Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9015016" data-attributes="member: 82106">Listen, I hold a degree in mathematics. I'd hoped you wouldn't go there, but... Yes, technically if you have an INFINITE game it can have an infinite number of well-defined game states. There are no such things as infinite games, they do not exist. Therefor this is, at best, a highly theoretical result which might have some utility in, say, game theory, but doesn't apply at all to any actual games in the real world. I'll avoid getting into the deeper muck of mathematical realists and whatnot where some have taken the position that infinity itself does not exist and isn't a valid tool for reasoning about our sort of questions. Naturally I have some fondness for this sort of position, but it does have its own difficulties.Beyond this, the more relevant point is, a game which spelled out every transition specifically, with a discrete rule, would be an INFINITE RULEBOOK, and since infinite rulebooks don't exist, and cannot exist, no game can follow this strategy to being complete! Thus such a game is NECESSARILY CLOSED because that's the only way it can be an actualizable game in the real world, finite numbers of states, thus finite discrete rules. From there its merely an exercise in efficiency to recode those rules in a less voluminous form.No, these are 2 different properties of games! Complete/Incomplete is telling us whether there are instructions (IE procedural rules) covering all situations which may arise within the game state. I contend that Dungeon World has this form of completeness. No matter what the fictional state is, we have a rule which tells us how to proceed.Open/Closed is a separate question. Open games have an infinite possible set of game states, such as RPGs. Closed games have finite states, like Chess. All closed games can potentially be made complete by the application of enough rules. I mean, maybe there's a 'halting problem' here where you can construct a game who's states cannot all provably be reached or something...No, you need to pay attention to the terminology, maybe it wasn't clearly articulated. I thought these usages were introduced in sufficiently clear ways, but probably not. In any case, it is my contention that a Complete but Open game can be structured by using a simple general rule which has the property of closure, that is you can chain (or nest, I won't go into how these are equivalent) the output of one application of such a rule into the input of the next. RPGs of this sort, like DW, then typically employ exception based design to allow the addition of a richer set of tools without breaking the system's complete nature.</blockquote>

Verification