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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9799678" data-attributes="member: 4937">So there is a lot to unpack here.  First, I don't think people usually do a lot of roleplay when making a sand castle.  The thing I think drives kids to make sandcastles is mostly the aesthetic of Expression - the pleasure of making or shaping something to your own design.  "Look what I made."  A kid who makes a sand castle doesn't run to his mom or dad to tell the story of his sand castle.  He runs to get them to see the thing he has made.  But it is I would argue empathically "play", and every kid loves it with or without attaching a narrative to it.  Secondly, while Caillois observation about Ilinx is really interesting, I think it is also so narrow that it is falsifiable and it misses out on a lot of activities.  The mountain climber that does so for no reason is playing both for Challenge (which he understands) but also for the beauty of the summit and the discovery of what is at the top.  At a smaller level, kids climb up boulders and trees for the exact same reasons, not just the Challenge of doing so but the joys of having done so.  And climbing trees is emphatically play.  They aren't doing it to get dizzy or "drunk", albeit I agree with him that it's a type of play to do so.  And as delicately as I can put this, the "sex hobbyists" with their play are seeking sensation but not primarily dizziness, and yet that too is also play.  (Whether any play whether spinning in circles to fall down, drinking beer to get drunk, climbing high mountains or having a sexy hobby is healthy I'm not passing judgment on but they all fit in my opinion in Caillois definition of what constitutes play.)I don't think Garfield was saying that.  Rather he would say that humans operate something like an AI that analyzes moves in chess and assigns a confidence to them and then often as not picks one according to the weighted value they perceive to the move.  What move they end up picking isn't itself deterministic.  In this situation the same player might play this move 72% of the time, some other move 24% of the time and some third move 4% of the time.  In the critical portions of the game most moves aren't "forced" and while skilled players will generally analyze the forced moves correctly (and less skilled ones miss them) the really interesting thing is the randomness with which players will choose the unforced moves - say an opening.  A handicap isn't unlucky, but it greatly increases this "random" aspect of how a skilled player will play, since it moves them out of their comfort zone and they must speculate more on the unforced parts of play.[quoe]Likewise, the factors creating what Garfield calls luck in baseball are both random variance and factors like "did this guy sleep well last night" or "does he choke under pressure". The origin of these seems more indeterminate to me.</blockquote>Yes, but undetermined thing Garfield is saying is the same as luck.  In RPG terms, those moments and things are the things we dice for.It is of course extraordinarily unlikely.  But the point is that it's not impossible.  Skill dominates over luck in Chess, which is obvious to everyone including Garfield, but Garfield is the first person I know of who said, "Yes, but skill isn't everything in Chess.  There is still luck."  It's a counter-intuitive yet I think profoundly true observation.  And in some sense, the Chess world had already recognized this.  It's why they don't decide a championship with just one game.[/QUOTE]

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