this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Oh, ok, your article sounded so close I thought it was inspired by it. :) It's a very european thing, mostly developed in Germany and France. I have by blood with it, though. I've always been more interested in analytical philosophy so I didn't like it. Which shouldn't have been a problem, there are many schools of philosophy, right? Except I studied at a university where the philosophy department was specialized in it. Every day I was wondering what I was doing there. :) I actually consider it wasted my university years, so I'm probably not the good person to talk to you about it. 😅 (but your own articles stopped short of talking non-sense like phenomenology does in my opinion, so it was good to read, it's like taking only the good parts of phenomenology ;) ). The main authors, if you want to know more, are Heidegger, Husserl and Sartre. A note of warning though that it's very hard to read (well, at least if you have an analytical mind, I suspect it depends on people personality).
Oh, no, thanks. Actually, not being ready for public consumption is their whole point. :) I used to write (as an amateur) when I was younger, only to be confronted to a wall of indifference at each publication. So I was going back to it, doing my best, putting unreasonable amount of hours to make it likable, and still this indifference - in part because, I realized later, my folks just didn't like reading anyway. But it turned out that trying to please people was a terrible experience. Nobody was having fun, including me. When I started playing my RPGs solo, the reason why I enjoyed it so much was because I put this simple rule : nobody will ever read it. From there, I don't have to ask myself questions like "is it too long?", "is it too short?", "is it properly explained?", "does the pace progress fast enough?", etc. I'm just exploring and enjoying it. :) My oldest campaign (I play three different games) has a word count that would cover at least three novels, and it would be terribly boring to read, because of the slow moving pace, the returns to previous places that break the pace, the long sequences when there is just no narrative arc, the pages and pages of shopping narration, etc. And I don't care, because it's not meant to be read. :) I'm not writing, I'm exploring my imagination, spending just as much time I want where I want, with no regard to what makes an efficient story - or even just legible text, for the matter. It's basically a videogame powered by imagination. :) The day I even consider it may be read, all of that collapses.
Kurt Vonnegut advises doing exactly what you're doing with your RPGs. The end of that lecture touches specifically on it.
I completely understand about keeping that part of your work private. I have done much the same thing for the same reasons with the vast majority of my creations, and you're wise to protect the part of yourself that keeps your imagination flowing.
That being said, should you reach a point where you're ready to share work (RPGs, writing, or just things that inspire you), the magazine is always open to you.
Re: Philosophy - I agree on the difficulty of the writing. I've read some small amount of Sartre (Being and Nothingness), but I remember being frustrated at the density of the arguments, which often seemed an over-articulation of the obvious for the sake of precision - and the entire work felt like a response to work we hadn't covered. In my college classes, it was presented as existentialism (in fact, we went from Descartes to Hume to Sartre), and now, looking at it's place in phenomenology, I feel robbed that the connections to Husserl and Heidegger weren't properly illustrated - the historical context would have helped me finish the book. Looks like I'll have to give it another shot :)
Oh wow, thanks for that video, that was brilliant. :D
Indeed, if you had a teacher who made your class read Being and Nothingness without explaining phenomenology first, it feels like punishment or something. :) Not that Husserl and Heidegger are easier to read, but at least they don't presuppose other readings to be understood. That being said, I kind of get it, existentialism can be seen as its own thing, especially in Sartre's non-philosophy work (he wrote several novels and theater scripts). But not through Being and Nothingness. 😂