NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8628922" data-attributes="member: 82106">I wouldn't presume to judge the value of an analytical process to others. For myself, as basically an 'engineer of games', I am currently not seeing how I would use it to map my approach to either designing or running a game. That is, I see these as a potential list of 'ingredients', and that's interesting, but I don't understand how, for example: Challenges 2 and 3 are really distinct. The 'challenges' thus seem a bit like "a list of suggestions of ways players could be engaged." 1 and 2 seem much more general and 'game universal' than 3-5 as well. The 'dimensions' don't seem IMHO to form a coherent set with any shared properties at all. That is 'strategic' and 'tactical' speak to 'scale' in terms of either of 2 things, either in-world time and scale, or time and scale in terms of play (IE strategic deals with the course of play over many sessions, tactical to considerations within the current session, or possibly the next one). 'Cultural and Magical' seem almost like just adjectives that could describe various features of the milieu. I mean, OK, I can kind of see how 'magical' can have a SCALE (less to more magic) and that could be taken as a 'dimension', but I'm not sure how that really relates to the structure and process of an RPG, except maybe in a large sense of "a setting that is described as being highly realistic will require framing devices which adhere to its genre in order to maintain suspension of disbelief", but the same kinds of TECHNIQUES are still applicable as they would be to say high fantasy.While I agree that player contributions to the game may be met with either acceptance and a cooperative 'building on' or they could be met with 'lets challenge that according to the game process' I wonder what to call that, or if it is independent of other considerations enough to be a dimension in and of itself.The last one seems fairly concrete. I think it is again a matter of there always being a high degree of interdependency between elements.So, I would say that in order to create a sort of 'dimensional space' in which either designs or actual play practice could be placed you would want the dimensions to be INDEPENDENT (IE you can pick any value within the range of options regardless of values for other dimensions). A second criterion is that they matter; that is, if nothing really depends on one of these dimensions, then why bother to analyze it? We would obviously not care about what brands of beer are consumed during play, for example (I mean, we will care when we play...). I think another aspect here is consistency. That is, at whatever scale our analysis is operating, at that scale each dimension should be univalent, if it constantly takes on different values across the scale, then there's not much we can say about it in a theoretical analysis of this type. Instead in that case you would want to do a PROCESS based analysis (which might be modeled as an evolving trajectory in a state space if your dimensions are done right).As you can see, my thought processes in this are pretty hard analytical engineering/scientific tool stuff. Psychological models can be significant here, but it is in terms of how they illuminate the human elements of play. Purely philosophical matters are IMHO pretty irrelevant in most cases as we are dealing with real practical matters, though I'd temper that by saying that perhaps certain thinkers who dealt largely with matters close to the everyday world (Weber perhaps comes to mind) may have some relevance here.</blockquote>

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