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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8959423" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, I haven't studied Ron's take on this well enough to be sure what he was thinking, but IMHO there is no such thing as 'world simulation', its such a totally impractical and unrealistic concept that it literally does not exist, flat out, never. I mean, I think it might be fair to say that people often BELIEVE they are doing it, but they aren't. They're doing some sort of other thing, often a type of gamism IMHO where everyone pretends there is a 'real world' and then conveniently contrives it to be the most satisfactory world in which the game can take place. So, I have always failed to see this criticism as having any actual teeth. Now, I think there's the possibility of some level of process sim. Like, a game can provide a fairly realistic take on some specific thing, like maybe driving race cars. So the race car part of the game produces quite realistic results in a very narrow sense. OTOH all the PCs just happen to be F1 drivers and mechanics, and the rules for how their hot girlfriends (or boytoys, whichever) behave are perfectly silly. So, if you zoom out, there's not any real OVERALL realism there, and the world at large is simply a stage arranged such that the game works, so there's not really a 'world sim' at all. I know this point of view riles up a lot of people with a certain slant on RPGs. I will just say, I'm not criticizing them exactly, I just see things differently!</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 8959423, member: 82106"] Well, I haven't studied Ron's take on this well enough to be sure what he was thinking, but IMHO there is no such thing as 'world simulation', its such a totally impractical and unrealistic concept that it literally does not exist, flat out, never. I mean, I think it might be fair to say that people often BELIEVE they are doing it, but they aren't. They're doing some sort of other thing, often a type of gamism IMHO where everyone pretends there is a 'real world' and then conveniently contrives it to be the most satisfactory world in which the game can take place. So, I have always failed to see this criticism as having any actual teeth. Now, I think there's the possibility of some level of process sim. Like, a game can provide a fairly realistic take on some specific thing, like maybe driving race cars. So the race car part of the game produces quite realistic results in a very narrow sense. OTOH all the PCs just happen to be F1 drivers and mechanics, and the rules for how their hot girlfriends (or boytoys, whichever) behave are perfectly silly. So, if you zoom out, there's not any real OVERALL realism there, and the world at large is simply a stage arranged such that the game works, so there's not really a 'world sim' at all. I know this point of view riles up a lot of people with a certain slant on RPGs. I will just say, I'm not criticizing them exactly, I just see things differently! [/QUOTE]

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