From: jtn@nutter.cs.vt.edu (Terry Nutter)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: A Little of Everything
Date: 23 Jan 93 21:08:54 GMT
Followup-To: rec.org.sca
Organization: The Rialto

Greetings, all, from Angharad ver' Rhuawn.  Justin recently posted,
summarizing me and commenting,

>                                              -- that, for many people,
>the more you know, the less fun events can seem, since the seams
>become more visible.
>
[ Very nice magic show analogy deleted for bandwidth; starts with being
  fooled by it all, goes to unmasking things when you see through, then
  finally comes around to trying to make it work for others. ]
>
>Frankly, the third stage is the most fun, in many ways. Yes, you can
>see the seams. But if you hang around the kids enough, and let yourself
>see through their eyes and enthusiasm, you can still see a little of
>the old magic. Convincing people to accept the new tricks can take a
>little work, but if you really manage to improve the act, people
>will flock to your show...

Absolutely true; and I think this is one of the approaches that many
of the people who long wistfully for their magic take to try to bring
it back.  (Cariadoc comes strikingly to mind.) 

Justin goes on,

>I will say this, though -- I am more and more convinced by Graydon's
>SCA-as-framework argument (that the SCA isn't so much a recreation
>organization, as an organization within which you can recreate). It's
>inherently a more flexible paradigm, and I am increasingly sure that
>experimentation and change *is* good for the Society. Carolingia
>today is experimenting with how the game is played more than ever
>before in my experience, and it's making life a *hell* of a lot more
>ineteresting and fun. Now, the question is: what are the ramifications
>of this "framework" viewpoint?

Depends how you take it.  If you take it very strictly -- that we are
here to let individuals on their own learn things, and our events should
stay the way they are, as essentially costumed social gatherings -- then
it effectively drives out everyone for whom the heart of what they want
to do is feel like they are somewhere and somewhen else.

But I think there is an alternative, and that is, to allow for diversity
_in the kinds of events we do_, and not just in who does what when and
where else.  We will always, I suspect, have a majority of events in
the current style, if only because they are both the easiest to run and
the easiest to participate in.  Also, they are what many of our people
want.  But I don't see any reason to have them as the _only_ kinds of
events we do.  Heaven knows, most kingdom calendars are crowded, and
at least in Atlantia, we see some fairly amazing attempts to get an event
to look even a _little_ different from the other three that weekend.

It seems to me that there should be room for experimentation with events,
to discover what other formats we might also like to include -- and the
key words here are "also" and "include": not to replace anything with,
but to add.  Some of these might be more "recreative" in flavor; there
are already a sprinkling of narrow-theme events, and Charles the Clerk
suggested a "medium-focus" notion I'd like to see someone play with.

There should be room for all of us, and places we can all go to recharge
against burnout -- whether we find that in the most narrow recreative
environments or in the widest, most "modern-costume-party" ones.  I also
think that having _different_ rooms available would help with this: we
come in too many varieties for a "one-size-fits-all" approach to event
design to include all of us in any meaningful sense.  Surely some of the
ideas we will play with will probably turn out to have been bad ones;
it isn't an experiment unless it can fail.  But in the long run, a few
failures will probably be more than offset by the successes we have
every reason to hope for, based on past experiments.

Cheers,

-- Angharad/Terry