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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8498588" data-attributes="member: 71699">This is something I find janky, but you'll have to bear with me for a moment.When Chess is played, in potential is every possible game. Suppose I dutifully record the moves and the game concludes. I now have a distinct linear narrative. Or to put it another way, on what grounds do we say it is not a story? Perhaps not a very good story, but that is a qualitatively different matter. The story will include the cues, right? The board was like this. The pieces started thus. This pawn moved here. A few seconds later, that one moved there.Take a richer game, record it, and we have another - better - story. In a sense, games are mechanisms for generating stories. In the phase space of a game is every possible story that can be told with those symbols and dynamics.Saying then that fiction is one thing and game cues another is from this perspective really odd. If the cues are not symbolising the fiction, what are they doing!? When I erase the cliff, it means it's gone. Or it means nothing. But this isn't right. In games the game state matters. The rules address the state. Some rules only come into play in given states. Any supposed cue/rule separation is also doubtful.I think so, yes. I think the cues are important in themselves as symbols, and fiction adheres to them. Erasing the secret door and drawing an unbroken wall has meaning. Games as artifacts are tools. If the cue isn't the fiction then a mistake has been made: we have the wrong cue.Chess can be played without board and pieces, but then all that is done is the cues are neurophysiological. MtG can't be because cue state (hidden, random, deck sequence) matters and that can't be replicated in players' minds.I think we can say that map doesn't matter in some games, but we can find cues that do matter. Character-state, often.Agreed it doesn't follow just from the rules. It is the rules as participants grasp and uphold them. That's also true of boardgames, and it's acknowledged that human players will often inaccurately or opinionatedly apply the rules.It goes both ways. Cues are tools of the ritual. Wield the tool one way and participants applying the rules know something happens, another way, something else. The dice come up 7, that drives change.</blockquote>

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