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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8607693" data-attributes="member: 71699">One normal distinction between simulation and game is the absence versus presence of score or goal. Working through your last sentence, you should see that games and simulations are not differentiated by ability to answer questions: both can answer some questions.Although, perhaps your comment is meant in another way that I could agree with. A simulation has a reference: S is a simulation of R. One value of S is that it can answer questions (make predictions) about R. Another way to put that is that an answer to a question in S ought to be the same as the answer to the parallel question in R. That is a property the OP seeks: answers about bird flight in S are the same as in R.What I am thinking is<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A game is not distinct from a simulation on the grounds of failure to answer questions.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A game may be distinct from a simulation on the grounds of lacking or incomplete fidelity to a reference. (For instance not containing answers, or having different answers, to the same questions.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A game may be distinct from a simulation on the grounds of having score or goal. (I believe we can recognise some phenomena as RPG that don't have score or goal.)</li> </ul>I proposed another approach, which is to take S to be a simulation of some R. So that answers in S are one's way of knowing that R. I justified that in part by saying - it's all pretend anyway. Pragmatically, given our myriad of aims and finite effort available with which to satisfy them, we cannot satisfy all aims. Further, one value of simulations is the omission of information (the simulation is a simplification that allows us to investigate the phenomena without knowing everything about it, so usually simulations don't map 1:1 to anything anyway.The approach I suggested is not an exception in cases of normal RPG play, because we do not ask all questions that we could answer about that R, thus incompletely knowing it at any moment. Different participants can have different ideas of R, too. This is all noticeably similar to Baker's intuitions about the uncertainty of knowledge of fictional position and I think arises in similar ways.</blockquote>

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