Why collaborative storytelling is a meaningless phrase

[Max_Killjoy]

I mean, in general, if you define the word to only mean what you want it to mean and not what anyone else uses it to mean, of course it won't be applicable to describe what they use it to mean. But that's no more the point than if I decided that because "Fast" means "Rapid", no-one can use it to mean "Immobile" (as in "Held fast"), it wouldn't be applicable to describe things which are immobile. But people do use it to mean that, so it is applicable in those cases. Similarly, whether you like it or not, "Story" has a meaning that you may not be familiar with but a lot of people clearly are. So does "Role playing" and "Collaborative" and all the other words you're claiming can only be used in one specific meaning. You can certainly insist that we're wrong to apply it in those cases, but you come off as a prescriptivist with a point to prove.

Nope.

From a purely descriptivist point of view, the term "collaborative storytelling" does not describe what some/many gamers are doing.

At a very technical level it can be broadly applicable to playing RPGS if one pedantically breaks it down to the component words and applies the broadest possible meaning of each individual word, and then assumes that the actual term being discussed is applicable in that manner. But at that point it doesn't tell you anything about why, how, or what -- it has become a fluffword, without any actual meat.

Furthermore, we've already covered in detail how the term is loaded down with immense amounts of baggage from past contentious debates internal to the RPG community that it will never be free of (see, history of The Forge, etc) -- and how it is easily confused with specific types of games that overlap with, or are similar to, RPGs ("storytelling games", "storygames", etc).


Some gamers are sitting down to actually collaborate in telling of a story -- that is their intent, and that is what they are actively doing. More power to them... the more gamers gaming, the more types of games available, the more types of campaigns going on, and the more fun being had playing games, the better.

But there are plenty of other gamers who are not sitting down at the gaming table to tell a story, and definitely not collaborating to do so.


All of this has been covered in the thread already, you're just repeating arguments that others have already made more than once, and you're getting responses that have already been given more than once. Your position has already been refuted repeatedly. The discussion has long since passed by the points you want to assert.