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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9708150" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I have been told (by non-professionals, so take it with a grain of salt) that I might have neurodivergent traits, so it's not entirely surprising that you see a similarity there. I would not call that "cynical" personally; that seems far too harsh. Instead, I would say that it seems cavalier about the problems that can--and in my experience consistently do--arise.There is no word prior to the disagreement, yes. But once we finally discover that there's a huge disagreement that needs to be reconciled, we have to go through the painful, laborious process of turning unwritten into written, so that we can reconcile it. When it is unwritten, unspoken, invisible, it's not possible to reconcile those deep disagreements because we have no words to express them.How do you then resolve a deep disagreement where person 1 says "A" and means <X> but person 2 says "A" and means <Y>? The differences are entirely obscured by not having words to express them.Well. I was more meaning how we've had to do things like spend 500+ posts hashing out what "simulation" means before we can even begin having a conversation of any utility.I don't see how it's not utterly essential to this topic. Those strong opinions are where the aforementioned "person 1 says 'A' and means <X> but person 2 says 'A' and means <Y>" situations arise. If strongly-held opinions cannot, even in principle, be reconciled--if person 2 will never, under any circumstance, ever accept that 'A' should mean <X> and not <Y> even under limitations--then person 2 is unwilling to cooperate with others. The only result they'll ever accept is total capitulation to their opinions. That's an insoluble situation, and thus, such people absolutely should not be playing any game, TTRPG or not.Certainly more than "cannot play games". They'll almost certainly struggle with all parts of socializing in our world. There's a joke I'm tempted to crack here but it might run afoul of bringing IRL topics into game discussion.They're in a stronger position because how can you tell them they're wrong when there's no information to base that on?It's stronger by way of being almost totally immune to refutation.I mean, maybe they do, but general conversation isn't what is most relevant here, is it? It's how we resolve ambiguous situations. That's what gaming is....kind of about? If we could just declare resolutions to ambiguities, we'd truly be doing pure improv theater (or freeform roleplay, more or less the same thing). Relying on unwritten, unspoken, invisible rules in order to resolve ambiguities is extremely likely to, sooner or later, produce an ambiguity where critical parts of what make it ambiguous are obscured behind the things we have no words for because they've been offloaded into the "invisible rulebooks". That's when the nightmare begins.It frankly generalizes to other things too but it's most effective in gaming circles and other computer-related fields. It's risky (in that people may be very mean), but shockingly effective. People driven by righteous indignation to correct others' errors are truly a very driven bunch.</blockquote>

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