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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5105711" data-attributes="member: 4937">No.  The point of short hand is to allow two people to discuss something without belaboring the same material over and over again.  That is not the same as aiding understanding.  Shorthand is infamous for creating misunderstanding: "Too big to fail.", "You can't legislate morality.", "The exception proves the rule.", etc.  Many more will occur to you if you brainstorm.  They are all shorthand that have particular meanings and which are possibly true in a particular context, but which are frequently misunderstood by observers who aren't familiar with the larger point that the short axiom stands for and commonly used in ways which are falicious.Because it allows insiders to communicate information in shorthand without belaboring points and explaining themselves over and over.  I want to talk about how PnP RPGs are adopting conventions of cRPGs.  Here is a list of some of them that occur to me.  Let's call those 'video gamist conventions' or 'videogamey' or whatever so I don't have to keep repeating my list. I'm not responcible for what you don't understand.You've already answered your own question.I'm not responsible for what you get pissed off about.  Assuming that you are being honest, it means that we both see some element of the game which reminds us of conventions most commonly associated with videogames.   We can then proceed from that agreement toward trying to identify the common threads that run under those perception.  That is true of just about anything.  Virtually every noun referring to an abstract concept is capable of being misunderstood and we risk completely miscommunicating.  And yet, there are 1000's or 10's of thousands of such nouns and we use them all the time.  I can speak of computer code I read as being elegant, readable, clean, functional, readable, extensible, or being spaghetti code.  I'm describing something about my impression of the code which may well (if I know alot about code) have a real basis in fact.  But defining succintly and unambigiously those attributes of the code is not easy.  We can then procede to talk about different approaches to making this code 'more readable' or what not.  It's a meaningless abstract term, but two programmers looking at the same problem might agree, "Yeah, that's more readable."  What does that mean?  I read it better and I have the impression others might read it better.  Do you define it exactly the same way?  Maybe not?  But readability of code is important concept that deserves discussion nonetheless, and even if it doesn't, it can be discussed because I can put a label on the idea.Where this approaches the absurd though, is you are here complaining about not being able to know if we are using the same definition in a thread were definitions have been provided.  At that point the claim that you don't know what is under discussion is surreal.</blockquote>

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