thread: 2009-05-04 : Dice and Cloud, the Death Threats thread
On 2009-05-05, Mark W wrote:
The more you spin this out, the clearer it gets, but the less I find it particularly interesting. Isn't this whole concept basically a way of saying that whenever fiction refers to cues, or cues to fiction, somebody has to make a decision about how and whether a change in one translates into a change in the other? No matter how explicit your rules are, as soon as there's fiction, there's a judgment call. How high does the ground have to be to be higher? The closer you get to specificity, the closer you get to cue-to-cue looping. The more you rely on judgment, the closer you get to fiction-fiction looping.
This is the Popcorn Rule. It's why fiction games work at all. And honestly, I'm not sure I've ever seen play that didn't have arrows going in both directions EXCEPT where there was no functional social/aesthetic commitment to play.
Am I out in the weeds? Is this even a problem in design and play?
