> As I see it, the ideology comes in when people start arguing that a
> good game must, necessarily, be either purely narrativist or purely
> simulationist (or purely gamist, in case of things like D&D). The idea
> seems to be that there are specific pigeon-holes into which things
> must fit, and that if they don't fit neatly into one of those holes,
> then they are "incoherent" or somehow ideologically impure. Thus, HQ1
> cannot possibly be a good game, because it's beautiful balance of narr
> and sim elements does not fit neatly within the pure ideological
> framework. It's those sort of ideas that, quite frankly, piss me off.
My complaints about HQ1 have little to do with ideology. I think that
many of its mechanics (especially the magic system), although
innovative and interesting, were tacked on to Robin's core mechanics.
Mark Galeotti did a fantastic job tackling many of these problems with
Mythic Russia, but in the end we decided to ask Robin to write
HeroQuest the way he thought it ought to be written. As I said before,
we are very excited about the new HeroQuest rules and should have some
good news about its release soon.
Jeff