Notes on Board Games

..and I like people more than computers

Yeah, we are polar opposites there.

1) Acknowledged that you have thoughts about Jonathan having had thoughts about thoughts. I take it in good faith that you do not believe that this is where epistemology ends generally, but that in this case, you'd simply like to end this discussion with a win in your favor, and thus would like it all to end now. Got it.

2) However, if above is to be taken seriously, what you'd really like is a big game manual to cover all the other game manuals so that we can stop all of this jibber jabbering about anyone's intent, and thus the science of real pragmatic thinking was born, right here in this forum, and no one ever had to waste their time again.

3) Jonathan did not rip open the "Board games and Masculinity" wound. I sensed that he was deliberately and carefully steering clear of it. He mentioned violence as an assumed principle in board games, which is one of many threads we could have pulled on and discussed. Instead, someone felt threatened and pulled the super-insecure "yeah but men's rights tho" thing, apropos of exactly nothing in the above article, except that someone didn't know where they stood in the more-complex-than-average writing and then clutched their balls and started crying.

4) You know you can do all the ball-clutching at the other site you want, no problem, right? It's pretty much just that, at this point. If you left the other site ten years ago because it was a bunch of Eurofied fun killers, I'm here to tell you it's safe to go back. It's just pretty much men being insecure about their mounds of plastic and their masculinity there. It's the reason why there's a new batch of writers and players at TWBG now. We got tired of swimming upstream through that shit.

5) To be clear, in anticipation of your argument, no one needs to be protected from swimming upstream through shit. It's simply necessary to avoid those places and to be minimally cleanly.

6) I left an email to this effect to some the writers and editors who have participated in this forum, but I haven't received an answer, so I'll put it here. Dumping on an author's article when you're part of the infrastructure of the site's editorial team is not cool. If you don't like an article you're editing, before you publish an article is the time to bring it up, not after. It's certainly not cool to dump a bucket of chum into the water in the forum and let the sharks do the editing for you.

Who was this directed at? I'm pretty sure the last point was for Jackwraith, but I'm completely unclear on the rest. Trying to follow what you're saying.

I don't think this place needs to be particularly harshly vetted or professional. I like it being a public forum where people shout at each other with varying degrees of articulation.

I can't tell if Thirstyman's post is a troll I don't understand or just weirdly off topic. So for now it's staying. The discussion has been about the content so far and not overly hostile so I haven't had to moderate anything, please continue to keep it focused on content discussion and try to tamp down personal hostilities.

Jonathan, just as an aside, definitely do not confuse the people who post in the comments or the discussion board for the readership of the front page, or even representative of the readership of the front page.

Very cool to see moderators pat the author on the back while simultaneously going after anyone who didn't like the piece.

I've written for a lot of websites, but this is the first time I've ever seen anyone say that the reader needs to create the actual content and bring it to the writer for their approval. Comment sections are supposed to be about the article above, not writing their next piece for them. Attempts at continuing the conversation have been ignored in favor of defending the piece against criticism and using minority groups (that the writer isn't a part of, I'll add) as a shield. The fact that something as simple as "I don't like thing" generated this response is absurd.

oops mis-edit lol

-Frohike

It is deeply ironic to watch the TWBG "staff" demand a respect for "authority" that got Michael Barnes kicked off of BoardGameGeek in the first place.

boardgamegeek.com/thread/156320/banning-michael-barnes

I specifically asked you to explain how "Chess is the YASSSS Queen of the ancient world."

Great non-response.

LOL imagine posting that on Reddit.

Uba, thanks for writing that. I didn't really "get" this article, but walking us through it got me a little closer.