I don't think I was saying that at all. I didn't say anything about harmony, nor about the various art forms you mentioned.
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A game ability for players to create contrived outcomes shortcircuits game play. They are only applicable to rules for shared storybuilding. We've been through this before. You don't want an RPG you want a set of rules to tell a story with other people. That isn't role playing or what Dungeons & Dragons is designed for.
I don't agree with this. At any given point in D&D, the options open to the players are, in practice, unlimited. For instance, if the GM describes the PCs walking across a stony ground, the players have whatever options they can think of to investigage stones, pick them up, try and use them to advantage (eg throwing them at nearby things to see what happens, etc).
That's absolutely false. How can you possibly justify endless reams of different books for game element constructions with this position? At every given point players can make a choice based on anything they can imagine (a finite actuality), but games aren't about choices. They are about options and D&D has billions, maybe trillions, but they are still finite in number, even if only discerned from the referees responses and never ultimately known to the players.
Fiction is not a narrative term that limits thought experiments to liteary theory. Quine, for instance, one of the greatest of American analytic philosophers and in no sense a literary theorist, was writing in Word and Object and other books 50-odd years ago about the fictional character of thought experiments, counterfactual claims, and the like, and their relationship to scientific method.
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You and both know we have degrees in Philosophy. We've both read Ayer, W.V.O., probably Rorty, and other relevant to the discussion. I don't need a primer. Quine believed he reached an absolute conclusion. A certainty. He believed he proved logic to be ultimately indecipherable. Logic pattern = game patterns and game play being pattern recognition as it is, he wouldn't advocate for anything outside literary theory either. (Well he might have in the 50s, but not anyone after the Positivists) All this went down in the last years of the 1970s and by the early 80s certain English departments became untenable to be around given some of their professors believing authorship was some "all-knowledge" everyone did. That the universe was built with text and all that. It isn't -necessarily- so. Our Indie scene is an off shoot of some latter-day culture warriors still battling for the denouncement through ignorance of pattern recognition. Except we lose everything interesting, unique, cool, fun, and self-identifying to games when we follow the Big Model (a paint-by-numbers copy of post-structural theory found in some Literature departments).
Fantasy / Reality. That is the real divide games must maintain for players.
Not fiction / non-fiction. These are referential terms.
No one is claiming D&D is depicts reality. Games don't depict reality. They are the things in and of themselves players play. They don't refer to reality when playing them except at the loss of paying attention to the game.
Accepting Quine's vocabulary would be like going to the root of the divergence of the post-philosophy movement and claiming we should begin on only his side for our discussion. Why would anyone start a debate by denying their own position?
(You should know if you don't already, I don't have a position here. Not pro-pattern recognition at least. I'm simply advocating for the rejection of narrative absolutism as has become the contemporary group-think in game theory. Games actually aren't stories.)
