Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8239040" data-attributes="member: 16814">I had a thought this morning, dunno how illuminating it is, but here goes:It occurs to me that there's some similarity in the objectives of GMing, even playing, an RPG and some of the things that surround artificial intelligence.  I'm not talking about simulation of a world, a la a video game, but actually what defines artificial intelligence.  This is a murky line, so, in that regard, is similar to what defines successful approaches to game goals.  I'm sure we're all familiar with the Turing test, but for clarity, it's simply the idea that a system achieves AI when it can hold a conversation with a real person and that person cannot tell they are not conversing with another real person.  This is muddy, but I bring it up because of one of the refutations, or criticisms, of the Turing test seems to have some similarities to the topics discussed here -- the Chinese room.For those unfamiliar, the concept here is that you have a sealed room, where you communicate through an input where you insert things written in Chinese (and this is just the original example, it can be any language), and then the receive a response, also in Chinese, that is so realistic that one can be convinced that there's an actual Chinese speaker in the room.  In reality, the concept is that there's a program, presented as a man in the room, who has a detailed set of responses in books (memory/storage) and just looks up the input in the book and responds with the listed output.  If these books are sufficiently detailed and structured, then the result is indistinguishable from a native speaker, even though the man/computer does not actually speak Chinese.So, what's my point?  To start, in a number (most? all?) of the approaches, the GM is the man in the room.  The job is to take the inputs from the players (action declarations, questions, etc.) and provide a response that feels like it represents a world so well as to fool the receiver into thinking/feeling that it is real.  The obvious difference here is that we see the man in the room, and we know the 'world' is make-believe, but still this is the fundamental goal, I think, of RPGs -- to feel like/convince yourself that the action/world/story you're playing has some reality.  And, now, we get to my point -- various approaches to GMing are built on both how the instructions "in the room" are encoded and also how these operations are obfuscated so as to increase the level of "convincingness."The goal that's based on the GM as the central font of fiction for the setting/resolution of actions is much closer, in effect, to the original Chinese room throught experiment.  The GM is receiving the inputs and providing outputs in a way to make the players feel like they're interacting with a "real" world.  I think a large problem in these discussions is that the GMs have convinced themselves of this as well, and it's hard to step back at look at the role clinically.  Still, this is, obviously, an effective approach to generating the "feel" sought.  In this example, the GM is using a strong set of "instructions" to respond to inputs -- the prep or conception of the fiction based on prep and forethought.  The GM has put a lot of work into their instruction books and so is creating responses to inputs that have a coherence and "feel" that is convincing (as always, I'm assuming competent and good faith play).Other approaches, such as story now, modify this in various ways.  They focus more on an algorithmic instruction set rather than a detailed one.  This produces results, but those results are far more dependent on the inputs because the algorithm doesn't have a detailed set of instructions/responses and so must create based on input.  In both cases, there are large windows into the room where players can actually watch the operations, if they're inclined.  Or, they can not look in the windows and focus on the outputs.  I think a lot of discussions here get bogged down in claims that you can see through the window of approach 2, but not through approach 1, when, in reality, the windows are just in different places, or look into different parts of the room.This makes sense to me, and seems to put the different approaches into the same place -- attempting to model/create/describe a world that feels "real" to the players.  It addresses the different approaches, and how they work, within the analogy to the Chinese room.  It, to me, also explains why it's difficult to grasp the differences in approach if you're unwilling to look critically at how your chosen approach works.  For me, I use a lot of different instruction sets in my rooms, depending on the game I want to play and what I want out of it.  None of them are creating an actual "real" world, just like the Chinese room doesn't create an actual "real" Chinese speaker, but we can all hope to pass our own Turing tests, right?</blockquote>

Verification