What color is this text?Almost certainly you will answer "red". I would answer "red". Here's another question:
What color is this text?You might still answer "red", even though it is a slightly more pinkish red. I suspect you'd be more likely to say "red" if I'd have asked this question first, and you didn't perhaps imagine that I am trying to be sneaky. Human judgment is subjective, squishy, not perfectly consistent across languages, not reliable from person to person, potentially inconsistent within one person from time to time, and prone to having a zillion special cases. With my blinkered ultraformalist mathematician hat on, it is anathema; but it runs the (legal systems of the) world. It's fine. Even though it smells incredibly unconstrained compared to math and programming, it is not totally unconstrained. Here's an example of a game that depends on human judgment:
Alice chooses a fruit. Bob guesses a color. If Alice's fruit is the color that Bob guessed, then Bob wins. Otherwise, Alice wins.Note that:
Table-top role playing games are interesting because they substantially combine formal systems with human judgment.Here's some things that might be said playing some rpg:
Hey, friends, let's just, like, make up a story. Anybody, whenever they think it's their turn to talk, says whatever they think would make a good addition to the story.There's nothing wrong with this! People write novels collaboratively sometimes. But there's something very interesting about the space between these extremes, and it's something that, in particular, the story-games forum seemed to talk a lot about. It's something to do with the feeling that, while playing, you are interacting with something real.
Formal systems and human judgment in turn are interesting because they enable capturing two different properties of "realistic" fictional worlds. Or, to put it another way, they help achieve two different criteria of realism.Specifically: Games that substantially depend on formal systems enable the construction of fictional worlds that appear consistent, which obstinately behave in certain ways indifferent to the whims of the players, and this can be exciting to players because it makes the game world feel real. Games that substantially depend on human judgment enable the construction of fictional worlds that appear complex, which a player can interrogate, investigate, and explore, almost without limitation, and this can be exciting to players because it makes the game world feel real.
[the party is in a classic dungeon crawl, and] there's an object behind a curtain. I walk up to it and put my hand under. feels like glass. "it's a cursed mirror?" we all think. we take it down from the wall w/o looking at it or removing the curtain. attach it to our cart. hours later, fighting against toad monsters on our way home from dungeon. we pull away curtain. one toad monsters sees the mirror and goes pop like a soap bubble just disappear from this world. and the mirror cracks.It took me a while to understand what was remarkable about this: it's that the mirror really was cursed the whole time, and, more importantly,
the question of whether the mirror was cursed was already settled, by a mechanism independent of any of the people setting at the tablePresumably the DM of this game rolled some dice on a random-dungeon-treasure table, as instructed by the rulebook, and got "cursed mirror" (instead of, say, "regular harmless mirror"). The choices the party made — to avoid directly looking at the mirror, and also to attempt to weaponize it during combat — were therefore an interesting and consequential gamble. (For example, if it was a regular mirror, they would have been wasting their valuable combat time uncovering it) The mirror wasn't merely an improvised made-up fact. The fact that the mirror worked as a weapon wasn't merely something the DM had thought would be cool. It was a consequence of the impersonal, independent, impartial operation of formal system which the players cleverly used to advance their own goals. This is, I think, roughly what Sandra means by "blorb".
Our wizards had come into possession of a small collection of magical items. Meg, Emily and I brainstormed or otherwise generated a list of them, with no more information per item than "an embroidered shirt" or "a polished copper bowl." One of the items was a bone wand. We'd established that they'd come from the storehouse of a wizards' tower abandoned by its wizards, or something like that, and that's all we knew. My wizard undertook to figure out what the bone wand was. We had nothing prepped, we all knew that there was nothing prepped. [...] So here's my wizard, wandering around, waving this wand at things, working through the possibilities implicit in Ars Magica's in-fiction magic system. Meg and Emily are answering my wizard's actions whimsically at first, within those same bounds, then naturally starting to build organically on their collective previous answers. What happened in the real world was, at the same moment, with no communication between us, Meg's, Emily's and my imaginations converged on the same solution to the pattern they'd been whimsically / intuitively / symbolically / aesthetically creating. What it felt like was, the wand was real, and we all realized at the same moment what it really was.It's hard to know for sure what was going on without further details about what the wand did, or what they concluded, which information is not provided. But it seems clear to me that there is a form of deduction operating here, even though it is not crystal-clear formal system deduction. It's deduction from squishy subjective-to-interpretation postulates about bones and wands and perhaps trees and penguins stated with messy human language, relying on "common sense" and shared cultural assumptions, and shared beliefs about how physics works, and how magic ought to work, if only magic were real. This sort of deduction, despite its unreliability in general to produce crisp answers, can still under some circumstances produce deductive consequences which are virtually certain. This is the same as how I'm virtually certain you won't say that this text is green even though you might say that it's pink or rose or magenta or red-red-red-violet or something. The wand's nature wasn't merely an improvised made-up fact, even though a lot of facts came into being in the game via "mere" improvisation. It was something that came out of a sufficiently rich tapestry of human-generated words and ideas and notions as a necessary consequence of them. This is, I think, roughly what Lumpley means by "garst".
How can I be sure that someone else's Mere Human Judgment is going to produce the same result as mine? When you talk about deduction from a bunch of facts that have already been committed to, I can't really distinguish that from just making up more facts. This breaks my sense that the fictional world is realistic because it is not consistent enough. There had better be a definite predominance of the formally regulated parts of the world, and human judgment should be required only as a break-glass fallback last resort, to prevent hitting a dead-end when the players want to do something in the world that the rules didn't specifically anticipate.Someone who very strongly prefers garst over blorb might think like this:
Why am I reading books and rolling dice and doing arithmetic if someone could just program a computer to do the same? And even then, why am I bothering to play such an impoverished game that is entirely mechanizable? What happens if I want to Get Ye Flask and the formal system I'm engaging with lacks the common sense to know that Ye Flask ought to be Gettable and just says opaquely that "You can't get ye flask!" without me being able to sensibly negotiate about that? This breaks my sense that the fictional world is realistic because it is not rich enough. The fictional world should be, within the bounds of reasonableness, as malleable as possible. Formal systems should only be required as a last resort when the natural flow of good-faith collaborative storytelling negotiation breaks down.To be clear, I think even both of these caricatured extreme preferences are totally fine to have, as well as a preference for an arbitrary specific levels of compromise in between.
In common for all four scenarios: the players find a mirror, they believe it's dangerous, they treat it with the utmost respect, they try to use it as a weapon against bullywugs by tricking them into doing to what the players believe is a dangerous thing; looking in the mirror. "Harmless": the mirror is a scrying mirror that can spy into the lich's bathroom. "Dangerous": the mirror teleports whoever looks at it into a trap -- a trap that can be defeated, but can be lethal -- and then crack.The rest of the post explains that to prefer "blorb" (or, in the terminology of that post, to belong to the "Sandbox" group) is to prefer that mirror should be either D→D "dangerous all along" or H→H "harmless all along". It should be something all along; the world should be a realistic (and therefore consistent) world, and not a world governed by the DM's whims, "playing paper after seeing rock". That is, we want to demand, for consistency, that the game module has a sufficiently comprehensive rule for how the object behaves, not leaving it up to the judgment of the DM. We might imagine the book saying:H→D
(In our game, D→D happened. I've checked the module.)- The mirror was harmless, but after seeing the players try to use it as a weapon, the DM decides it's dangerous for the bulliwugs.
D→D- The mirror was dangerous all along and the DM describes it consistently.
H→H- The mirror was harmless all along and the DM describes it consistently.
D→H- The mirror was dangerous, but after seeing the players try to use it as a weapon, the DM decides it's harmless for the bulliwugs.
... on a 67, the treasure chest contains a cursed mirror. If the cover is removed, it cracks and teleports anyone facing it (if they are not blinded) to the pit trap on the seventh floor of the dungeon as described on p123.or, for a "harmless all along" mirror, it might say
... on a 67, the treasure chest contains a scrying mirror. If the cover is removed it reveals what's going on in the lich's bathroom. Roll 1d6 on the Table of Euphemisms for Going to the Toilet for what the viewer sees.
... on a 67, the treasure chest contains a adversarially semi-cursed mirror. If the cover is removed and a player looks at it, it cracks and teleports them to the pit trap on the seventh floor of the dungeon as described on p123. If a hostile dungeon creature looks at it, nothing happens to them.We might call this, in functional programming notation,
λ x. case x ofor just D | H for short. From the players' point of view, this is nearly the same thing as the D→H mirror. If they look at it directly, it harms them, if they try to use it as a weapon, it doesn't work. And yet its behavior is determined by rules that have been committed to before play occurs. The GM would in fact be arguably engaging in the same sort of "cheating" if she were to fudge the D | H mirror into a consistent D→D or H→H mirror as she would be if she had fudged a mirror that was consistent (according to her prior decision, or a game module specifying it as such) into an inconsistent mirror.
| Player → D
| Bulliwug → H
The "realism" so created still depends on using a certain fuzzily-defined subset of formal systems, and a constrained set of human judgments. Some formal systems appeal to a human sense of regularity of how the world works.Some formal rules, even if they are totally, absolutely, unquestionably formal rules, with clear outcomes that no human whim can gainsay, nonetheless feel wrong. They feel inconsistent, capricious, irregular, inhumane, unrealistic. To really be a good "blorb" game that satisfies its players' sense of a realistic world that is consistent enough you have to have not just a formal system, but a formal system that feels sufficiently uniform. And to have a good "garst" game that satisfies its players' sense of a realistically rich world, you nonetheless have to include some principle of inductive uniformity in how you perform "human judgment". If you wave the bone wand at five animals and it makes them double in size, then it would be strange if you wave it at a duck and it shrinks it — unless there's a good reason why ducks should behave differently. I'm not sure I have a good theory of which rules feel this way — or ought to feel this way — but this is a recurring theme in lots other domains. I think it's neat that this shows up in rpgs as well: both the idea that some rules are better than others by being more uniform, and that determining what really counts as "uniform" is hard.
[Imagine a planet] full of people who believe in anti-induction: if the sun has risen every day in the past, then today, we should expect that it won’t. As a result, these people are all starving and living in poverty. Someone visits the planet and tells them, “Hey, why are you still using this anti-induction philosophy? You’re living in horrible poverty!” “Well, it never worked before...”