Follow Up on Yesterday's Post: The Way I Beat the Forge is How the Right Can Beat the Left at Everything

In yesterday's blog entry, I presented an analysis of something I felt was a basic error the Right (especially the Old Right) was making against the Left on a near-constant basis.  As I expected, it got some interesting comments!

There was a response that I felt warranted a little follow-up today. There was a bit of a misunderstanding that what I was suggesting was debating with the left on their terms. That's actually the opposite of what I was suggesting. That's the sort of thing that the old-time Conservatives would do all the time, and it essentially involves: 

A) accepting the Left's control of the basic assumptions of the conversation

B) writing lengthy, boring, and often mushy-worded half-apologizing justifications filled with compromise to the Leftist paradigm.

The alternative that was suggested in comments is that we "refuse to use the terminology of the left", which is what I had highlighted as the main problem, of just dropping the ball into their hands and walking away. That's not the solution.

The problem is most of the times the old right 'refuses to use the terminology of the left' but never actually OPPOSES the terminology of the left with an alternate terminology.

I if any of you have read Foucault, Derrida etc. -in other words, the enemy- a summary of their basic ideas very plainly lays out the strategy of the modern identity-politics left: the way to power is control of semantics. 
That's always the Left's very first play: create the semantic assumptions and then argue as if those semantic assumptions are true. 

The right's response, like suckers, is usually to say "no it isn't" and then walk away, leaving the Left to appear (in the eyes of the mushy middle) to be the only ones offering an argument. 

What I'm saying is we have to subvert the semantic assumptions and replace them with our own. 

That's the model I used, years ago, to undermine the efforts of the Forge movement to take over RPGs. Everyone else was arguing with them about whether Gamism-Narrativism-Simulationism were correct or accurate. Some people were trying to modify the argument Ron Edwards and company were making. Others just walked away in disgust and hoped the problem would go away, while they gained more ground and influence by being the only game in town trying to control the discussion of what "right RPG design/play" is supposed to be. 
 
Instead, I completely rejected any discussion on those lines and created an entirely alternate language. 

I subverted some of the things the storygame/GNS theory said were BAD things (Immersion, Emulation, and what they considered "incoherent agendas"), and used those as GOOD things (in fact, the goal of RPG gaming). 

I refused to acknowledge G, N or S at all and instead talked about the Landmarks of RPG. 
I said "this defines RPGs, anything that does not fall into that definition is not an RPG, it's something else". Thus, I ended up isolating them over there in a little corner. 
They found they couldn't fight back and the term "Storygames" was eventually THEIR surrender into accepting that what they were doing was NOT in fact "the right way to do RPGs" as Ron Edwards had claimed. 

And what I'm saying now is that we need to use that tactic with the left on EVERYTHING.


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