A discussion of metagame concepts in game design

[The Crimson Binome]

A character being able to survive 10-15 direct hits a day and becoming capable of withstanding inordinate amounts of punishment as he becomes more competent IS the overtly gamist mechanics.

Not in the slightest. How many direct hits could Mike Tyson survive from a lesser competitor? It's a real thing that really happened in the real world.

Just because there's a significant physical impact that causes some sort of injury, does not mean that you've been impaled on a spear.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Okay, now we're getting somewhere. I agree with all that. My point is that modeling an election and then testing it against an upcoming real election certainly seems to count as the former rather than the latter. Nate Silver isn't looking at past data and saying, "JFK won the 1960 election! Hah, called it!"

Only if you're going to include most sports betting in the same category. Fancy statistical models aren't much different from serious betters parsing the stats. It's prognostication by knowledge of the game, which is how Silver builds his models through heavily weighted and sorted data. Silver doesn't take straight data as an input, he selects and massages it according to his keen political insights and then makes a model that matches his guesses. Same as someone betting on sports. Or casting a horoscope, really.

ETA: I guess a more succinct way to put it is that what's successful about Nate Silver's predictions isn't his method, but rather Nate Silver. He's an astute political observer, and I enjoy his analysis -- it's thought provoking. But I don't ascribe any more science to his methods than I do any other pundit.

There are a couple of ways to experiment in history. You can do what we've been talking about: make a prediction about some phenomenon and then wait for more history to happen and see if the prediction bears out (e.g., "based on the trajectories of totalitarian states, the North Korean regime will fall within 25 years"). You can also make a prediction and test it against new data you gather in the primary sources and archeology (e.g., "this culture suffered a plague at this date, so we should see an increase in death motifs in their writing and art").

The problem isn't the inability to experiment. It's the tiny sample size - just one timeline, no repeats - and the fact that the experiments are way down on the "worse control" side of the continuum. It's certainly never gonna be a hard science.

If you're making a guess about the future, it's no longer history, is it? Under this interpretation, ALL science is history, because it all uses past observations to inform the method. This proves too much.

 

[Shasarak]

As well as the examples you point to (astronomy) we could point to aspects of biology (Darwin didn't do experiments - he made very careful observations and conjectured the best explanation for them given the constraints he took to be applicable) or demography/public health (no one goes about spreading diseases or polluting water supplies to try and determine the effect on life expectancy, birth rates, and other aspects of population health), etc.

Are you saying that no one goes about spreading disease or that no one should go about spreading disease?

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Only if you're going to include most sports betting in the same category.

Why not? Because it's trivial? Nate Silver himself is first and foremost a sports statistician - national elections are a sideline.

Fancy statistical models aren't much different from serious betters parsing the stats. It's prognostication by knowledge of the game, which is how Silver builds his models through heavily weighted and sorted data.

I'm having a hard time reconciling "knowledge of the game sufficient to make accurate predictions reliably" with "not science".

Silver doesn't take straight data as an input, he selects and massages it according to his keen political insights and then makes a model that matches his guesses. Same as someone betting on sports.

If I'm trying to find the gravitational constant G, I might estimate it at some value, run an experiment, compare the results to what's predicted by my estimate, and then adjust the estimate up or down accordingly and repeat. I am effectively "massaging" the gravitational force in my model. But I'm massaging it in accordance with experimental results, in order to make better predictions.

If Nate Silver decides a priori, "My gut tells me Ohio is going to go red", and then weights his data to say that Ohio is going to go red, then you're right, that's not science. But if he does what he says he does, and what we have no reason to suspect he's lying about, then the weights he puts on his data are in response to the results of previous experiments, and will be adjusted in response to future ones, in order to zero in on some value which can make predictions most accurately. That looks like a scientific process to me.

Or casting a horoscope, really.

I'm going to take a stab in the dark and guess that you don't read many horoscopes? The key element of horoscopes and prophecies, the trick that makes them work, is that they make vague predictions which can can be interpreted after the fact as conforming to whatever happened, and are thus difficult to falsify. Whatever else you may say about political prognosticators, they do not do that. We can say, definitively, what Nate Silver was right about and what he was wrong about. That clarity is in falsification conditions the sine quae non of science. So to compare a prediction which has such clarity with one which doesn't is deeply unfair and, when the whole point of this discussion is "what is science?", actively misleading.

If you're making a guess about the future, it's no longer history, is it? Under this interpretation, ALL science is history, because it all uses past observations to inform the method. This proves too much.

With apologies to Francis Fukuyama, history did not end in the year 1990. History is the diachronic study of human behavior and societies - or, if I may be tautological in turn, it's the study of the stuff that makes it into history books. Historians have tons to say about current and future events. They differ from, say, sociologists or political scientists in that their methodology is more focused on finding patterns of cause and effect in the written and archeological record, although naturally the boundary between the disciplines is fuzzy and there's a lot of overlap. But in short, "Those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it" really is kind of the historian's mission statement.

 

[Emerikol]

I dont really understand your claim that stats is not science. How can you do Science without using stats? If I want to create a new medicine to prevent Heart attacks then how can I prove its effectiveness without the use of stats and of course randomised control studies?

Well a hammer is not a house but carpenters will use a hammer to build a house. Mathematics have other uses besides science so they aren't science but rather tools which scientists often use.

 

[Emerikol]

I think your problem is that you need to look for really, really simple games that limit player choices as much as they can. Everytime a player gets to choose a different type of action you basically create a potential disconnect between player and character because the character may not be as informed as the player on the context of that action.
What you want is a system where you describe your action, roll a dice, and you get to describe what happened based on the idea that the character is hoping for the best result possible every time and how close he gets is based on how well he rolls.

I didn't have a problem with earlier editions of the game pre-3e. Not saying I couldn't find one tiny example of something in a splat book but I could play the basic game without worrying about these things. So it's not that revolutionary and idea to want that same sort of approach.

If Action Surge (the idea that going overboard with effort will mean you won't be able to do it again, think of "I'm doing 5 more reps on this exercise but this means I won't be able to do another series") is already triggering your metagame threshold I think PF2 isn't going to be a game for you.

Look, I used the term metagame because a lot of people on here are triggered by the term dissociative mechanics or dissonant mechanics or whatever. It's a subtle form of bias but bias non-the same to try and make people you disagree without out as radicals. That is a fallacious form of argument. The topic, though way off the rails at the moment, is about discussing solutions to the problem. Those who can help are welcome. Those who can't get their heads around the idea should probably just look for a better thread for their input.

Also, there is no martial maneuver or pulling of inner resources that is limited to even a two hour window let alone a whole day window. Not in terms of combat where people are fighting in rounds.

 

[Emerikol]

Folks, can we drop the arguments about science? Come on.

 

[Shasarak]

Well a hammer is not a house but carpenters will use a hammer to build a house. Mathematics have other uses besides science so they aren't science but rather tools which scientists often use.

Science is also not a house but houses are tools that scientists often use to keep their stuff in.

 

[pemerton]

Are you saying that no one goes about spreading disease or that no one should go about spreading disease?

I'm saying that public health researchers don't go about spreading disease so as to perform experiments concerning population health.

(I'm not talking here about experimenters who infect themselves, which happens from time to time.)

His observations and measurements were the experiment in this case. He would compare the same species on different islands(an experiment) and note the differences in their adaptions.

That's not an experiment. It's careful observation and measurement. Those are not the same thing!

Fair. However, I think it's more clearly stated by others I've met, that correlation does not indicate causation.

It would be correct to say that correlation does not, per se, indicate causation.

I have noted the following correlation over my life, though: when I tap a solid surface with my finger, it often generats a noise. And I have inferred, from the correlation, plus the absence of any other salient phenomenon correlating with my tapping, that it is the tapping that generates the noise.

Patterns of correlation (what present thing correlates with what other present thing, what absent phenomenon correlates with what other absent thing, what absence correlates with what presence, etc) tend to be the best evidence we can get of causal relationships. Part of the function of control in experiments is to eliminate the possibility of non-salient correlations.

Part of what distinguishes Darwin's careful observation and measurement from someone taking holiday photos is that he is trying systematically to note correlations between phenomena (both present and absent) that he judges to be salient.

Collection and cataloguing of data cannot be science by itself, else baseball scorekeepers are engaged in science. Collection of data is necessary to science, but it is not sufficient.

Collection and cataloguing of data can be science, by itself, if other conditions are satisfied. Joseph Banks systematicallly catalogued fauna and flora on his voyages. That was - in my view, correctly - treated as a contribution to science.

Astronomy begins by systematically recording the position and visible motion of heavenly bodies. That is science.

There are many sorts of information that can be collected and systematised. There are many ways of doing so. And there are many degrees of difficulty in doing so. Whether or not such collection and systematisation constitutes science may depend on all these things. Baseball scores are (i) not interesting features of the natural world, (ii) not hard to discover, and (iii) are not systematised in any interesting or revelatory way by a scorekeeper.

Whereas the work done by Banks, or by early observers of the heavens, (i) concerned interesting features of thenatural world, (ii) required the application both of discipline and intellectual effort to discover, and (iii) was systematised in various interesting and revelatory ways.

 

[Shasarak]

I'm saying that public health researchers don't go about spreading disease so as to perform experiments concerning population health.

I wish that was true and on the other hand there are just so many examples of this I dont know which to point you at first.