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Sadras
I think that when it comes to the phrase "more realistic" I generally don't mind people using it to try and convey an idea. And I think that generally speaking, I'm likely to know what they mean when they use it. The EN5ider article, in that sense, is clear to me what it is trying to convey.
So the rules for weapon degradation being an attempt to add "more realism" to the game.....I get what is meant, even if I don't really think it's technically accurate. But sometimes for the sake of conversation and for conveying ideas, that kind of phrase can work fine. I do think a lot of the conversation has been wasted by devoting time to this angle. To me, someone saying "I added weapon degradation to my D&D game to make it more realistic" is perfectly fine.
What I don't think is fine is something more like "My D&D game has weapon degradation mechanics, and therefore is more realistic than a game that lacks such mechanics" because I don't think that's true at all and for a myriad of reasons.
So I think the semantic debate has remained relevant to the discussion because some folks will mistake acceptance of the general use of the phrase for acceptance that the phrase is technically accurate. Others want to make sure that distinction is clear.
I think it is one of those issues where people think "I know it when I see it" but then often they haven't actually thought through what all the questions are. As you say, we can sort of guestimate that maybe some sort of weapon breakage/damage/wearing out COULD produce some added realism, but in general it doesn't.
This actually happens in a kind of profound way too. See, WAY back in the earliest days of RPG development, we had this concept. That concept was that our frustrations with the inability to reproduce the kinds of adventures we could read about, or sorts of stories which happened in real life, or were 'true to life' in some sense was caused by an inadequacy of the rules to produce an emulation of real life. The theory went something like realism in role play is produced by a 'true to life' set of incentives and motivations being applied to the character, and that could only be produced by a set of rules which emulated all the features of real life such that the forces acting on the character would be realistic.
The problem of course was twofold. First of all it rapidly became apparent that it is impossible to even get meaningfully more realistic than some highly unrealistic games like D&D, which produce results which are nothing like real life, not at all true to life, in terms of incentives and forces acting on the character. Even much more realistic, in some senses, games like 'Boot Hill' (which really has some reasonably realistic gunfight rules, albeit the game lacks equal detail in other areas) didn't produce results which were in any meaningful way more realistic than D&D. You just cannot model real life well enough with playable rules.
Secondly, and far more important, you cannot really emulate the internal life and mind state of a character. Fundamentally the player is a person sitting at a table somewhere engaging in a form of entertainment. Even if they genuinely endeavor to inhabit their character they can only do so with very limited fidelity. The player is not a product of the character's society, lacks most of the information and background the character would have, and is fundamentally subject to entirely different motivations (just to note the most obvious example, she's not subject to death if she does something dangerous in game).
Thus it was quite quickly realized by game designers and those of us who were seriously interested in the nuances of game play and design, that this very notion, that play could be 'true to life' if only certain degrees of realism could be introduced was clearly an erroneous proposition, or at best utterly unobtainable. RQ and one might say also Tekumel arose as experiments in creating worlds with elaborately detailed aspects in which characters could be rooted in ways that would allow for deeper characterization and creation of more dramatic story arcs (IE better than just 'loot the dungeon' or 'shoot the Earps').
Since then things have moved on several more generations and now we have games like BitD, for example, who's mechanical structure, content, tone, and play procedures are tightly focused on producing a specific sort of RP experience. They are largely shorn of the various impedimentia of rule systems aimed at producing realism via some sort of numerical simulationist mechanics. Instead they employ game design techniques, providing 'currencies', 'bidding processes', mechanical embodiment of elements of drama (IE aspects), etc. These have proven vastly more successful than the earlier approaches, for the most part.
That being said, a very deeply detailed game world, played intensely over a long period of time, can produce fine results. There are plenty of long-running D&D games, for example, where characters have acquired personality and motivation through episodes of play over time. I'm not sure that realism is exceptionally important here though. My experience has been that the most immersive of this type of game I have played in was also the most starkly fantastic and paid very little attention to the sorts of details some posters are insisting are key. So much so that this particular game was almost utterly fantastical and dreamlike in quality at times, so that even writing down accounts of play would be hard (it was also 30 years ago, so my recollection is spotty on many details).
And sure, there's ways to explain away almost everything but it gets to be a bit much if this has to be done all the time.
