Last week, Ron had a post over on Story Games where he explained his vision of the Forge:

But the Forge isn’t their vision. It’s ours, just Clinton and me. And not only that, Clinton and I (I keep saying both of us because we talk about this stuff, and I’m representing those talks right now) want to keep the Forge’s function right where it started – finding people in the canebrake, struggling with their designs, or having produced an amazing design but not knowing what to do with it. We like it working best and most for the guys with a crappy Geocities website and a neat game idea, who aren’t quite sure how the internet can help them further.

As long as the Forge lasts, it serves those guys first, and that same spirit/attitude of theirs which both Clinton and I individually try to preserve in ourselves. That’s why it is not, and will never be, an imprint of the kind that would force membership or identity of any sort on someone just considering or along-the-way of developing their own game and perhaps company.

It might be the single most lucid version of his ideas that I’ve seen, and he even manages to get through it without once saying something that makes me think he needs a thwap upside the head.

On a somewhat related note, Ron’s started a thread over on the Forge for what he’s calling the Forge retrospective project. The basic idea is that people choose a limited period from the Forge’s history, summarize it as best they can, and then comment on things that they find especially interesting or surprising. Given that one of the problems I’ve always had with the Forge is the volume of material that goes by, I’m hoping that people end up posting about some interesting things I might have missed.