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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 5784433" data-attributes="member: 177">I think that depends upon your interpretation of some of Edwards' wording.  "Three player aims or outlooks have been suggested, in that a given player approaches a role-playing situation pretty much from one of them, with some, but not much, crossover possible," leaves only a little room for interpretation.  If Edwards had intended to note that a person was likely to change agendas from one situation to another, he could have done so with addition of one word ("...approaches a particular role-playing situation...").  Without that distinction, the implication that it is a general behavior of the individual is pretty strong.But then, we've already identified that his language use was not actually all that great, so that's not surprising.  That, if nothing else, sometimes leaves me wondering why so many folks like his work - the guy's not a very clear writer, honestly.And I think there's also an argument that if categorization is not explicit, it is implicit.  There is no such thing as an agenda without a person that has it.  If a good system focuses on one agenda, and that system is played for extended time, or with some preference by a given player, the player probably enjoys that agenda, no?  The whole point of identifying the agendas, and focusing a game on a particular agenda, is to produce a game that will be enjoyed by folks who like that agenda, no?  Or, is there some objective, non-player-preference-focused reason to stick to one agenda of which I'm not aware?Yep.  Which is part of why I say that in this, Edwards was wrong, and that the model does not match reality well in this regard.  That is a possibility, you know - that his model isn't very close to reality.There's a bit of a bugaboo out there about classifying people.  Here's the thing - there's nothing wrong in general with taking a large group of people, and finding clusters of likes or dislikes among them, and then using that information to try to better serve people in one or more of those clusters.  The issues arise when you try to treat individuals as if membership in a group is the most important thing about them.Statistics about people in aggregate are an information source.  Treating a person as if they are a statistic is stereotyping.As a physicist, I disagree with that statement, but don't feel it'll be valuable to this discussion to go down that rathole at this time.</blockquote>

Verification