Old RPG Gamers and The Streaming Youth - From a Dark Forest

 Another question from the dark forest, which is essentially creaky old people muttering about how much better it was back in the day. I tried to answer the following self-summarized prompt, posted in late 2022:

"JD! You absolute fool. You dunce. Why do you say 'System Matters' lost the debate in the public sphere? What's all this about "the streaming generation" of players? And don't you just hate all that shit, why are you talking about it like it's legitimate?!" 

Over the last...maybe year and a half, I came to terms with the population of people entering the hobby via twitch or youtube streams (the Actual Play podcast phenomenon continues but is greatly diminished in comparison).  I have my issues with how those streams are conducted, but that's only of tangential interest here. I challenged myself: "You claim to care about your local gaming community, in fact you often assert that it's (and local communities like it are )  the only gaming community that exists. These people are going to flood your community and you are going to know nothing about their  point of view. Are you one of those pieces of shit artists who sit around being like 'oh man we solved all these problems in 2005, these new artists are dumb and have nothing to show me and will do nothing to help the world'". Are you that kind of guy, where they'll laugh at you behind your hand because you're old and have nothing to offer them? 

Gaming SCPs - 200-299

 I realized I forgot to mention that I actually did read all SCPs that existed, but this was back when there were only about three thousand of them, so a lot of these are just re-skims on my part.

This section has the first "monster SCPs" that I really like for gaming. Too many of the monster SCPs are just "they torturekill you if you break rule X" which are less interesting for gaming than you might think. Puzzles make more sense in gaming if they have other stakes.  The Tortured Iron Soul (SCP-203, below) is quite dangerous and gruesome but the obvious motivation in interacting with it is to gain new information about it such as its origin and effects.  And The Protector (back to back! SCP-204), once you set aside the edginess of "let's use these pedophiles to activate the anomalistic entity" is also really interesting.  This edginess sometimes ruins otherwise interesting entries - the phonograph record that causes time to freeze when it skips is primarily tested by killing someone near it, for example. C'mon. Couldn't we think of other things to test with it?

Overall, there's a LOT of good candidates in this range for gaming even though from a project perspective there's not much mythos or worldbuilding going on. I was really surprised how many of these 100 I thought were good! There are still plenty of derivative SCPs (one is just "what if Silent Hill, man"), and much of the project's identity still remains in the future.  One notable entry is the first real action-oriented SCP, primarily consisting of transcripts of the special forces of the SCP going into a weird dimension. It's also been updated to modern presentation standards so it's neat!  

There's also my first disease SCP - a lot of these are just zombie/rage infections that make people into m m m m m monsters! Gamers already got plenty of monsters, they don't need more. But this one (Base Eleven Disorder, below) is really nice and intriguing.  I didn't pick it because it's not really scenario-inducing, but the Dialysis Bracelet (SCP-269) is also a decent "medicalized" SCP, where you "kinda get what it's trying to do" but it's too alien/bizarre to pull it off. 

Similarly, Professor William Wordsworth's Collection of Curiosities is good because every new animal comes with sketchy/blinkered but quasi-accurate instructions on how to contain and care for each new anomalous creature, which of course is much more valuable (and challenging) than just gunning them down.