thread: 2011-08-01 : The Unreliable Currency series from 2010
On 2011-08-08, Josh W wrote:
Ok go one more step ahead:
From
Resource A spent->action
to
/->resource B changed
Resource A spent->action->dice rolled
->resource B unchanged
Actions to change Resource A don't reliably transfer into changes to Resource B, there's uncertainty in it.
Sometimes that uncertainty can be quantified in terms of probability or risk, (dice systems) sometimes it can't (unprincipled player judgement, or judgement based on unknown principles).
Vincent can speak for himself, but I think it's no prob to have two main types of unreliable currency; either way the person making decisions on the basis of them knows that the changes he's expecting are not gauranteed to happen, unless he tries something to "fix the odds"/insure the principles are nailed down.
That's the important part right? The experience of the people making decisions based on the game's structure?
When they put a bit of game mechanics in motion, is it going to take the changes all the way, or could it get stopped part way through?
Also some control-theory stuff maps straight onto this discussion without any problems I can see. It uses some of the same vocabulary in the same ways, and just adds stuff. Like that little diagram up there is a rough transition diagram for a non-deterministic state machine, it's just a discription of potential cause and effect in a game system, nothing special, but that double interpretation means you can consider what other states could be used to choose between outputs and make it more deterministic etc.
