Putting Things in Context - RPG bloggers vs. the Cambridge School intellectual historians
Little says more about the soul of America than the fact that one of its greatest painters was briefly an anarcho-McCarthyist Sometime towards the beginning of the year, I came across an interesting counterpoint to some of the reconsiderations of lore and its functions that bloggers had been posting about in an anonymous blog comment. It was a little more elaborate (and a lot more insulting) but the heart of the argument went something like this: things like conventional gazetteers are useful for providing the same contextualizing depth that historians rely upon when studying or writing, without this you can't have a truly grounded world of play. The actual argument being made is not interesting imo - it's already been dealt with by Sandro's post above . What makes this idea worth exploring to me is that historians themselves are often unclear or weird or both about what they mean when they say "historical context." Maybe even unclear or weird in ways that so...