Real life power gamers

From: ANDOVER_at_delphi.com
Date: Sat, 02 Mar 1996 22:46:36 -0500 (EST)


As soomeone whose experience has led me to meet more famous people than most of you on this list, I think that a very high percentage of successful people are minimaxing powergamers about the things they care about. They focus their attention continually on one thing. That is, Jimmy Hendrix hardly spent 10 minutes without a guitar in his hand, Ed Koch barely spent 10 minutes on anything but politics, Donald Trump sees everything as a game with money and fame as the goal, and so on. Very few people have the single-mindedness that a majority of famous people have. So if players in your game are genuinely playing someone who wants to be a ruler, or a great religious leader, or the savior of the tribe, or a great warrior, the fact that their characters are not very complex does not mean that they are not properly role-playing them. I have met some rich and famous entertainers, politicians, intellectuals and businessmen who are very complex, but, in fact, most of them are rather more simple (I do NOT mean stupid) than most people. The character of Manuel in that wonderful novel by James Branch Cabell, Figures of Earth, is a close approximation of that of many successful politicians. Remember what Francois Mitterand said was the requirement of a successful leader: "indifference." Jim Chapin

End of Glorantha Digest V2 #418


WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html

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