thread: 2011-04-12 : A background in Principled Freeform
On 2011-04-16, William Burke (not a monkey) wrote:
Oh, I forgot my actual point. The thing I find fascinating about this is that, without actual primary research, it becomes impossible to judge how "freeformy" a game is—even asking the players themselves won't always give you the real answer, because they're not necessarily consciously aware of it! In fact, as soon as I brought up the fundamentally negotiated nature of play, we discovered all sorts of holes in our consensus that we were letting slide before, but now, with sovereign authority, we ended up discussing appropriate responses and even writing new mechanics for places where we couldn't easily agree! So blatantly acknowledging the freeform nature of a game can sometimes set it back.
