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"Gygaxian Scientasy " Topic


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Tango0130 Jul 2018 9:32 p.m. PST

"I have a lot of affection for a phenomenon which I am here going to call "Gygaxian Scientasy", or "scientasy" for short. (Terms which I would have preferred – "scientism", "scientificism", "scienciness" and so on – are all taken as words used to describe the application of scientific language and dogma in non-scientific domains like the humanities or social sciences to bestow a veneer of false truthiness. "Scientasy", which is something slightly different, will have to do for my purposes.)

Scientasy is the mixing of the scientific and the fantastical – or, perhaps put more accurately, the handling of fantastical things in a non-expressionistic, quasi-positivist way. In Gygax's D&D, while there are magic, different planes and other worlds, monsters, alignments and so on, there is also a sense in which those fantastical elements are the subject of academic and pseudoscientific inquiry within the fiction itself. (Making Gygaxian Scientasy something a little different from the problem of banalifying systematization I have written about before, which is very much a case of nerds imposing order on the supernatural in order to make it into something usable in a game.) There are sages who study the world. And, moreover, there is a world for them to discover: there is an objective reality to all of this fantastical stuff – it is empirically verifiable that there are inner planes, that there is something called alignment and there are 9 varieties of it and it actually affects things, that there are deities and they have different "spheres", that there are different categories of magic, and so on. Despite its weirdness and wonder, Gygax's D&D is ultimately a positivist's universe. If you tried hard enough, thought hard enough, studied hard enough, investigated hard enough – you could actually understand how it all Works…"
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Bowman31 Jul 2018 4:42 a.m. PST

From the link:

Propounding my half-baked ideas on role playing games

A very accurate self assessment of his writings, I believe.

Personal logo 20thmaine Supporting Member of TMP31 Jul 2018 5:06 a.m. PST

Gygaxian Scientasy = Science Fantasy (an already recognised sub-genre of SF and Fantasy).

Think Barsoom, or Lin Carter's Barsoom inspired Science Fantasies. Or his Thongor books.

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