Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrogReaver" data-source="post: 9246055" data-attributes="member: 6795602">I also will add.It’s not just what fiction a game can produce but also how it produces it.  That is, all the mechanics and omitted mechanics matter. One of my much earlier mistakes in such discussions was believing that narrative/story now games were being praised for being able to generate certain fictions that a game like d&d could not, but the actual claim was a bit more subtle, it wasn’t that the games generated different fiction, it’s that the mechanics behind the generation of the fiction made for greatly dissimilar gameplay regardless of whether the resulting fiction ended up the same. (This difference also affects the distribution of resulting fiction, such that usually the fiction generated by 2 different games is going to be different, it just need not be.)I’ve said that to lead into this - the game is the mechanical bits. Changing any of the mechanical bits changes the game (the play experience). Obviously some changes are bigger impact than others.So as Manbearcat said above, the moment to moment experience is different between different games!  I fully agree.  Yet there still are similarities and design patterns even with all those differences.One of the most important takeaways here is that if we all agree that games with different mechanics provide different experiences, then saying something like mechanics that provide greater player authority are better is wholly out of bounds because changing the mechanic changes the play experience.This leaves us in a bit of a rut, how do we determine what kinds of mechanics a game should have, when is more player authority good and when isn’t it - well that depends on the rest of the game mechanics and on the experiences you want your game to provide.So now that all this is agreed upon, can we stop claiming some games provide universally better experiences than others. This goes both ways!</blockquote>

Verification