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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 6779891" data-attributes="member: 85555">Again, impact mattered in what they were saying. Because if I recall the Ted talks correctly, one of the key points was most of the time, these mental shortcuts work just fine. They didn't put a number on it, but let's say that is 80 or 90 percent. It is was the remaining 10-20 percent of the times that it was an issue. If the stakes are high, that impact matters a lot and you would want to pay attention to bias because people might enjoy fewer advantages than others, go to jail or even die, as a result of bias. But this is a game, where the GM is trying to make the players feel like they are in a real place. No one is going to go to jail if his biases lead to a slightly inaccurate description of the number of haberdashers in town. All that matters is that the tools he uses to make those judgments, yield results that produce a world that feels real to the players. Impact is immensely important here. What matters is that the players assessment of the GM is he or she is fair and objective. That is what I meant when I said he doesn't have to be a slave to his biases (the comment that initially got us off on this tangent). And for me this modeling is a lot more about consistency. As long as the GM is consistent in how he or she is making these kinds of calls (whether those judgements are biased or not) the result is a fairly consistent game world. I don't know I feel like sometimes when you tell people that you like the world in a setting to feel real, you immediately get presented with this straw man that holds up the impossibility of a genuine actual simulation. I guess you could throw your hands up at that, or feel like you have to master the field of cognitive bias before getting behind the GM seat. Personally I think it is usually enough to strive for fairness, objectivity and to try to be self aware enough that you don't make decisions on thing like where you want the adventure to go or the story you are interested in emerging. You can tell us it is impossible, but the fact is many of us have experienced exactly the kind of game we describe. We're not lying about it. Again, I am not at all familiar with this field of research and I am very, very wary of bringing that kind of research into my game design. If I understood it well enough, perhaps I'd feel differently but I make games, I am not a scientist. The ted talks were interesting to listen to. But they condensed a lot into a short period of time and were generally expressing a particular point of view from one researcher in each instance.</blockquote>

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