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[Mini-Phalla] of Brass: The Philosopher Kings (God Save The Queen: Cultist/Templar Win)
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Mental effort that would go into producing rules is now going into the debate? At work? Lazy? Take your pick
That this will happen is literally one of the arguments I offer in my current debate!
Phyphor attempts, really, to do two things in his most recent debate post. The first, his attacks on my arguments, is less important and I will attempt to handle it first, before moving on to his arguments in favor of the proposal.
The first thing Phyphor is trying to do is half-heartedly undermine the argument I make in my previous debate post. He does this in a couple of ways. One of these ways is by arguing that this game is not really intended to be fun for everyone; it's targeted at particular kinds of players, who specialize in games like this. There are other games, Phyphor says, targeted at new players, and that's good enough.
I have two answers. First, the fact that the game is intended for a particular audience or other does not mean that it is not actually a drawback for that game to be unfun for others. It may be intended for the rules-lawyers among us (bro-five, Phyphor!), but there are people playing this game that aren't those rules-lawyers, and if implementing this rulechange makes the game less fun for them, that's a serious cost.
You'll note Phyphor does not even attempt to argue that the rulechange he advocates will make the game more fun for the rules-lawyers; that's because he knows that the game will be awesome fun for us regardless, and he might even in his deep dark heart know that rules-lawyers actually will find the game more fun without his change. Rules lawyers love limitations; it's not impressive to do something awesome if there are no limits. In fact, it's basically trivial. What's impressive is to do a lot with a little, within the constraints of the game.
Second, by his own admission this is a defense post; defense posts are about presenting positive reasons for your side of the debate, not about undermining the other player's points. This is the strategic tradeoff that INANTP has created in the debates; you have to choose between knocking down your opponent's points and making your own. That means, even if the argument Phyphor is making here is good, it can't remove the points I gain from my previous post. He has to commit a post to attacking my post in order to remove those points, and he chose not to do that, but instead to make some points of his own. That's a fine choice, but he's got to live with the consequences it has.
The second thing he tries to do is undermine my arguments that come from hard-won experience running my game. The arguments are several here, and honestly, I think the fact that his is a defense post makes the whole thing irrelevant, so I'll just make one broad comment instead of sticking to a strict line-by-line.
The point he needs to engage the most on this part of the debate, and that he engages minimally, is my analysis with respect to the specific posts in my game complaining about too many options. I give a clear explanation as to how that same scenario is repeating itself before us. Frustration comes in degrees, and what was really frustrating those people was having so much they really had to keep up with in order to play the game well. Phyphor proposes that they were really just kind of drained from the second half of a long 'day', but this is to make two mistakes. First, it is to fail to realize that if long days had this kind of effect, you'd see the same kind of complaints in other games. But take the first long day in Munkus' game; that long day was pretty analogous, because it happened early on, and no one was considering dropping out then. (Admittedly, later on it was rougher, but that was because of more extensive interruptions and that game being very long, both not analogous to our case.)
Second, Phyphor is straight failing to take the claims of the people in question seriously. They say that specifically what was frustrating them was how many options and proposals they had to keep track of, and the current rulechange will implement the same requirement that people keep track of a large set of proposals. We ought to take those claims seriously, and that means implementing this rulechange will make this game less fun for some of the people in it, and that's a problem.
Of course, I am really just being thorough here; those arguments don't really matter because they can't actually undermine the points I'm getting from the post Phyphor is targeting. And that's just because Phyphor has declared the post I'm targeting to be a defense post. So let's move to the arguments Phyphor makes, finally, in favor of the proposal.
Phyphor makes functionally two arguments in favor of the proposed rule change. He says, first, that the rule change will make non-rules-lawyers have extra fun because they can support fluffy changes without costing themselves too much, and second, that it's important to enact this change in order for future hosts to know how to handle it themselves.
I first turn to the fluffy proposal argument. The first thing to say about this argument is that his putting it forth feeds my argument that there are people in this game who are not as engaged in the rules-manipulation aspects. Those people are going to drown in the necessities to follow all the proposals. Look back to my game. There were fluffy proposals all over the place. Let me repeat that.
There were fluffy proposals all over the place.
People were advocating, in addition to the pragmatic ones you consider, things like “The hosts of this game are also players in it, with their own win conditions. Their status as players is separate from their status as hosts.” That was proposed for the first time on p. 18 of my game's thread. The shalmelo post I've cited twice now occurs on p. 27. Silly proposals were not helping keep people engaged. Tons of fluffy proposals were being made, and people still wanted to withdraw because of too many options.
Second, we still have two proposals that get in. In my game, when hosts actually became players, that was after the revisions that changed the rules-changes down to...exactly two rules changes. That's to say, people can still pass crazy fluffy rules-changes with merely two rules-changes, just like in this game.
Summary of the fluffy rules-change argument: Two rules changes is plenty for people to still prioritize fluffy rules, so we can get the advantage without implementing this ruleschange, and more ruleschanges puts more pressure on people to follow more stuff, frustrating and disengaging them.
The second argument in favor of the proposal that Phyphor offers is my very favorite. Phyphor says that we need to implement this ruleschange in order to “[force] hosts to determine if this is a thing they want to have in their games.”
You know, in principle, I like the argument. In practice, though...we've already done it. We implemented it in my game. That implementation almost destroyed my game. We have the relevant information; we need not sacrifice another game to learn what I already know.
Phyphor has an answer, of course, and he's basically put it forward. Invictus' game, he says, is different. It was more nitpicky, more rules-focused, not like this game we're playing now. But this answer puts him in a bind. Either 1) my game is like future rules-changing games, and we already know what he wants us to know, so we ought to reject the proposal, or 2) my game isn't like future rules-changing games, and neither is this one, because we can always make distinctions between various phallas that show how they're all different.
Phyphor doesn't even try to argue for why future rules-changing games will be more like this one than mine, which is good, because there's no good argument there. The people in this community are creative; they'll find other interesting ways to implement rules-changing. Those other interesting ways are unlikely to be like the ways they've been done in this game and in my game, because everyone wants to put a slightly different spin on it this time. That means that what we learn about this game won't be relevant to future games, because they'll differ as much from this game as this game differs from my game, and that means we earn nothing from implementing the proposal here.
Unfortunately, this time you don't get both, Phyphor. Either this game and my game are similar, and we already know how this is gonna turn out, or this game and my game aren't similar, and we have no reason to believe any future game will be similar to either of them, so lessons don't transfer.
I'm out, yo.
1.) Gizzy for no real reason so I have a vote in.
2.) Last night I was driven mad. Apparently this makes me immune to rule changes and effects from rule changes. It explicitly states "while mad", so I don't know if this is a temp or permanent thing. So, you have that to look forward to as well.
This is accurate.
Note that I will be reading arguments and if I think "I think this person got attack and defend mixed up" I will swap them around to what seems to be the intention of the argument.
Catching up on thread now.
Skyrim
GT/Twitter: Tanith 6227
As you may notice, whether a particular post is an attack or defense ends up being of significance in my current debate. This is why I explicitly asked Phyphor which he was doing in a particular post; I hope you will accept that kind of explicit question-and-answer as binding, as it informed strategic decisions I've made in the debate.
SeGaTai
Day 2 hunch.
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Retaliatory vote?
This post that screams mafia to me?
I'm pretty happy with my hunch.
You skipped my not-in-mafia-proboard clarification of thrallvigs?
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BradicusMaximus
You say there were fluffy proposals all over the place. True, there were. But how many actually got passed? The rule bringing you into the game and... anything else? At all? Sure there were lots proposed, but proposing rules is pretty meaningless if none of them ever take effect. And it's pretty disheartening to come up with a cool idea that never gets implemented simply because there are more pressing issues that need to be taken care of; and this was when you limited things to only 2 changes per day... Hmm,2 changes per day, that sounds awfully familiar. I'm not saying fluffy proposals would drive interest, that's irrelevant to this rule and are happening anyway, I'm saying that the very real possibility of fluffy changes to actually get enacted will. My rulechange will allow those effects to be brought about.
This game is different. For one, I specifically designed that rule in your game to break it and cause the as much havoc as possible. If you don't believe me, just look at my signup post (I REGRET NOTHING). RAW it actually allowed a quorum of the village to pass unlimited rule changes before you changed it. My goal was breaking the game. In this game, that is not my goal and that is not what this rule is designed to do. I'm not arguing that future games will be more like this game, or more like your game, nor am I arguing that this game will be broken. What I am doing is letting hosts know that the village will (or should from an optimization standpoint) wish for more wishes when possible and force them to deal with it one way or the other. This is a relatively mild form of it that adds the possibility of one or two additional changes per day maybe.
Clarification denied.
I hate you, all of you. But @Phyphor, I hate you most of all.
And you better hope to God I don't find my way back into the university.
OoOooOOoOOooOOOooOOOo
Today, you gotta vote by hunches or, like, 'cuz the guy's post "screams mafia".
This is why I despise cyclists
I am fully willing to admit that I have no good reason to at this juncture though.
Lockeout 2
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Retaba 2
SeGaTai 2
Gizzy 1
jdarksun 1
TheRoadVirus 1
vertroue 1
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This is why I despise cyclists
gizzy
This is why I despise cyclists
There are, I think, three things happening in Phyphor's most recent post, and they are not clearly distinguished. The first is Phyphor's admission that he was trying to break my game with his infinite wishes rulechange. A second is that the point about this game as a pattern for future games, and the implications for hosts. The third is the substantive issue about the possibility of fluffy rules coming into effect, and the effect that has on morale.
The first, Phyphor's admission that he was trying to break my game, is pretty much irrelevant. It was totally fine; he's allowed to do that, that was how the game was structured. But in part because he was trying to break the game, we didn't implement his rule as written. That's to say, no game ever existed where his rule as written was in force, and I seriously doubt, for a multitude of reasons not unrelated to the reasons I'm giving in this debate, that one ever will. Instead, we've been arguing about the game as implemented.
The second is the point that passing this rule is important for making better games in the future. I argued in my last post that it isn't important for making better games in the future, because we'd already passed a similar 'wishing for more wishes' rulechange in my game. Now here's the argument, from his most recent post:
What, in his proposal there, is something that we haven't already done in my game? He says that the hosts should know that the village should, from an optimization standpoint, wish for more wishes. Hosts know that; they know that because of Day 0 in my game. This game does not contribute to that knowledge; people shoulda already picked it up. He says that hosts have to deal with a relatively mild form of the wishing for more wishes that adds the possibility of one or two additional changes per day maybe. There were two revised versions of Phyphor's broken "wishing for more wishes" rule on the books in my game, at different times. One allowed for a time-delayed possibility of up to 5 extra rulechanges per day. We figured out pretty quick that one was busted. The other one allowed for a single extra rule change per day. That sounds suspiciously like what Phyphor is suggesting here. If that's what he wants to test, we tested it, in every day, day 2 and after, in my game. There is, therefore, no more additional knowledge to be gained from testing it further in this game, or, if there is, it's because this game is different than that game, and other future rule-change games will also be different from this game, and as a result the knowledge gained will be of limited utility. In either case, this is not a good reason to pass the proposal.
An additional note: Phyphor does not distinguish the argument he makes here from arguments he had made previously at all. He is straight up saying, in this post, that future hosts will know more about how to deal with and handle this case when they run similar games, and that's exactly the argument he was making in his previous post. This is a repeat, and repeats are clearly not worth any points in the rules.
The third point Phyphor makes is this:
He's here distinguishing proposals from implementation, saying what matters is 'the very real possibility of fluffy changes to actually get enacted' is what drives interest. One way of showing that fluffy rules have a very real possibility of getting enacted is to enact fluffy rule changes. In my game, the players enacted a fluffy rule change, when they had two rule changes to use. That means that in this situation, with two possible rule changes, the players really might enact fluffy rules. How do we know? Because in a situation where they had two rule changes, they enacted a fluffy rule.
Phyphor wants to make a big deal out of the fact that they only enacted one fluffy rule. But if it can be done once, it can be done more than once, and therefore people ought to be optimistic about enacting fluffy rules now.
Similar to the previous point, this point too is taken straight out of his last post. That means it's a repeat, and is also not eligible to grant him points.
Maybe there's a way to make this argument work, but the way Phyphor has put it, it doesn't. Compatriots, don't look at the best version of this argument that you like; look at the version Phyphor has given. That one is the one that matters for the purposes of this debate, and that one is crucially flawed.
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BradicusMaximus
I mean, I like your attention but I also like knowing why
Kime for being a zerg, LONG LIVE THE TERRANS!
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