Do you understand the difference between "involve" and "fundamental"?
As an example - making a typical birthday cake involves all-purpose flour made from wheat. But all-purpose flour made from wheat is not fundamental to cakes - you can change out the "all purpose" or the "wheat" for something else, with some thought and understanding of cakes, and the experience may be slightly different, but still be recognizable and enjoyable as a birthday cake.
Oh I thought the phrasing was "core", not "fundamental". Weren't you the one telling people not change the terms? For my money, fundamental is a notably more extreme term than core. For example, religions have core tenets, but those might not be the same tenets someone would consider genuinely fundamental to that religion - I'd say core was usually a bit wider in scope and less extreme. YMMV, but those seem different to me.
I don't think there have been any examples so far that really support "shared (or alternatively easily shareable) imagination is core to RPGs" as being untrue in the present day. It seems to be inarguable that it is true with TT RPGs, as people have only retreated from attempting to argue otherwise. There seems only to be a suggestion with videogames that are called RPGs with highly variably levels of persuasiveness, require sufficiently less imagination that it isn't "core". I would say, based on BG3, we most assuredly are not there yet.
Also I don't think that's a good analogy - I think "flour" would be a good analogy, not a specific flour. But has anyone ever made a good analogy online? I know I haven't! Possibly not so not much of a critique.
I feel like once we get to the point with videogames where it does become true then maybe the real issue is that RPG stops being a useful term for videogames. Because that seems to be all we're discussing in real-world applications - videogames - and some people would say RPG has already become so misused with videogames as to be meaningless.
(As an aside I've definitely had a couple of cakes which challenged the definition of cake in a very, very, very bad way so I may be biased by this example.)
Sure and I’m not arguing, but that’s not particularly different than how optimizers treat d&d.
Absolutely it is different in my experience.
I've never met an optimizer IRL who wasn't also reasonably imaginative and didn't engage in roleplaying (contrary to stereotypes). I'm capable of being and sometimes am a huge optimizer. So are some - perhaps most - of the best RPG designers in gaming history.
Being an optimizer and extreme metagaming are completely different things. Dungeon World provides an easy example of how - if you want to metagame DW, you want to make as many rolls as possible, so you can fail as many rolls as possible in order to gain XP. But optimizers don't actually play like that, at least I've never seen it happen, have you?
Whereas that's precisely what videogamer players routinely do. If you're "roleplaying" in a lot of modern videogames, but you want to actually progress, you often have to do counter-intuitive stuff that doesn't fit the RP at all well, and doesn't even support verisimilitude within the game context (I can provide specific examples at boring length if needed).
You would be having to engage in imagination to decide what to do and what you do would be incorporated into the game via the ai.
If that's "imagination", all human activity involves imagination and so that's kind of a moot point isn't it? Also I strongly disagree that letting AI decide what to incorporate based on your actions involves imagination. You could literally have a brainless robot, or even a physical machine perform the same actions and the AI would respond just the same.
