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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1899533" data-attributes="member: 812">EB: Good points, all, and I certainly favour a reductionist sort of way of comprehending distinctions -- sometimes taking it too far, no question.But in this case I think where we're disagreeing is really on the side of "Is this distinction important to me?"To you, it seems, it's not very important, and so for you the differences I'm drawing are slight.To me they're a big deal. Not because I'm determined to live my life by these principles, but rather because I've noticed time and again that I don't enjoy video games, or indeed most board games, OR jigsaw puzzles. But I love D&D. I wondered why that was. I used to think it was just the competition aspect, but many video games aren't particularly competitive and I'm still not very fond of them, so I've been poking around with my brain to try and figure out what quality it is about these activities that turns me off. And I think it's puzzle-solving. I think that fundamentally I don't get much enjoyment out of finding the "correct" solution to any given problem. And the activities in that list have correct solutions. There are correct plays (as determined by the designers of the system) and incorrect plays. Chess is, from this point of view, the same TYPE of activity as solving a jigsaw puzzle -- just with a very much larger number of options to choose from (8 to the power of 30, it turns out, for the average chess game).When I play RPGs, I'm not engaging in a more or less complex form of puzzle-solving. I'm not looking to choose a correct option from among a set of those provided. I'm just making up a story with my friends. That story can go ANYWHERE. A chess game can only go towards a draw or a victory/loss combination. It can't go anywhere else. A jigsaw puzzle can only go towards completion or frustrated surrender.If my friends and I start in on The Sunless Citadel and they decide instead to start a farm, they can go right ahead and do that. Stuff like that. My players (and I'm sure I'm not alone in this) have a spectacular ability to decide they want to do things I never saw coming -- and they go right ahead and do them.The kinds of computer systems we have nowadays can't allow that sort of behaviour. And somehow I seem to be able sense that and it has always turned me off games and activities of that fundamental nature.Not saying it has to be an important distinction to anyone else. But it is to me.</blockquote>

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