If We Don't Define the OSR, Ron Edwards Will

Not only will he define it, but he'll simultaneously claim:
a) it doesn't actually exist
and
b) inasmuch as it does exist, HE was actually the sole architect responsible for its existence.

It sounds fucking cretinous, right?  But there we have it, the King Fuck Swine of all pseudo-intellectual swinery has claimed it, when he briefly crawled out of whatever rock he's been hiding under to give an interview with "runas explosivas" (who interviewed me first, though I'm sure that had nothing to do with his motives), where in this interview he said all kinds of insulting and stupid things. Things like ""Old school" is a marketing term and is neither old nor an identifiable single way to play".  And that absolutely anything good about the OSR is "all the Forge".

And frankly, this unmitigated bullshit is possible because of how Edwards is choosing to define the OSR.  Ron Edwards, at least in what has to do with gaming, has been absolutely wrong, and proven absolutely useless, in every aspect of his intellectual approach to RPGs in his entire life.  His "success" at being the King Swine, and at creating a movement that for a while posed an enormous threat to regular RPGs (and whose ideas even managed to hijack one edition, the least successful and most despised edition, of D&D), is largely due to the fact that he has always been a master at precisely one single thing:  the manipulation of language.

I can claim to have invented the Burrito, if I successfully redefine "burrito" as the mix of olives, chorizo, sharp cheese and potato chips in a lehmeyun wrap, and successfully 'undefine' anything people formerly understood as a "burrito".  That's exactly what Ron Edwards does.  Its standard university training these days of a bullshit pseudo-academic, following the examples of the deconstructionists.   

Shit, don't take my word for it, read the interview. He TAKES PRIDE in how he manipulated language to try to turn around the CENTRAL PURPOSE of RPG play (Immersion) into something utterly irrelevant to his NEW definition of what an "RPG" supposedly does and is about, and even gloats about how he used the equivalent of Linguistic Terrorism to deconstruct the idea of "GM" to the point that the most important power-structure of Regular roleplaying could be effectively neutered (and replaced by the "Genius Game Designer"). 

And this is what he does with the OSR in the interview, in order to take credit for it even as he simultaneously insults the notion that the OSR is anything other than 'marketing'.  He just twists around and reinvents the structure and context of the word so that it means what HE wants it to mean, so that he can actually (absurdly) take credit for a movement that holds Rulings, not Rules as its central motto (and is therefore the antithesis of everything the Forge ever actually stood for, as the cult of Trained and Forge-Certified Genius Designers making Perfect Theory-Based Games that must then never ever be allowed to be "ruined" by Evil Unwashed-masses GMs, who must be stopped at all costs from ever being allowed to act outside of the Designer's Sacred Rules because "SYSTEM MATTERS").

So,  here is your proof, of why it matters that within the OSR we create a set of boundaries, of Landmark-definitions that, at the very least, prevent the hijacking of old-school by the likes of Edwards.  There are times when it is necessary, even vital, to define the OSR; particularly when others are trying to define something as "this is OSR" when it is clearly not (that is, going beyond the landmarks of what old-school design really is) or trying to define something as "this is not OSR" when it clearly is (that is, well within the landmarks of old-school design).

Otherwise, Ron Edwards would be right about the OSR not being anything other than a marketing logo (that, therefore, ANYONE could use for ANYTHING, like he just tried to do).  
But he's not right (and thank Mordenkainen for that; I wouldn't want to live in the universe where he was), because we in the OSR all know when we're seeing something that is OSR, and when we're being bullshitted at.  You can argue within the movement about what is "real" old school or not, but the visceral reaction all old-schoolers would feel when some asshole on rpgnet tries to claim that "FATE run in a dungeon is totally an OSR game" gives proof to the fact that the definition of qualities, of landmarks, exists.   The OSR IS a definable thing, I just reject reactionary small-tent definitions as much as I reject post-modernist 'the OSR is whatever you feel like' definitions that are all too often opportunistic moves on the part of non-old-school designers to try to get more sales for their obviously-not-old-school games by calling those games "OSR".  Or of piece-of-shit pseudo-intellectual architects of failed, disproven 'theories' to try to somehow define their way out their track record of total fuckups.


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