We tried baseball and it didn't work

[Tobias]

I searched, but didn't find a reference to this yet. If it's already here, my apologies.

http://www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/jatBaseball.htm

Greets,
Tobias

[Valamir]

Yeah, I think I first encountered this on the BW site.

Its pretty much an exact description of what all game designers have to put up with...programmers or table top.

[Ron Edwards]

Heh. This is, surprisingly, precisely in the correct forum. Great post, Tobias.

Best, Ron

[Callan S.]

My god, that's devistating in the way it's funny. I think in part its talking about people latching onto a technique, like scaling (what the hell is that, anyway) and having it there without any reflection on whether its needed - and of course demonstrating the considerable fallout from that. You don't often see articles which talk about using stuff without reflection.

It's also got that sort of table top 'oh, they couldn't mean X, so well have Y of course' "logic" path. Eventually resulting in the delusionary conclusion that they had actually played the game, have actually experienced its qualties. An experience they haven't had, of course.

This was inspired by computer programmer culture? Wow - the parralels!

[Filip Luszczyk]

Only, the experience is always personal, affected by the group's specifics and play circumstances. There's no universal experience in playing any game, I think - at most, you can get something close enough for the differences not to be easily noticeable. So, I suppose the game's qualities need to be rather broad, or (almost) nobody but the author will be able to actually have an experience that fits the scope of his design goals.

For example, we had the "they couldn't mean X" logic in our DitV games, as we approached the system with some assumptions and part of the rules wasn't written in a way that would make it apparent to us that the assumptions are wrong. The variation we played as a result, however, was functional and generally fun (i.e. fun enough to overshadow most of the other stuff I've been playing back then). Whether we've been experiencing the core qualities of the game despite our misunderstanding of the text, however, I can't be sure as I have not much to compare.

On the other hand, I guess there's no certain way to have a set of rules that would be perfectly unambiguous for anyone.