Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="prosfilaes" data-source="post: 7344126" data-attributes="member: 40166">Whenever you're talking about &quot;why&quot; something happened, you're talking about alternate universes. &quot;Why did the lightbulb break? Because you dropped it&quot; presumes in an alternate universe where you didn't drop it, it wouldn't have broken. Given the number of lightbulbs we deal with, that's an easy statement to make, but we don't have a bunch of RPG industries that we can test under controlled industries; we just have history, and our guesses about what would have happened. As&nbsp; [MENTION=19675]Dannyalcatraz[/MENTION] points out, we do have data from other industries to look at, but 60-70% is far from the certainty of &quot;lightbulbs don't break unless they're dropped&quot;.If it would have happened anyway, than D&amp;D didn't cause it. That's what to cause means. This is an example of the post hoc fallacy.I don't see how D&amp;D's influence being pervasive adds to its staying power. It means there's so many slightly different alternatives that it's hard for D&amp;D to distinguish itself from the crowd. It's like when Coke was losing market share and the company was flailing about for something to do; part of the problem was that colas are hard to distinguish between each other so it's all advertising. The more you can buy games that play like D&amp;D, the harder it is for D&amp;D to stand out because of its game play.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="prosfilaes, post: 7344126, member: 40166"] Whenever you're talking about "why" something happened, you're talking about alternate universes. "Why did the lightbulb break? Because you dropped it" presumes in an alternate universe where you didn't drop it, it wouldn't have broken. Given the number of lightbulbs we deal with, that's an easy statement to make, but we don't have a bunch of RPG industries that we can test under controlled industries; we just have history, and our guesses about what would have happened. As [MENTION=19675]Dannyalcatraz[/MENTION] points out, we do have data from other industries to look at, but 60-70% is far from the certainty of "lightbulbs don't break unless they're dropped". If it would have happened anyway, than D&D didn't cause it. That's what to cause means. This is an example of the post hoc fallacy. I don't see how D&D's influence being pervasive adds to its staying power. It means there's so many slightly different alternatives that it's hard for D&D to distinguish itself from the crowd. It's like when Coke was losing market share and the company was flailing about for something to do; part of the problem was that colas are hard to distinguish between each other so it's all advertising. The more you can buy games that play like D&D, the harder it is for D&D to stand out because of its game play. [/QUOTE]

Verification