Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="mythusmage" data-source="post: 2799119" data-attributes="member: 571">But the implications and consequences that arise from the theory could be very interesting. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin&nbsp; &nbsp; :D"&nbsp; data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />To address your first point. Gaming as gaming does cover a lot of territory. Though I suspect gaming theory could be simplified if people would focus on the elements all games have in common. But since there are many types of gaming folks apparently feel it necessary to compose all inclusive hypotheses taking up paragraphs. Instead of looking for the simplest formulation that covers games as a whole.As to your second. Arthur Conan Doyle came up with this formulation of Occam's Razor, &quot;Once you've eleminated the impossible whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the answer.&quot; To put it another way, The solution incorporating all relevant factors is usually the best.Now, if the vastly more complicated theory has greater predictive power than the simpler one, this indicates one thing. The more complicated theory needs a rewrite. A good theory is, at worst, complex. Meaning it is made up of simple parts and can be broken down into simple parts again. Complicated means it's made up of simple parts, but it can't be broken down into simple parts again.So when formulating an hypothesis you need to do one thing, keep it as simple as possible.Another thing to remember is that an hypothesis becomes complicated because the author is trying to account for matters that don't strictly need to be explicitely covered, when they are implicitly covered in the base hypothesis itself.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="mythusmage, post: 2799119, member: 571"] But the implications and consequences that arise from the theory could be very interesting. :D To address your first point. Gaming as gaming does cover a lot of territory. Though I suspect gaming theory could be simplified if people would focus on the elements all games have in common. But since there are many types of gaming folks apparently feel it necessary to compose all inclusive hypotheses taking up paragraphs. Instead of looking for the simplest formulation that covers games as a whole. As to your second. Arthur Conan Doyle came up with this formulation of Occam's Razor, "Once you've eleminated the impossible whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the answer." To put it another way, The solution incorporating all relevant factors is usually the best. Now, if the vastly more complicated theory has greater predictive power than the simpler one, this indicates one thing. The more complicated theory needs a rewrite. A good theory is, at worst, complex. Meaning it is made up of simple parts and can be broken down into simple parts again. Complicated means it's made up of simple parts, but it can't be broken down into simple parts again. So when formulating an hypothesis you need to do one thing, keep it as simple as possible. Another thing to remember is that an hypothesis becomes complicated because the author is trying to account for matters that don't strictly need to be explicitely covered, when they are implicitly covered in the base hypothesis itself. [/QUOTE]

Verification