I often forget that not everyone has the same understandings that I do, and for that, I apologize.
You've mistaken quotation marks being used to actually quote something for... I'm not sure what. I certainly didn't misuse the term, and I very much understood how you used it. You've used it poorly.
But- 1) that is not what was said.
It was the extended position. If D&D being the dominant game is indicative of revealed position, then the other, less preferred games being niche is a direct result. I don't know how you can make the points you've made using reveal preference and avoid this. If you're arguing you didn't specifically say this, then, sure, you didn't specifically say this.
2) Revealed preference is a specific term used in economics that I often use (h/t Paul Samuelson). I am not using it all willy-nilly. At its core, it is the rather simple observation that consumer preferences are revealed by their purchases.
Confounding factors is also a term used in economics.
That's why I made the joke ealier-
Put another way, "I think vegetables are great," said the guy, munching on another bag of Cheetos.
This doesn't show anything at all -- it's a very poor example and doesn't show revealed preference at all. It shows that someone thinks vegetables are great while eating something else. They may like Cheetos as much as vegetables. They may be hungry and vegetables aren't available. We don't know. And this problem translates to your assumption of revealed preference for D&D -- it's borne up solely by unspoken assumptions and can't be conclusively determined by the data.
The tension is between stated preference ("I think vegetables are great") and revealed preference (the purchase and consumption of Cheetos). .... man, jokes, like frogs, do not do well when dissected.
Those things aren't at odds, though, so it fails at more than being a joke.
Later, when you said the following:
All that can be said is that the large majority of RPG players play 5e edition*. That doesn't tell us much else as to why, or even if those D&D counts include also playing ither games.
I replied-
In a certain way, nothing means anything, does it?
In a another, also certain way, revealed preferences count for something. Not quality, but something.
Again, notice the joke. The counterpoint between the nihilistic framework (nothing means anything) and the experimental/evidentiary framework that you demand (revealed preferences, aka consumer behavior) that "count for something" - not quality, but something.
No, because the "revealed preference' here is your guess -- your bias, your assumption, your thinking -- dressed up in a fancy term. Your 'joke' here is about as interesting and useful as your previous one -- it's a pithy sounding set of words that don't actually work to do what you want them to.
Now, not to get to far down the wormhole (as unfortunately happened in a discussion about opportunity cost), but revealed preferences (RP) are often contrasted with stated preferences (SP), as in my Cheetos joke. More importantly, looking at RP alone can help you avoid worrying about normative discussions regarding quality.
Looked at another way:
People might have an SP of one thing (what they think people might want to hear, or what they will tell people they want, when they don't have to make a choice between competing alterantives; the second issue is one that
@Nagol referenced and can be a continuing issue when conducting surveys or focus groups and people provide SP).
But the SP doesn't always match the RP. RPs are how people actually behave. It doesn't make it right. It's not a sign of some objective quality.
...but it is important, because it shows what people want. And to the extent you care about empircism (as you do) RP is insanely important.
The way I look at it is that RP is useful to me because it always reminds me that despite my everlasting belief that there are only two kinds of music (county .... and western), the existence of large and popular markets for other types of music most likely indicate that there is something appealing about those other kinds of music to other people.
Or, as I might put it .... "
Not quality, but something."
Again, you haven't done the work here, just assumed something and attached a fancy term to your assumption to lend it credence past it's value. D&D is the market leader by more than a fair margin, granted. It's game people like, granted. Is this indicative of reveal preference?
Maybe. But, if you recall my mention of confounders, we can't say for certain. Let's talk about those. A lot of people here, on ENW, seem to harbor a great deal of unawareness of different ways to play D&D. And that's in the self-selected group that spends time on the internet in a forum that talks about games, ie, a cohort more likely than the uninterested in having exposure to games. Further, there's quite often long thread arguments on D&D on how it actually works at a fundamental level. So, whatever D&D is, it's at best a collection of disparate preferences using the same ruleset. And, that's interesting -- we argue quite often about what D&D is, and disagree, so there's already some fracture to the theory that playing D&D shows some kind of revealed preference for something, as the different kinds of games played show that what's actually happening is people are playing related games, not the same game. And that shows that there's a bunch of different preferences under the D&D tent. D&D handles this by 1) being GM directed -- what the GM says goes so the GM chooses the preference set in a game and collects players that are amenable to those preferences and 2) building the concept of 1 into the rules. This is the power of Rule Zero to distort the preference set -- D&D allows GMs to dictate different games according to their preferences and not according to the ruleset, thereby creating a broader appeal at the cost of unification.
So, D&D is actually a multitude of games under an umbrella. Are they games that are uniquely D&D, then, can we can the umbrella is the revealed preference? I don't think so. There are too many table variants to D&D to call them really uniquely D&D. And, one of the more common statements in regards to this is to point out to GMs asking how to do type of play by suggesting other systems that do it better. This is, also often, rejected because people find value in staying under the D&D umbrella. That, then, starts to get at a root confounder -- that D&D is popular because people are unwilling to abandon playing the popular game. You see this on this board time and again -- someone is suggesting a radical rebuild of the D&D engine but wants to promote it as D&D to get players, even if the rebuild no longer looks anything like D&D.
And, then there's the popularity argument being that most people are going to be introduced to gaming through D&D. Even now, one of the largest 'infection' vectors D&D has is streamed games. These aren't popular because they're D&D, but because of the players involved and the story told. Matt Mercer, for instance, is more than willing to ignore the rules for drama that sells. And, that's good, he should do this, because his motivation isn't preservation of D&D, or even selling D&D, but selling his videos. So, if most people are introduced through D&D because it's popular, that reinforces it's popularity -- it's a well known loop. This kind of loop shorts out preference by market pressure, peer pressure, and ignorance of other options.
And that last, ignorance of other options, is pretty big. People who have had fun doing a thing are very resistant to the suggestion that they do some other thing to have fun. Why? Why bother? And, that means that they're not going to spend much time learning about other things they could do to have fun. Even if presented with those options, the opportunity cost is high -- I could do this thing I like or try this other thing and maybe not like it. This driver can be seen here at ENW, when other games are discussed they often get little response unless an argument about the game starts -- which is fairly common. And, many of those arguments are due to people either not letting go ingrained D&Disms or insisting that games that don't do D&Disms are somehow flawed. Like, maybe, in this thread, where other games are dismissed because they aren't popular.
Heck, this thread is pretty extra special in that regard, as your argument is more that techniques originating from non-D&D games should be dismissed because they aren't from D&D, and since most people play D&D and not those games, they clearly prefer the D&D way of doing things. Except, there isn't a D&D way outside of a broad umbrella which these things actually fit under. So, in reality, your entire argument is an example of someone using technical jargon borrowed from other fields to define the argument in a way that their preferences are supported and others are dismissed. The irony to this is that you've started a thread complaining about this very thing.
tl;dr: You're making a bad argument abusing technical terms from other fields so you can validate your assumptions and dismiss other arguments.
