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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9465349" data-attributes="member: 71699">Connecting it with "resolution" seems right (versus those other examples of let's pretend.) I'd say that "Resolution" is more part of what it is to be a game, than what it is to roleplay. Being done in the particular way involving fiction makes RPGs open and formally incomplete in contrast with definitions of game like Chris Crawford's that assume closure and completeness. Openness and incompleteness succumb well to instruction and less well to specification. The table draws into their play concepts and norms (such as those about axes and wooden doors) from a practically limitless reservoir.That's what I cover with "replicated" and "prospective": I'm not saying freeform is done without rules, I'm saying it's done without a prior game text. A game text then is "a reduction, to writing of the procedures and/or rules of play" among other things, designed to instruct future play. For folk whose experience of RPGing has been following the instructions of a text, it might not be immediately evident that those texts can only be constructed following the experience of play.Inspire may not be the right word choice, but while I like the examples of building and programming I believe the above significantly undersells it. My points of comparison are with traditional storytelling media, in which performances are secured by more exact specification. I'm trying to think what storytelling form aside from RPGing makes its core text an instruction manual? For game designers, there's the useful implication that there will be things to learn from instruction manuals from other domains. In that light, Tim Hutchings' Apollo 47 Instruction Manual becomes a representative artifact.I'm not sure exactly where these sit, as they seem to go a bit beyond instruction and more toward specification. RPGing is a hybrid or heterogenous activity, and thus elusive to define (someone can always point to some exception.)It seems we look at the same facts and feel differing senses of excitement about them. Novel writers might refer to an instruction manual that explains how to go about writing their novel, but their audiences simply read it. Audiences aren't obliged to interpret instructions so as to write their own take on the setting and premises of the novel. Similarly films. And maybe the same applies to musicals and opera. If that's right, then that's unique to RPGing and it's what I'm therefore characterizing as "distinctive."</blockquote>

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