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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6105410" data-attributes="member: 4937">There is some truth to that, but I think it is like evaluating 'common sense'.  For things that humans have ordinary experience with, common sense tends to be fairly accurate.  For things that they've never experienced or which aren't part of daily experience, common sense tends to be wildly inaccurate.  I think a lot of human methodologies, especially the less formalized ones, end up subject to that.  Much of reality is just counter-intuitive and actually paradoxical.You'll hear people arguing that the procedural programing paradigm won out over oop, functional, etc. simply by accident.  I think that that ignores that describing what you want to do tends to naturally take the form of a procedure accept in special cases.  I remember taking early classes in oop, where the instructor - true to the thought of the day - was arguing that it was natural to think of everything as a noun.  Well, that's true until you have a verb, in which case you end up with nouns are data and verbs are procedures.  It's not natural to think of a sort as a noun.  And then don't get into how we were supposed to create these elaborate multi-tier object hierarchies implementing multiple inheritance and this was just going to automatically lead to good design.Yeah, it gets hard to say anything definitively without ways to make measurements and apply math.Maybe I'm wierd, but since I played 'war' well into high school, I can remember all sorts of evolutions in how we handled the game negotiations begin from the simple, "I shot you.  No you missed.", conflict that started to derail early games.  One early example was that you had to take turns.  If I missed you last time, you couldn't declare I missed the second time.  That ended up turning into complex negoitated fairness rules that I won't even try to understand childish logic around.  But around that time we discovered we could play 'swords' with cane sticks and solve the arbitration problem - it was obvious who hit who.  A bit later on we came up with a 'no miss' rule.  All guns were infinitely accurate as long as you were in line of sight and shouting range, which turned 'war' in to a game of pure stealth.  It was like playing hide and seek where everyone was it.  That game survived at least between me and my brother from about age 7 until high school, as did the 'stick fighting' game until we got strong enough to really hurt each other and started worrying about putting out eyes (which turned into fencing once we got helmets).  On the gun front, we early on had evaluated 'snow ball fight' as a general way of arbitrating guns, but since snow was not reliable any light weight ammunition would do - pine cones, hickory nuts, etc.  On occasion, this was played with sling shots.  By college, paintball guns were added to the possibilities.The thing to keep in mind is that while these games became highly gamist in the long run in that they could be played without the RP and still be fun, initially there was a lot of blur between the fantasy RPG and the increasingly gamist resolution mechanics.  And to some extent, when you see guys playing paintball, there are often many that are still playing at soldier/warrior and still fundamentally playing war - especially when played competively (especially early in the paintball era).  And that's even more true of the guys using airsoft guns.And that isn't even to get into the discussion of the early minitures wargaming being invented with plastic army men and gi joe figures, well before I got exposed to the notion that you could dice for those things, or even the paper transfer 'tie fighters and x-wings' games where you'd close your eyes and make a dot, and then overlay to the sheets of paper to see if you blew up the units in the other guys drawings.I came to tabletop fantasy at age 8.  So it was a pretty natural progression for me, especially as someone playing house with the girls and then going outside and whacking each other with sticks (including a few of the girls) or hiding in the woods waiting to scream, "Bang I shot you" (and then trying to work out who had died when if 6 boys screamed in quick succession).</blockquote>

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