Geez, I've come here to see a prestigious discussion about "RPG Codex Top Ten Vintage RPGs Poll Results", not to debate philosophy of language, well...
- It's revisionist -- People referred to these games simply as "RPGs" back in the day, or even just "adventures" (yes that's right, check out a few magazines from the 80s and 90s)
- It's imprecise -- Its proponents claim that it's a specific term, while it's far from it in reality. It tries to categorise games by a secondary (at best) attribute ("party moves/fights together as a blob" - duh), while neglecting the much more important primary game mechanics:
Generally, I also like terms to be clear and well-defined. As long as we communicate with language, semantics is all we have.
Firstly, I am addressing your post specifically because I considered you cordial and respectful when portraying your opinion. Maybe something slipped, but you are not attacking other Codexers and people in general, so it is possible to have a productive and qualified discussion. Secondly, even though I read Lycan, Austin and Wittgenstein in English, considering I read the others in my native tongue, my notes are on a different language, therefore, when I retranslate it (because I'm now too lazy to go search), some strange vocables may emerge (but the idea, hopefully, will be preserved).
The problem I see (discussing only semantics — I won't go full pragmatic till next next paragraph), is that even since Kripke we realized terms are not clear, well-defined and precise. It is not that the terms should not describe, as portrayed by Russel, (describe as clear, well-defined, precise) things (names are nothing more than abbreviated definite descriptions), but we realized that they normally, on daily basis, don't do it: what should be is not what it is. And that leads us to Kripke's causal-historic communication chain (the fixation of the reference, the baptism, is, more than less, inappropriate — but appropriate, because that is how humanity does it, for better or worse).
People, always, baptize things that already exist differently, sometimes even for political-ideological reasons. Take gothic architecture, for instance. The Frankish people building churches never used the term to describe their style, but some Italian guy, 500 hundred years later, in other to delegitimize the movement, called "Frankish high middle age architecture" gothic (as in German barbarians that did not exist for a thousand years). Not only if someone says gothic today we will automatically think about that type of building (even though the term does not describe and is revisionist), but we started calling books, compositions, people, subgenres of rock and so on gothic (including a game: even if the game is German, it probably is somewhat infected by this chain). That is the thing, lots of terms are interchangeable and there are different chains of casual-historic communication.
That was only semantics view, which is objectively outdated. Wittgenstein, Austin and Grice won't even waste time discussing reference.
Prescriptive speech doesn't work unless you're French.
Actually, it works (in my political view) more than it should. Supposedly, our EE UU friends can talk more about it, Strunk's "The Elements of Style" has been purging dissidents for over one hundred years. It is quite true that prescriptive grammar does not affect the everyday speaker, but it is not the everyday speaker which becomes presidents, judges, journal editors, philosophers, and so on.
