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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prosfilaes" data-source="post: 6418023" data-attributes="member: 40166">I didn't say it would or wouldn't, but it's an example of where technology in the fiction is completely here, which goes to the question I was responding to.It could in theory be verified, and we certainly do know for some major games in what ways many people play them in off-brand ways. In reality, it does change how the car was designed and natural selection will add more to that. If the producers of a car know that SUVs sell as SUVs and are used as minivans, they don't have to worry about making it a good off-road vehicle. It has to look like a good SUV, has to sell to the family who believes they're going to be exploring the wilderness every weekend, and work like a good minivan. And to the extent that the designers don't do, the market probably will. The stories in the air will be how the SUV did fail them, not how it would have had they gone off-road.For RPGs? Again, I have to wonder if Werewolf and Vampire employees ever with forethought added the high-concept intro but wrote a decent part of the book for the people who wanted their characters to rip out human throats with their teeth. Even to the extent they didn't, I bet that was part of the thing that shaped the White Wolf market, that caused Changeling and Wraith to fail while Werewolf and Vampire raged on; that is, that section of the market supported those games that facilitated ultraviolence as well as the high concept and didn't support those games that supported only the high-concept genre all the White Wolf were seemingly designed for.So, yes, I do believe it changes how they were designed, that they wrote books that would sell, which are those that support the styles the customers want.To the extend I said you can ignore the text of the game, I repudiate that. (But I don't know where "criticizing" came from.) But the text of the game is more like the screenplay of the movie then the movie itself, since the game is not normally enjoyed by reading it alone (well, at least to the extent it is, I believe that's beyond the scope of the current discussion.) And certain movies and certain games may have inexplicable popularity until you understand what's going on. Rocky Horror Picture Show is a minor picture blown up by how the audience responded to it. I don't think you can truly understand any edition of D&D without understanding what came before it. Why the set of races in D&D 5? Not a single race could the developers really say "we needed this type of race of the type of fantasy we wanted" instead of "we didn't want the Gnomish Liberation Army to hit our houses again" and "we kept getting anonymous emails with pictures of dragons swallowing gnomes whole and the gnomes had the faces of D&D developers on them".And who really cares how the game is supposed to be played? We're gamers, and good games are ones that play well in practice, and frequently even if the developer is there to explain how it's supposed to be played, maybe people like it better this way! Nothing really matters but the game in play.</blockquote>

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