This is something I'd started typing up in response to something someone said over on Menewsha in the thread about WTF RPG. I realized after my reply started getting into the "several paragraphs" route that it might be more interesting to have the discussion here, where people might actually read and respond to it.

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Context:

The user complained that they didn't feel that games that were "rated high" were any better, and were sometimes worse, than games that weren't. (I have no idea if she was talking about what I think she was, though.)

That provoked me to respond with something about the reason why I'd had the games sorted by the minimum experience level the game host was looking for (ie: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced) because I felt that would give a clearer (and perhaps more accurate) skill level selection than the standard practice I've seen in forums of labeling games, "literate" or "advanced-literate".

Her response was that she didn't think that the words were "real words" anyway. Again, I wasn't sure how to interpret her post exactly, but this became my response to it.

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Well, they're real words, yeah. But I don't feel they're being used properly when people use "literate" or "advanced-literate" to describe their games.

"Literate" means you can read and write or have competence in some area. The denotation of the word "literate" doesn't mean you have to be good at writing, just be able to do so competently in the language in question.

Some people try to be more specific by saying "advanced" literate, but that still doesn't mean what they are trying to make it mean. Many (not all) people who specify "advanced literate" in their listing are only moderately good at writing themselves because they're following the trend of people trying to get players who perhaps have college-level writing skills instead of high school or even middle school -level skills.

I'm also of the position that someone doesn't have to have college-level writing skills to be an "advanced" player. I've roleplayed with people who had better writing skills than I had/have and I've more frequently roleplayed with people who have typo-strewn, poor-grammar posts. I've learned that people can write beautifully and still be a terrible roleplayer.

Good roleplaying, after all, is the ability to tell a story with one or multiple partners in a way that brings fun/excitement/pleasure/interest to all parties. It indicates a certain willingness to compromise or run with things that they didn't necessarily expect to happen. It indicates a certain mastery of the "give and take" or "yes, and"ing that gives the other players something to work with. Good writers won't necessarily take it to heart that they are only one person in the game and not the star of it. They may have trouble understanding that they're not writer, director and star of the story the way they are when they write fiction.

However, you can't exactly advertise that you're only looking for "good" players, because few people who roleplay regularly either know or will admit that they're "bad" players....

But I'm getting off-track.


My questions are:

- If you use "literate" or "advanced-literate" to describe your game, why do you use them?

- Do you think that they are more useful terms than "Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced"?

- Do you have any other observations on "literate" or "advanced-lit" labled games or think I'm misinterpreting aspects of the terms?


Disclaimer: Please don't take it as me looking down on people who use the terms. You use what terms are commonly used in your community and those gained a lot of use and popularity over the years. I think it was a genuine effort on the parts of the people who started using the terms to find players who wrote on their level, only to become appropriated by people who didn't understand what it actually meant or would imply.