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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9239642" data-attributes="member: 71699">I will leave some of your specific questions to a separate post, in order to focus on some interesting aspects of our discussion. First to set in place that I've no essential disagreement with MDA, but neither was it intended by its authors to be a resting place. In general it has been valuable to practical design (in particular to my mind, by suggesting attention to the intended experiential consequences prior to crafting mechanics.) Recollect that, as summarised by Frank Lantz in his critique of MDAAs Lantz observesI'm going to use the word "experience" rather than aesthetics going forward, for the reasons cited by among others Wolfgang Walk and Jesper Juul. The "aesthetics" grasped by MDA is not the art style, graphics, narrative tone - things designers do have control over - it is the experience of play - sensation, discovery, challenge, etc.There in a nutshell is why I think MDA is confounded by TTRPG, and why we have to do some organizational design (of the group formed for play) to achieve the promises of neotrad. You put it thatBaker described thatWhen I make a move purely in fiction - "I take position on the crest of the hill", "I'm taking the bullets out of five chambers, spinning the cylinder and grinning like a maniac" - that changes my fictional positioning without reversion to cubes. Everyone nods and updates their drafts of our shared imaginative space accordingly. My revolver now has only one bullet loaded. I'm up there on that hill gazing out over the forest. Folk can see that I'm deranged. Stuff has happened, stuff that is productive of experience. I can in play even take on the role of designer, asserting so-called mechanics (narrative, world facts, scenes), to shape the experience. If time permits, listen to the Beneath Ash and Snow, Forbidden Lands actual play podcast by The Lollygaggers. In hours of play, I've observed a decent standard of OSR-ish sandbox play. And I'm left with the question - did the mechanics lead to experiences that in any powerful sense paid off on the potential aspirations of a neotrad design project? The answer's a strong no, from what I've observed so far.I've said in the past that play is process not product. And I've said that game-as-artifact is a tool for play, not the play itself. MDA agrees with this point of view - mechanics inform experience, but aren't experience, which emerges from the player systematically engaging with the mechanics. From Lantz againMultiple commentators observe irresolvable ambiguity around where graphical and textual elements should sit. When developing a videogame, designers can write documents, prepare user stories in a tool like Jira, develop wireframes in a tool like figma, script directly in something like Lua, configure using for example Unreal blueprints or the ubiquitous json pile, iterate with engineers on functional code, with artists on graphical assets, and writers on narrative (which surely give rise directly, without the intermediary of dynamics, to experience!) They exert far from absolute, but a very workable level of direct control over mechanics and dynamics.The analogy with agile and dependencies is that sure, we can revert to - folk can talk about it - to locally extend our framework to solve our problem. And as you alluded to, that can lead to formally extended versions of the framework that include the thing - like dependency mapping in SAFE. But agile out of the box is silent on dependencies! It's a straight up fact that it's effortful to finesse dependencies given the ideals of iterative incremental development. Finessing dependencies is one of relatively few edges waterfall has over agile (while introducing a bunch of other problems, obviously.)So getting back to my - in a nutshell: due to the technology (processing in wetware, if you like), the game designer doesn't have the control they'd need to see their chosen mechanics "are likely to lead to" the intended dynamics and thus the desired experiences. The participant who most powerfully controls that in traditional modes of play, is GM. Hence, the prescription is - start there. Do your organization design so that the technology instantiated for the time being by the folk around the table gives affordance matching your intentions. Baker shows how this is done in the AW game text. MDA contains nothing about said organization design.</blockquote>

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