thread: 2012-12-28 : Positioning: Disagreements?
On 2012-12-30, Josh W wrote:
Anyway, to do something more helpful than being pointlessly technical, my understanding of the value of "currency", is that you can do some cute mapping of the tradeoffs and patterns of change that a game assumes by it's structures, and how those interact with choices.
In the less interesting cases, stuff like optimal builds/trap choices etc, and in more interesting cases, death spirals, run away victories, growing specialisation, sunk cost investments, tipping points etc. All that cool stuff about how someone can implement a system and express a kind of meaning about the game world just by how those different representations feed back into the game world they're representing.
So there's that idea, and one of the categories of stuff that can change is positioning which is all the stuff about characters around the obvious "how much x" "how well can you y" that shapes play but isn't directly about more about implication and soft logic.
And Vincent has blown that last category up to eat everything!
So to try and answer your example, your inventory is a character resource that changes your positioning, in that new actions are possible that weren't possible before. It might also change your effectiveness, allowing you to do things better or worse than before.
Currency would then be exactly that thing you described, the passing of changes from
is being disarmed->looses club->it no longer makes sense to do things with the club
but to get into more detail, perhaps that only lasts for a certain amount of time, because you don't have a very rigid inventory resource in the game, and so later on a conversation happens like
"ok I hit him with the club"
"but wait a minute someone disarmed you earlier!"
"yeah but he had a few minutes to pick it back up again"
"fair enough"
and the game continues
vs
"yeah but you didn't say at the time/write it down on your sheet"
"ok I rugby tackle him to the floor"
This also makes me wonder about these long chains of positioning affecting positioning:
Call that currency?
Restrict currency to more explicit game operations?
I favour the latter just on the basis of preserving too different ways of thinking about how things change in games.
