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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9682179" data-attributes="member: 6690965">Yeah, that's pretty good. The point about solvability/optimization is too small, but it's a start. It's certainly better than this:Competition is a tool, not the point, challenge is necessary to reach the appropriate state, but not a metric that can be maximized for greater success. The point is to present the player with interesting decisions and allow those decisions to be evaluated. To be interesting, the decision must not be obvious or arbitrary; simple optimization cases are generally obvious, and really only shine as displays of skill over extended time as fatigue sets in. If the decisions is as well made by flipping a coin or tossing a die as by a player picking something, it also has no value.The bit that keeps getting cast as "winning" is evaluation: what was the quality of the player's decisions? Did they achieve the desired outcome? The bit that's important here is not actually whether the player "won," it's whether the player can see the impact their decisions had and can reason through a counterfactual. What's important is that decision be made in service of some goal, and the analysis of that goal lives outside the player themselves. The player should be able to learn from the experience; what could they have done differently, and how can they change their play to do better in future? Then you just sort of do that forever; get in a novel situation, make choices, learn about the impact of those choices. I sort of understand why that looks so compatible with narrativism at a glance, but you need evaluation and direction to be playing a game in a way that I think is somewhat in conflict with the "playing to find out" question. We're both there to see what the board looks like, but we're employing opposing processes to get there, and leaving with different information.So, the thing is, I actually think I'm just being more judicious about trying to fulfill the same goal as other proponents (or perhaps opponents, if we're primarily united by objecting to fail forward mechanics) here. Fundamentally, I think our primary difference is in how much stock we put in GMs as designers. I think they're pretty bad and hoard player agency much tighter and thus have much stricter system side demands; if you're using a much less calibrated scale for measuring player impact, then it just doesn't matter.[USER=7025577]@Enrahim[/USER] brought up Fluxx earlier, a game I will happily never play again, but many people do. It's mostly random, has really limited impact per decision, and despite presenting as a wildly changing game that never plays the same way twice, breaks down into pretty clearly repeated play patterns that provide a pretty similar experience game to game. I would legitimately choose not to play a game over playing a game of Fluxx, but it's sold quite broadly and is a commercial success, and many people enjoy it. Presumably they're significantly less homed in on my concerns, and even to the degree they care about gameplay, probably care a lot less than I do.That's fundamentally what I think is going on here. You're getting what I suppose we could call a "gamist" criticism, coming from a perspective that's concerned their decisions are being rendered arbitrary. I'm just going a step further and pointing out yet more ways that can occur and proposing solutions there, because I am bought in a layer deeper. I don't think we actually need criticism to be complete and pure to be valid. Surely someone can have a little concern that the gameplay doesn't look good, in much the same way I'm not completely willing to compromise what a given mechanic is modeling?</blockquote>

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