thread: 2005-04-25 : Technical Agenda
On 2005-04-29, John Kim wrote:
Vincent wrote: If you want to talk about technical simulationism more generally, you have to back up to the comment I made about that: strictly representational rules are necessarily insensitive to social situation. "Socially destructive" is one case of insensitivity.
I don't follow this. As far as I can tell, whether the rules are representational or not has nothing to do with sensitivity to social situation. Whether a power is representational or not, it is at the social level a power used by real players. i.e. Suppose my rules balance power between players. They can do this either (1) representationally by balancing the power of elements that the players' control; or (2) non-representationally by balancing some sort of meta-game power. Whether they represent or not, the question for social situation is how they affect the players.
So, for example, suppose there is a rule which gives one player a huge amount of power and the ability to dominate the game. Let's presume this is socially insensitive. Now, it could be either representational (i.e. the in-game elements he controls are overly powerful) or non-representational (i.e. the player gets a monopoly on a narration resource).
The simple proof of this is that I can make a representational mechanic into a non-representational mechanic, and vice-versa. For example, I can trivially assert that there is in-game a mystical "Convergence" quality that characters have in the world of Dogs in the Vineyard. This corresponds to unassigned Relationship dice.
