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<blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8295581" data-attributes="member: 71699"><p>Posit three players with three skills each.</p><ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">RP (ability to grasp themes and navigate emerging story)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">MP (ability to grasp written rules and apply mechanics)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">CP (winningness at <em>Chess</em>, their Elo)</li> </ul><p></p><p>P1 has RP10 MP1 CP0 (where higher is more skillful)</p><p>P2 has RP1 MP10 CP0</p><p>P3 has RP0 MP2 CP10 (Elo re-scaled for sake of this discussion)</p><p></p><p>RPG gaming group A are story-focused and count P1 as a wonderfully skillful player, and P2 and P3 as woefully unskillful.</p><p>RPG gaming group B is mechanics-focused and finds P2 wonderfully skilled, and P1 and P3 woefully unskillful.</p><p>Chess club C doesn't play RPGs and only cares about winningness at <em>Chess</em>. They find P1 and P2 woefully unskillful, but wow - P3!</p><p></p><p>If "skilled play" means playing skillfully, then your rubric cannot apply across the gaming groups: it can only apply within the gaming groups. We might ask - why don't we let each group define skill, rate it on a common scale, and then say that the most skillful player is whoever is best-overall. In this case, we end up saying P3 is best-overall (12pts of skill), even though P3 has zero skill at RP.</p><p></p><p>To give a real world example of a skill construct: generalised intelligence or IQ. Factor-based analyses suggest that generalised intelligence is made up of several contributing components - short term memory, working memory, attention, visual-spatial processing, and depending on the model a few other things. A set of tasks have been found where score on one task in that set is predictive of scores on other tasks in that set. That's what IQ is. It's not meaningless, but its limits should be borne in mind. Elo is many times simpler: it just counts wins at <em>Chess</em>. More specifically, who wins (or loses or draws) against whom. It is a ranking algorithm for a single dimension.</p><p></p><p>If "skilled play" is to mean playing skillfully, and say we limit this to RPG, then as [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] attempted, we will need to analyse factors in common across all games, player cultures, topics and goals. We will have to exclude anything that is private to just some RPG - because that which isn't in common cannot be used to construct a common measure! This will be orders of magnitude more complex than the Elo. It will be closer to generalised IQ (and refer to the literature to get a sense of the complexity and confounds for that!) A skill construct must - and can only - be predictive of results on tasks that are found to be significantly correlated. In the case of IQ, those were identified through decades of task ideation and controlled clinical trials.</p><p></p><p>And in the end, it will offer us very little, because gaming group A only cared about RP anyway. If I tell them their players are not best-overall they will shrug and say - you know what, we never cared about how good we were at <em>Chess.</em></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="clearstream, post: 8295581, member: 71699"] Posit three players with three skills each. [LIST] [*]RP (ability to grasp themes and navigate emerging story) [*]MP (ability to grasp written rules and apply mechanics) [*]CP (winningness at [I]Chess[/I], their Elo) [/LIST] P1 has RP10 MP1 CP0 (where higher is more skillful) P2 has RP1 MP10 CP0 P3 has RP0 MP2 CP10 (Elo re-scaled for sake of this discussion) RPG gaming group A are story-focused and count P1 as a wonderfully skillful player, and P2 and P3 as woefully unskillful. RPG gaming group B is mechanics-focused and finds P2 wonderfully skilled, and P1 and P3 woefully unskillful. Chess club C doesn't play RPGs and only cares about winningness at [I]Chess[/I]. They find P1 and P2 woefully unskillful, but wow - P3! If "skilled play" means playing skillfully, then your rubric cannot apply across the gaming groups: it can only apply within the gaming groups. We might ask - why don't we let each group define skill, rate it on a common scale, and then say that the most skillful player is whoever is best-overall. In this case, we end up saying P3 is best-overall (12pts of skill), even though P3 has zero skill at RP. To give a real world example of a skill construct: generalised intelligence or IQ. Factor-based analyses suggest that generalised intelligence is made up of several contributing components - short term memory, working memory, attention, visual-spatial processing, and depending on the model a few other things. A set of tasks have been found where score on one task in that set is predictive of scores on other tasks in that set. That's what IQ is. It's not meaningless, but its limits should be borne in mind. Elo is many times simpler: it just counts wins at [I]Chess[/I]. More specifically, who wins (or loses or draws) against whom. It is a ranking algorithm for a single dimension. If "skilled play" is to mean playing skillfully, and say we limit this to RPG, then as [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] attempted, we will need to analyse factors in common across all games, player cultures, topics and goals. We will have to exclude anything that is private to just some RPG - because that which isn't in common cannot be used to construct a common measure! This will be orders of magnitude more complex than the Elo. It will be closer to generalised IQ (and refer to the literature to get a sense of the complexity and confounds for that!) A skill construct must - and can only - be predictive of results on tasks that are found to be significantly correlated. In the case of IQ, those were identified through decades of task ideation and controlled clinical trials. And in the end, it will offer us very little, because gaming group A only cared about RP anyway. If I tell them their players are not best-overall they will shrug and say - you know what, we never cared about how good we were at [I]Chess.[/I] [/QUOTE]
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