thread: 2014-07-15 : Procedure, Components, Object, Strategy, Style
On 2014-07-16, Josh W wrote:
Ok, here's what I think about strategy and style; these are play elements that in their specification have to go through the player's intelligence or personality.
If you fully determine the strategies that should be played in the game, you have noughts and crosses; player behaviour is a solved problem, which makes it a matter of your capacity to implement rote behaviour.
Style and strategy are to an extent what the players bring, and so they require the space for them to remain open, but on the other side, if you give too little help in creating them, then there's a lot of pointless search on the player's part.
So if you define mechanics in such a way that "use your judgement" "consider what makes you feel scared and cold" are the instructions, then these are implicitly statements conditional on a players internal states, (to get a little bit cybernetic for a moment), they only ever partially determine the players role and their contribution.
Strategy and style are just two cuts of a more general category of "things that the players must bring to the game (for it to work, for them to have a satisfying role in it), but can be helped to bring".
This makes JMW go "Woops, I mean explicitly, not implicitly"
