372 réponses à ce sujet

[AlanC9]

If this thread's going to go off the rails, can we do standards of evidence instead of empathy? I didn't think the empathy thread worked well last time.

[In Exile]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

I think the outcomes of its application is a lousy way to judge a standard of evidence.

Not at all. In PM, we talked about your 'goal' in conversation. You mentioned it was to minimize your rate of error. All that is to say is that your evaluative standard relates to how well the system you have construct meets the aim you started with when you wanted to construct the system.

If we are to evaluate a standad of evidence, we have to ask why we have a standard of evidence to begin with. Presumably, it is to demaracate between events in some fashion or other. If a particular standard fails to distinguish between anything, it is not a good standard at all.

Coming back to the issue of tone indicators in DA2 and off-screen content, if absolutely anything can happen in-game, then I don't see any reason why I should even assuming the game is happening. That is, why can I not think the game is set in the 1960s in a mid-American psychiatric institution and the PC is simply insane? The lucid moments that are not related to the fantastical content of DA:O are merely off-screen. Moreover, each party member is actually insane too. Duncan never dies at Ostagar - the PC halucinates the entire perspective from an ominiscient third person view, and Duncan in fact survives. Alistair's mental instability leads to his belief Duncan is dead, whereas all the party conversations happen with Duncan off-screen.

Duncan, in fact, kills the archdemon too, in all cases. This is why the player continues to view content after "dying" killing the archdemon in the US ending.

The problem with off-screen content is that we can devise essentially any incredibly absurd scenario and say that it has primacy over the game. I do not even see a reason why we ought to play games in the first place if we allow for off-screen imaginative content, because we give the ability to the player to actively overwrite or contradict any sort of content in-game, especially when we combine it with your claim that if there is a conflict between something the PC believes and something the game indicates (like how the PC allegedly said some thing) it must be the interpretation of the PC wins out.

I've said that exact thing before as part of my general denial of the existence of empathy.

Like AlanC9 said this is probably too involved. But let me just say that even if people fully imagine the mental state of others, that does not mean empathy is impossible. It just means it is inaccurate.

[Sylvius the Mad]

AlanC9 wrote...

Again, the intent icons aren't preventing you from getting the full text . Once Bio decided to go with full protagonist VO, you were never going to get that, because they want to write responses that won't fit on the interface and aren't limited to single lines.

That's what they want to do, yes, but there is no requirement that they do it this way.  If we can persuade them that their first choice is somehow unable to achieve their goals (making a good game), then they'll be forced to choose a different approach in future games.

[Piecake]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

AlanC9 wrote...

Again, the intent icons aren't preventing you from getting the full text . Once Bio decided to go with full protagonist VO, you were never going to get that, because they want to write responses that won't fit on the interface and aren't limited to single lines.

That's what they want to do, yes, but there is no requirement that they do it this way.  If we can persuade them that their first choice is somehow unable to achieve their goals (making a good game), then they'll be forced to choose a different approach in future games.

Personally, I'd just find it stupid reading a line of text and then have that repeated to me by my character.  Bit of an immersion killer for me, so I am happy with the change

[Sylvius the Mad]

In Exile wrote...

Not at all. In PM, we talked about your 'goal' in conversation. You mentioned it was to minimize your rate of error. All that is to say is that your evaluative standard relates to how well the system you have construct meets the aim you started with when you wanted to construct the system.

If we are to evaluate a standad of evidence, we have to ask why we have a standard of evidence to begin with. Presumably, it is to demaracate between events in some fashion or other. If a particular standard fails to distinguish between anything, it is not a good standard at all.

There's a difference between whether the standard does what you think it ought do, and whether it produces results you like.

Am I happy that knowledge is impossible?  No.  But given that it's true, I'm glad to be aware of it.

Coming back to the issue of tone indicators in DA2 and off-screen content, if absolutely anything can happen in-game, then I don't see any reason why I should even assuming the game is happening. That is, why can I not think the game is set in the 1960s in a mid-American psychiatric institution and the PC is simply insane? The lucid moments that are not related to the fantastical content of DA:O are merely off-screen. Moreover, each party member is actually insane too. Duncan never dies at Ostagar - the PC halucinates the entire perspective from an ominiscient third person view, and Duncan in fact survives. Alistair's mental instability leads to his belief Duncan is dead, whereas all the party conversations happen with Duncan off-screen.

Duncan, in fact, kills the archdemon too, in all cases. This is why the player continues to view content after "dying" killing the archdemon in the US ending.

The problem with off-screen content is that we can devise essentially any incredibly absurd scenario and say that it has primacy over the game. I do not even see a reason why we ought to play games in the first place if we allow for off-screen imaginative content,

The on-screen content offers stimulus.  It's provides the basis for the off-screen content, which you add only if you would like to.

But it's nonsense to suggest that adding off-screen content is somehow wrong.

because we give the ability to the player to actively overwrite or contradict any sort of content in-game,

I don't allow the player to contradict the on-screen content.  Then, yes, I would wonder why we were bothering to play the game.

If I didn't know better I'd think you were constructing a straw man.

especially when we combine it with your claim that if there is a
conflict between something the PC believes and something the game
indicates (like how the PC allegedly said some thing) it must be the
interpretation of the PC wins out.

The game never does this, though.  Nothing in DAO tells you how the PC delivered a line.  The lines are delivered silently.  You are never given this information.  This is you imagining content, again: you're imagining the NPCs' interpretational standard, and you're imagining their accuracy is applying it.

Like AlanC9 said this is probably too involved. But let me just say that even if people fully imagine the mental state of others, that does not mean empathy is impossible. It just means it is inaccurate.

I don't really want to discuss empathy.  But what this does it defeats your objection to my earlier point.  You're imagining content, and you're doing it repeatedly throughout the game.  As such, it would be inconsistent of you to object to the imagining of content.

[AlanC9]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

That's what they want to do, yes, but there is no requirement that they do it this way.  If we can persuade them that their first choice is somehow unable to achieve their goals (making a good game), then they'll be forced to choose a different approach in future games.

Sure. I'm just saying that arguing against the intent icons if it's the paraphrase that's actually the problem for you is pointless at best. I suppose it could even be counterproductive, if somehow Bio got the idea that intent icons themselves are a problem and so dropped that idea but kept paraphrases.

[AlanC9]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
I don't really want to discuss empathy.  But what this does it defeats your objection to my earlier point.  You're imagining content, and you're doing it repeatedly throughout the game.  As such, it would be inconsistent of you to object to the imagining of content.

Is "imagine" the right word here? I suppose constructing a hypothesis based on limited information is an act of imagination in a sense, but I'm not really comfortable with this usage.

Modifié par AlanC9, 07 décembre 2010 - 07:05 .

[Sylvius the Mad]

AlanC9 wrote...

Sure. I'm just saying that arguing against the intent icons if it's the paraphrase that's actually the problem for you is pointless at best. I suppose it could even be counterproductive, if somehow Bio got the idea that intent icons themselves are a problem and so dropped that idea but kept paraphrases.

I think the way to make the paraphrase system work is to drop the PC VO, but the existence of the intent icons prevents that from working.

I don't want to know what tone the writers intended for a given line, and I don't want to know what the actual line is if I was forced to choose based on the paraphrase.

So, for example, I think I could have fixed all that I thought was wrong with ME just by disabling the PC voice and turning off the subtitles.  But if ME had had intent icons, that wouldn't have worked.

I had been hoping that DA2 would be sufficiently moddable for me to be able to turn off the PC voice, but with the intent icons that doesn't really help.  The intent icons deviate from my ideal design in exactly the same way that the PC voice does.

That said, given the voice I suspect the intent icons will significantly reduce the rate at which I'm surprised by Hawke's lines, so that should serve to put DA2 miles ahead of ME even without modification.  But the icons are still a barrier to making the game perfect that I'd rather wasn't there.

[Sylvius the Mad]

AlanC9 wrote...

Is "imagine" the right word here? I suppose constructing a hypothesis based on limited information is an act of imagination in a sense, but I'm not really comfortable with this usage.

But that's not what he's doing.  Yes, it would make sense for his character to do that with the NPC's reaction and posit reasons why he reacted as he did, but what Exile is doing is imagining the NPC's method of interpretation and based on that concluding that the PC delivered the line in a particular way.

He doesn't have the tool he needs to draw that conclusion (that tool being the NPC's thoughts) so he imagines it.

[AlanC9]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

So, for example, I think I could have fixed all that I thought was wrong with ME just by disabling the PC voice and turning off the subtitles.  But if ME had had intent icons, that wouldn't have worked.

I don't quite see why. ME doesn't have tone because it has Paragon/Renegade. If you can ignore P/R position on the wheel and P/R point awards, can't you ignore the tone icon too?

[AlanC9]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

AlanC9 wrote...

Is "imagine" the right word here? I suppose constructing a hypothesis based on limited information is an act of imagination in a sense, but I'm not really comfortable with this usage.

But that's not what he's doing.  Yes, it would make sense for his character to do that with the NPC's reaction and posit reasons why he reacted as he did, but what Exile is doing is imagining the NPC's method of interpretation and based on that concluding that the PC delivered the line in a particular way.

He doesn't have the tool he needs to draw that conclusion (that tool being the NPC's thoughts) so he imagines it.

Huh? He's trying to model the NPC's thoughts; of course he doesn't have access to them or he wouldn't need to model them in the first place.

[tmp7704]

In Exile wrote...

With the tone indicator, the paraphrase can just be [Sarcasm/Diplomatic icon] ''Your idea was great.''.

This gives you a much clearer notion of what you will be saying, and how you will be saying it.

I think my confusion was caused by the terms being used inconsistently in our discussion -- like, here you use "tone" to call what was earlier referred to as "intent" giving me impression you treat these two terms as the same thing, while Mr.Gaider was listing earlier both the tone and the intent as two separate components. So when you earlier talked about "tone" while referring to the "intent" it threw me off and created impression perhaps you split the "tone" into two separate sub-parts. Anyway that's cleared up now.

It does not make sense to talk about half data being more precise than all data because the full paraphrase (icon + paraphrase) contain both cues for the tone and content.

Please note i'm talking about scenario (created by request made earlier in the thread) in which the player is allowed to turn off the intent icons. In this context the notion that half of the data (the tone) may become unavailable (because the player chose to indeed turn off the icons) does make sense, as far as i can tell.

And this very fact -- that in such theoretical scenario half of the data would go missing -- is said to be reason why we aren't given such option by the game.

[Sylvius the Mad]

AlanC9 wrote...

I don't quite see why. ME doesn't have
tone because it has Paragon/Renegade. If you can ignore P/R position on
the wheel and P/R point awards, can't you ignore the tone icon
too?

Maybe, though just as with the P/R distinction the paraphrases are written with the existence of the tone icon in mind, so they don't give us enough information.

Ad either way, we still need a way to turn off the voice.

AlanC9 wrote...

Huh? He's trying to model the NPC's thoughts; of course he doesn't have access to them or he wouldn't need to model them in the first place.

No, he's trying to model the PC's thoughts, and he's using the NPC's thoughts to do it.

But even if he were trying to model the NPC's thoughts, he doesn't have any information about them.

[PsychoBlonde]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Upsettingshorts wrote...

I suppose I found them fairly shallow by comparison - to use your terminology without dispute - but since I was a teenager when the original Baldur's Gate came out, my standards and expectations weren't quite the same as they are now.

Baldur's Gate isn't meaningfully different from DAO, in terms of how one can play it.

I was more thinking of games like Ultima IV and Wasteland. 

DAGGERFALL!!!

Sorry, I've had that game on the brain today, but it's a prime example of a game where there's almost no explicit interaction so you'd be "free" to imagine anything you wanted at all.  Granted, I kind of got tired of it after the 40th time I was sent to get mummy dust out of a random pile of spaghetti.

Me, I started out in CRPG's playing the old gold-box SSI games.  The very existence of conversation options and plot options when BG came out was like, WHOA!  THIS IS AWESOME!!!  I CAN NOW . . . wait, most of these options suck.  Who wrote this psycho nonsense?  I don't want to go around slapping people!  I wanna be good!  Where's the good option!?  There we go.  AWESOME.

The idea of wanting to play a computer game with inherently limited optionality as if it were a PnP game where you can *imagine* whatever you want is mind-bogglingly silly to me.

[Sylvius the Mad]

PsychoBlonde wrote...

The idea of wanting to play a computer game with inherently limited optionality as if it were a PnP game where you can *imagine* whatever you want is mind-bogglingly silly to me.

I would agree.

I simply dispute that BioWare's games had inherently limited roleplaying options prior to the introduction of the voiced protagonist.

[In Exile]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
There's a difference between whether the standard does what you think it ought do, and whether it produces results you like.

Of course. But what I think a standard of evidence ought to do is to demaracate between states. Allowing off-screen content cannot demarcate between states.

Am I happy that knowledge is impossible?  No.  But given that it's true, I'm glad to be aware of it.

Again, we had this discussion, but your argument is internally inconsistent. The sort of features you need to take as foundational to make the claim that knowlege is impossible undermine the counter-arguments you can make to a standard of evidence that argues that knowledge is possible and continous.

The major problem being , again, being that you cannot use deduction to reach any conclusion without pressuposing it as an ultimate unjustifiable rule, and if you grant this, then there is no reason not to suppose other fundamental unjustifiable rules.

The on-screen content offers stimulus.  It's provides the basis for the off-screen content, which you add only if you would like to.

Except that once you allow this, you allow for a logical contradiction. I brought this up in another thread but we never finished the debate. I will here, shortly.

But it's nonsense to suggest that adding off-screen content is somehow wrong.

Not at all. In fact, it's logically inconsistent to allow for offscreen content.

I don't allow the player to contradict the on-screen content.  Then, yes, I would wonder why we were bothering to play the game.

You do. Remember when we talked about Trask and the background information he gives on you? You told me that what Trask said could very well have been a lie or a fabrication or somehow otherwise mistaken, because your character knows another state of affairs to be true.

What you have done here is endorsed the broad standard of evidence that the ultimate authority in-game is congruency with the personal experience of your PC. There is no reason not to assume that your PC is dreaming, under the influence of magic, or any other set of problems that arise precise as the same kind of logical problems as the brain-in-the-vat.

The problem with the brain-in-the-vat is that it makes all evidence self-referential, and that is quite literally compatible with any possible state you can imagine.

Duncan could be alive because your PC dreamed the scene where he died. Alistair is convinced Duncan is dead, but Alistair is mistaken or delusional (like Trask might have been). You know that Duncan is alive, and your justifiable proof is the off-screen content which is equivalent to as on-screen content as evidence.

If I didn't know better I'd think you were constructing a straw man.

I am not. I am taking you argument to its logical conclusion, which you have not done. It is the same as your insistent that the game rules ought to apply the same to all characters in-game (NPCs, enemies, etc.). There is no logical reason to suppose uniform laws of nature at all. We have clear evidence from our own world that depending on the level of detail of investigation.

Your insistence that a setting has to be consistent in this way is equivalent to your claim that off-sceen content is not a problem while jointly holding that the only final world on in-game content is the PC. Both are things you (by your own standard) hold not because they are logically required, but because they justify your preference.

The game never does this, though.  Nothing in DAO tells you how the PC delivered a line.  The lines are delivered silently.  You are never given this information.  This is you imagining content, again: you're imagining the NPCs' interpretational standard, and you're imagining their accuracy is applying it .

No, you are given information. You are given information about the reaction to the tone. There has been some input in the external world, and there are differential reactions to that data set. We can either conclude that the problem is with one of the interpreters (PC or NPC) or with the data set, but if the problem is with the data set that amounts to it being a problem with the NPC

As AlanC9 already pointed out: imagining =! hypothesizing and predicting.

If I have some large set of evidence (for example, modern chemistry) and point out that oxygen atoms exist, I am not imagining oxygen atoms, though it could very well be the case that both my model and prediction is wrong.

This is the same thing. You are using imagination in a strange way.

I don't really want to discuss empathy.  But what this does it defeats your objection to my earlier point.  You're imagining content, and you're doing it repeatedly throughout the game.  As such, it would be inconsistent of you to object to the imagining of content.

Not at all. Again, you are misusing the word imagine.

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
But that's not what he's doing.  Yes,
it would make sense for his character to do that with the NPC's
reaction and posit reasons why he reacted as he did, but what Exile is
doing is imagining the NPC's method of interpretation and based on that
concluding that the PC delivered the line in a particular way.

He
doesn't have the tool he needs to draw that conclusion (that tool being
the NPC's thoughts) so he imagines it.

What are you talking about? This is where you are again imposing your standard of belief on me and accusing me of an inconsistent because you're plugging my inputs into your algorithm and churning out errors.

I am not using the same standard as you. What you say I need to draw a conclusion, I contest. Evidence on behaviour and belief are sufficient tools to draw conclusions about beliefs.

The NPCs thoughts are just direct access. To go back to the oxygen example, I can use empirical chemistry and physics to develop a detailed body of evidence that oxygen might exist, but I have no evidence (by your standard) that oxygen actually exists because I have no access to it.

I could suppose that I am imagining oxygen, but I would be using a term incorrently (imagination) and would furthermore fail to reap the enormous benefits avaialble from predictions within a margin of error.

You beg the question against me quite a lot. Please, appreciate that I have different beliefs than you do. I am more than happy to debate our overall differences in beliefs, and I am more than happy to debate the consequences of our beliefs, but we cannot filter each other's inputs through our system; that will lead to internal contradictions as a matter of course.

Sylvius the Mad wrote....

I simply dispute that BioWare's
games had inherently limited roleplaying options prior to the
introduction of the voiced protagonist.

Sure it did. Let me put it this way: suppose we lack a developed formal logic. With formal logic, we would know P, P=>Q .'. Q is a valid inference. Without it, we might mistakenly believe that Q, P=>Q, .'. P is true because there has never been a proof otherwise.

The mere fact that something has not been shown to be false in the past does not mean that it is not true. Put another way, your belief about Bioware games (at least from BG onward) was never correct; you the writers and designers for whatever reason simply did not include enough explicit evidence so you ignored it.

Of course, you will argue that that you could still have RP'd the way you like, so whatever I say does not call into question your claim. The response, as I said, is that you could neve have done it (or rather) you could continue to do it in the same way with PC VO, you just choose not to. The logical implications of a Bioware game never changed; Bioware simply went from leaving unstated premises to making them explicit. What you are arguing is that if you cannot infer these unstated premises, then you are right to infer a conclusion other than the properly drawn conclusion of the argument. But you can do this even when the premises are explicit, because it does not require you to do anything different. At most, it requires you to consciously be aware of the error you are making.

But this goes right back to the issue of off-screen content.

Modifié par In Exile, 08 décembre 2010 - 02:40 .

[Sylvius the Mad]

In Exile wrote...

Again, we had this discussion, but your argument is internally inconsistent. The sort of features you need to take as foundational to make the claim that knowlege is impossible undermine the counter-arguments you can make to a standard of evidence that argues that knowledge is possible and continous.

The major problem being , again, being that you cannot use deduction to reach any conclusion without pressuposing it as an ultimate unjustifiable rule, and if you grant this, then there is no reason not to suppose other fundamental unjustifiable rules.

That we can't justify deduction only reinforces my assertion that knowledge is impossible.  Even this claim is unjustifiable.

All claims are unjustifiable.

Except that once you allow this, you allow for a logical contradiction. I brought this up in another thread but we never finished the debate. I will here, shortly.

Not at all. In fact, it's logically inconsistent to allow for offscreen content.

I have no idea how you're going to demonstrate that.

You do. Remember when we talked about Trask and the background information he gives on you? You told me that what Trask said could very well have been a lie or a fabrication or somehow otherwise mistaken, because your character knows another state of affairs to be true.

Sure.  But that doesn't contradict the game.  I'm not claiming that my PC didn't perceive Trask saying that.  I'm not even saying that Trask didn't say it.

And that's literally all the evidence the game is providing.  I'm not denying any of it.  I'm not contradicting any of it.

This is only a contradiction if you assume a priori that the NPCs are reliable narrators, so then when I treat them as unreliable I've abandoned that premise.

But that's an unjustified assumption.  There's no reason to assume Trask knows what he's talking about, or is being honest, or is even real.  Just that he's being perceived.

I can even imagine a standard of evidence which, applied consistently, could even defeat that claim.  Perhaps the appearance of Trask is there to confuse you, the player, but he doesn't really exist in the game world.  This would require the player view the game as a game, however, which I'm disinclined to do.

I have no idea why you think any suggestion that Trask is mistaken about what he's saying contradicts the game at all.  You certainly haven't shown that.

What you have done here is endorsed the broad standard of evidence that the ultimate authority in-game is congruency with the personal experience of your PC. There is no reason not to assume that your PC is dreaming, under the influence of magic, or any other set of problems that arise precise as the same kind of logical problems as the brain-in-the-vat.

The problem with the brain-in-the-vat is that it makes all evidence self-referential, and that is quite literally compatible with any possible state you can imagine.

Yes.  I agree entirely.

That's the nature of the brain-in-a-vat problem, and there's no way (of which I'm aware) to defeat it without arbitrarily excluding possible standards of evidence.

No, you are given information. You are given information about the reaction to the tone. There has been some input in the external world, and there are differential reactions to that data set. We can either conclude that the problem is with one of the interpreters (PC or NPC) or with the data set, but if the problem is with the data set that amounts to it being a problem with the NPC

Or we could do neither, unless you want to insist on an excluded middle again.

As AlanC9 already pointed out: imagining =! hypothesizing and predicting.

And he's wrong about that.  There is no justification for drawing a line between the two.

That people routinely do it is not evidence that it makes any sense.  Hypotheses and suppositions are merely a subset of imagination.

I am not using the same standard as you. What you say I need to draw a conclusion, I contest. Evidence on behaviour and belief are sufficient tools to draw conclusions about beliefs.

The problem arises when you claim that empirical data require the drawing of conclusions based on the preponderance of evidence.  This is what I dispute.

A great thing about formal logic is that conclusions can only be drawn when they must be drawn.  All possible conclusions are mandatory.

Your style of inference carries no such requirement, and yet you often apply it as if it does.

The mere fact that something has not been shown to be false in the past does not mean that it is not true.

I suspect you meant to say "does not mean that it is true".

And I agree.  What I'm claiming (and I'm right) is that if something has not been shown to false, then it remains possibly true.  It can't reasonably be held to be necessarily false until it has been shown to be false.

The possible trueness is all I need to avoid contradicting the game.

Put another way, your belief about Bioware games (at least from BG onward) was never correct; you the writers and designers for whatever reason simply did not include enough explicit evidence so you ignored it.

Except my belief about BioWare games was (and is) correct.  They did allow the broad range of characters I've described.  They unequivocally did, as I played them.  Nothing in the game necessarily contradicts this, unless, again, you incorrectly require the drawing of conclusions based on the preponderance of evidence.

Of course, you will argue that that you could still have RP'd the way you like, so whatever I say does not call into question your claim. The response, as I said, is that you could neve have done it (or rather) you could continue to do it in the same way with PC VO, you just choose not to. The logical implications of a Bioware game never changed; Bioware simply went from leaving unstated premises to making them explicit. What you are arguing is that if you cannot infer these unstated premises, then you are right to infer a conclusion other than the properly drawn conclusion of the argument. But you can do this even when the premises are explicit, because it does not require you to do anything different. At most, it requires you to consciously be aware of the error you are making.

That I'm required to be aware of it is what makes it an error.  Before the voiced PC, there was no error to make, as the content you're describing didn't exist in the game.

Modifié par Sylvius the Mad, 08 décembre 2010 - 10:44 .

[AlanC9]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
As AlanC9 already pointed out: imagining =! hypothesizing and predicting.

And he's wrong about that.  There is no justification for drawing a line between the two.

That people routinely do it is not evidence that it makes any sense.  Hypotheses and suppositions are merely a subset of imagination.

Sylvius, you pick an awful lot of fights with ordinary language usage. Does that actually work for you as a communication strategy? From what I've seen it seems to just result in derailments of varying length.

In any event, the problem with using "imagine" here is that we're actually talking about only the hypothesizing-predicting subset of imagination, which means that "imagine" is needlessly broad. It's unlikely to cause further confusion among the three of us  (four if PsychoBlonde's still reading), but it's still suboptimal.

[AlanC9]

In Exile, a clarification please:

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

AlanC9 wrote...

Huh? He's trying to model the NPC's thoughts; of course he doesn't have access to them or he wouldn't need to model them in the first place.

No, he's trying to model the PC's thoughts, and he's using the NPC's thoughts to do it.

My impression was that you've already got access to the PCs thoughts, since that's equivalent to the character you want to play, and you're looking for a model of the NPC's thoughts that doesn't blow up your model of the PC's thoughts.

[Sylvius the Mad]

AlanC9 wrote...

In any event, the problem with using "imagine" here is that we're actually talking about only the hypothesizing-predicting subset of imagination, which means that "imagine" is needlessly broad. It's unlikely to cause further confusion among the three of us  (four if PsychoBlonde's still reading), but it's still suboptimal.

I only complained because he criticised my use of imagination.  But as long as he's using imagination, then he can't think imagination generally is a bad tool.

If he wants to exclude some specific type of imagination, fine, but then he needs to define the scope of his criticism and justify where he's drawing the line.

If that doesn't happen, then all that's left is baseless conjecture.

[PsychoBlonde]

In Exile wrote...
But this goes right back to the issue of off-screen content.

I think Sylvius sees playing a cRPG as a *collaborative* endeavor between himself and the game designers, with both somehow contributing "content".  The thing I don't get is why he'd even want to play a modern cRPG at all when games with truly minimalist story (like the aformentioned Daggerfall) would offer him far more scope for this sort of thing.  If, however, you actually make a distinction between self and other, it is the undetailed games that you find shallow (and often deeply unsatisfying).  When I write, I don't expect (or want) people to fill in the blanks with random gibberish, and I certainly don't do that to their work.

I'd argue more with him about it, but I'm becoming concerned that he's "collaborating" with me on this conversation and has decided I'm a space princess from Mars or something.

[FemHawke]

"The paraphrasing is too confusing"... "The icons are too clear"

Gimme a break. Some people can't deal with change. Fortunately, I'm not one of them.