“If this isn’t the most brilliant thing ever said about playing role-playing games, I’ll eat my shoe.” Clinton comments on Rebecca Borgstrom’s paper, “Structure and Meaning in Roleplaying Game Design”.
I just read it last night, and I recommend it. Some long words, yeah, but actually well-paced and (to me) clear. Let me quote the part that got CRN so excited:
This paper views gaming as a computational process.
Gaming is work, in the sense of effort over time. That work takes the form of processing the raw data—-the set of possible stories applicable to the story’s premise. The players generate additional structure until a single story remains.
Structure is stuff that whittles down the possible stories down to the one that the players end up telling.
I also appreciated reading about her Fair Folk book, and seeing how the in-game structure of the surreal faerie world was to some extent a justification of making those metagame structural problems amongst players now explicit, and under the domain of the rules.