stepnix | Research but no conclusions

For the past few days I've been tracing a few threads of recurring TTRPG discourse to their source. kind of. I'm still not really closer to finding out how these conversations got started, but I have put names and usernames to the figures who were the most vocal (and, from my perspective, did the most damage) and gained a new awareness of how... avoidable it was?

For clarity this isn't about like, racism in big names TTRPGs, that would be much easier, it's a relatively esoteric design priority debate. Extra tricky to talk about because I don't actually want to restart the arguments in question, so just, keep that in mind.

I'm seeing now how ideas that I previously thought of as just ambient Popular Discourse Topics were really extending outwards from a relatively stable core group of theorists. People weren't independently coming to similar conclusions, they actively knew each other and worked with each other and developed this shared understanding between themselves. And now that the center of that is gone (or at least off of Twitter), the arguments are just... fighting shadows, echoes of the originals.

There's a couple games that I thought of pretty highly, that I'll think about a little differently now. I see other "wires" too, more connections between ideas that have hopped from blog to blog or tweet to tweet. i have gained wisdom but at what cost etc. etc.

the end, no moral