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I came a little late to this, but I think it's probably best to start from the first post. I think this is a bit redundant (any rule that is not inviolable is not a rule), and in light of the rest of your post, I think is slightly insufficient. Firstly, I don't actually think knowledge is...

This feels like confusion around the word "face" somehow, and drives at that doublethink around play objectives I was talking about earlier. The player wants to make good decisions, constrained by systems that present adversity...if there is a method within that system to lower adversity, it is...

I think I misinterpreted @thefutilist there, that question at the end of the post I was responding to seemed targeted at the narrativist camp, not the kind of gameplay I was talking about. Personally, I've never internalized what precisely is meant by "play to find out." It seems to live in...

That's what the role-playing is for, that's the whole reason you set up genre constraints and build characters within a milieu and all that. The whole point of characters is to want things, either intrinsically (I want revenge on my brother's killer) or extrinsically (this dragon will pay me a...

Yeah, this feels like the usual pie size fallacy. More books being published you don't like doesn't mean less books published that you like, and the whole problem is pretty moot to begin with when more books are published than anyone could possibly read.

This is something I've tried to get at before, which is linguistically tricky and fairly sensitive; I would not describe the second activity here as a game in the sense I'd use the word to talk about tabletop. I would argue the state you describe in chess above is a necessary component for a...

I think a little more exploration of "gameful" is necessary here. Addressing the premise doesn't have a lot to do with the gameplay loop in question, and mutual understanding of how the game is to function is great, but doesn't actually have any bearing on the quality of the underlying game...

I'm not sure how to be clearer that those are completely different gameplay loops. The differences are more salient than the similarities, and it's wild to put "use mechanics" outside the grounds of comparison! The play is entirely the interaction with systems; different systems lead to...

Well, I think the problem we'd run into next is what is meant by "gameplay." My first point in this whole thread was saying the fiat/no-fiat divide isn't a useful razor, or rather it's an insufficiently useful razor. I don't generally find the critique of "processes of play" useful; it...

Feels like we're about to do the immersion discussion. Let's please not do immersion. It's clear to me that nothing is to be gained in addressing the the quality of the resulting experience, especially not in terms of its authenticity. My point is that we should be focused on the tenor instead...

I don't think it makes a lot of sense to partition this off into sides, given it looks like there's at least 4. If it helps, I'm solidly in the "a mystery is about deduction from a fixed set of facts" camp, but I think it's significantly more important to look at what that means for the players...

So, I've been checking in and out, because this whole thing is wild, but it seems to me that this has been rather too focused on the "nature" of mysteries and mystery narratives. The whole question of whether something is a "real mystery" is rather beside the point of the activity we're doing...

I'm none of these people, but I'm definitely in the other camp, so I'll take a shot. It's obviously conditional, and starts with the same question: What is the player's goal? Are they trying to apprehend a criminal? Is this entirely a forensic exercise into something that's already happened...

It's certainly real deduction though. Like, Clue's gameplay is certainly weird, and I think you can get better deductive structures in other games, I'd look towards Awful Guests or Mystery Express for similar weight games with better deductive loops, but you are absolutely using systems to learn...

I'm not sure "we" is a coherent group here. I'm solidly against the rule zero concept in a way others in that same category probably aren't, for example, and I'm only reluctantly about simulation. It's not the point, just a byproduct of creating dynamic situations that allow for broad player...

Here's some stuff I've said about ludic agency that I think might be driving at the point you were making @thefutilist Dealing with agency and retcon (in semi sandbox) D&D 5E - How do you define “mother may I” in relation to D&D 5E? I offered I think my pithiest definition was here: Dealing...

I've written some stuff about "ludic agency" before to try and differentiate this divide before, but I'm not sure that's your precise concern. I'll try and find some representative definitions from those discussion I can link later.

I simply don't recognize that as agency. If a choice can be seamlessly replaced with a die roll, it's meaningless and should not have been offered to me. I'd even go a step further and say trivial optimization cases (particularly if all information is open upfront) also don't offer any real...

Unless there's some further possible action you could take to gain more information, then I don't see a difference between a player making a choice and rolling a die. Agency requires better than random level impact. Consider the card game War, which has no agency (and is fact deterministic from...

....was I supposed to? I quibble pretty aggressively with how "gamism" is conceptualized in the first place, and I mostly disagree about what immersion is with people who like it a lot. I don't think I'd be nominated for whatever debate you're casting me in.