only for the sake of writing (myself included), whether it be writing stories or Getting That Update Out, and honestly this is only difficult because there is no passion in such writing. It is filler, window dressing, stuffing. It's strictly unnecessary and generally unwanted, as much as people pretend to appreciate 15,000 words of purple prose that they Ctrl+F for their map color's name through.

In fact, as I have argued, the true substance of the update is not in the narrative it purports to deliver but the information it communicates to the players. That's why an update in Diplomacy and an update in EoE fulfill the same function. Usually, an update is explaining what changed in the stats, and at the end of the day that's what it boils down to (you know, something like [England: +3 boats, -2 soldiers, +1 gold pieces]). The rest of the information an update provides - the status of a cultural movement in the Raxxatai Rashakrai, or the approximate stopping point of Napoleon IV's offensive into Cyber-Russia, or whatever - is also meant to tell the players something about what's going on in the world. The importance of narrative in the whole ordeal is a projection by players in much the same way that pretending your AI opponents in Civilization V are "up to something" in order to get your juices pumping for crushing them in whatever way you deem fit. The advantage NESing confers over Civilization is interactions between human players, additional opportunities for sharing fluff and diversion, and a heuristic player-led variation of depth and detail.

If it was really all about the narrative, you could abandon all pretenses to gameplay and just start storyboarding things together. In fact, that'd probably be the best way to go. But pretty much from day 1 NESes have been about painting your color on the map, and what we call "narrative," or the setting of the game, or all that jazz, is merely an ad-hoc justification of why blue is here and red is there. And that's OK, I'm totally fine with that! But if we keep lying to ourselves, pretending that we're writing books when what we're really doing is playing games, then we won't ever take the steps necessary to improve the latter as submerged as we are in the former. And this is not a sustainable state of affairs as the ruins of this forum stand testament to.

So maybe being a co-author is good but player/moderator is hardly an equal partnership and it's probably impossible to write a coherent narrative through cloud computing.

Crezth said:

It's strictly unnecessary and generally unwanted, as much as people pretend to appreciate 15,000 words of purple prose that they Ctrl+F for their map color's name through.

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That's unreasonably cynical, dude.

So, he's saying two things:

1. NESers should stop applying themselves and half-ass everything to cut down the work.
2. NESers never cared about the narrative and only about painting the map and seeing stat changes.

If that's the NESing he wants, he can keep it. It isn't the one I fell in love with.

ChiefDesigner said:

That's unreasonably cynical, dude.

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Hey man, warn me before you're going to bust into this thread blasting dual barrels on that there ol' argumentation, I'm only one man.

Luckymoose said:

1. NESers should stop applying themselves and half-ass everything to cut down the work.
2. NESers never cared about the narrative and only about painting the map and seeing stat changes.

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If by "applying themselves" you mean "running themselves head-first over and over at a door with a 'PULL' sign on it in order to open it" then yeah, pretty much.

Painting the map is the most quintessential activity in NESing. Even LifeNES was "paint the evolutionary chart." Once again, I don't find anything wrong with writing stories to inject color and life into these activities, mostly because it's inevitable: story-telling is just a thing people do to rationalize and justify the world. "You rolled a 3, ergo" is an unsatisfying answer to any question; the GM's "art" is weaving that into something that engages the players. Some players like flowery GM's and some players just want to get on with business, it doesn't matter to me but the thing to remember is that the narrative doesn't exist for its own sake, it exists to entertain the players. When you focus on narrative to the exclusion of other elements, you obscure the true machinations at work. This might be intentional because usually the machinations are "moderator fiat" and purely arbitrary. I guess that doesn't matter if the only reason you pulled up a chair was to listen to the mod talk pretty at you, but I think that describes astonishingly few people, even among the supposed "narrativists" (who are all collaborating on a narrative even though only one person has supreme direction and won't share any of it with his collaborators).

Anyway, historically most NESers probably really did only care about the map and stats. Maps are pretty and stats are cool. As much mockery as it got, there was always a line outside the latest project built according to the Amon Savag School of NESing. What you keep calling "NESing" I'm convinced is a bubble you've built around EoE, and that game had like four different maps or something crazy - hella maps is what I'm saying.

"You rolled a 3, ergo" is an unsatisfying answer to any question; the GM's "art" is weaving that into something that engages the players.

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Anyway, historically most NESers probably really did only care about the map and stats.

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No one wants to play Amon Savag's vision of NESing.

Luckymoose said:

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So am I the Kylo Ren to your Luke Skywalker, or the Darth Vader to your Obi-Wan Kenobi?

Luckymoose said:

No one wants to play Amon Savag's vision of NESing.

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Well, they clearly did, and they left when he did. And then there were the people who didn't want to play Amon Savag's vision of NESing, and they also left. Have you guys abandoned the notion of growing the base, or are you going full-on puritanical "hard work will set you free"?

Crezth said:

Well, they clearly did, and they left when he did. And then there were the people who didn't want to play Amon Savag's vision of NESing, and they also left. Have you guys abandoned the notion of growing the base, or are you going full-on puritanical "hard work will set you free"?

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... What?

Crezth said:

Have you guys abandoned the notion of growing the base, or are you going full-on puritanical "hard work will set you free"?

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Are you imagining some growth, or are you just tossing out all the statistics involving community size over the years? We peaked around sixty active, a few times, and never broke out. We're niche, and always will be. Trying to alienate the people who discovered the niche (and fabricating some Amon Savag love affair) won't get you any growth.

Luckymoose said:

We're niche, and always will be.

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I'll take that as a "yes", then.

Crezth said:

"hard work will set you free"?

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Again... WHAT?

Just leave him alone. Engaging him further isn't going to accomplish anything productive.

thomas.berubeg said:

Again... WHAT?

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First of all, congratulations on not participating in this discussion at all except to snipe at bits and pieces of my posts. You haven't been the only person doing this so it's not fair to focus on you, but fairness is for communists and this ain't Bernie Sanders' USSA.

I was referring to the weird fetishistic appreciation for "hard work" that keeps cropping up in absence of any kind of cerebral activity whatsoever. What are all the solutions to all of NESing's problems? Just work harder! OK, nobody actually wants to do this work, and that's why NES's only activity these days is unfinished timelines and tumbleweeds rolling about, but that's surely what we need. Frankly, nobody even seems to want to admit they have a problem, or have ever had a problem! I mean it got kind of hard to ignore when the community completely dissolved a little over a year ago, but even now we have people saying "We don't need to change anything about the way we're doing things, everything is fine!" in the only active thread in this subforum!

Thlayli said:

Just leave him alone. Engaging him further isn't going to accomplish anything productive.

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Whatever, bro. I'm not the one who keeps trying to armchair-therapist his way out of a discussion he's clearly lost his grasp on. I'll just take my Morpheus glasses and go. Here's something that should ease the aftertaste:

Masada said:

The forums are now active again, how's about someone starts one of the many games that are supposed to be in the cards?

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Lord of Elves is running a game reminiscent of an Imago NES on IOT right now, I'm having quite a bit of fun plotting in it!

You should check it out!

Love,

-#nes's one black friend

IGGY IS BLACK?