thread: 2011-05-11 : The Un-frickin-welcome
On 2011-05-11, Zac in Virginia wrote:
If we were talking about straight-up fiction, this wouldn't be so difficult to grok, imo. (said the latecomer... ^_^)
I was watching House, MD recently, and there's this bit where Dr. Cutty's pregnant surrogate has complications, and needs an emergency C-section that will endanger her life.
The alternative is that the baby will definitely die, but the surrogate would be somewhat better off having a stillbirth than the C-section.
Cutty makes a gamble - she'd rather have the baby live, so she pushes for the C-section - and both baby and surrogate survive. Then the surrogate says that her brush with death (courtesy of the C-section) has made her decide to keep the baby, and not pass it off to Cutty.
Cutty gnashes her teeth, pulls her hair; cue the high strains on them violins!
When there are dice involved in a game, we take very literal gambles. When there are not dice involved in a game, those risks are more hidden, maybe, but there's still a gamble involved by doing anything. It's related to Sorcerer's "fail forward/no whiffing"; it's related to AW's "Say/do what honesty/integrity demands". In Polaris (my almost-diceless example), the Mistaken's job is to make the Heart fail, break, and die. Cue the violins! :)
Just because nobody is happy about an outcome doesn't mean that it's the wrong outcome. A game that can't do that is a game that can't nail risk, reward, and consequences.
