I'm assuming a really good game master. One who plans out the events that will happen if the players do nothing for each session, and simply wings it as the players attempt to influence the events. He's also exceptional at winging. Also, I'm assuming an actual RPG, rather than freeform roleplaying.Jonas wrote:But I do think the difference is fundamental, I'm just trying not to get into a debate about the nature of choice and freedom of will because I have no background in philosophy and I fear I will fare poorly in such a debate. I don't believe our options in most situations are limited in any easily divisible fashion, such a world view conflicts with the idea of the human brain as a true emergent system.
But I need to clarify something before I attempt to continue down that avenue: are we comparing videogames to real life or to a tabletop roleplaying game right now? Because the nature of tabletop roleplaying depends so heavily on the attitude and disposition of your game master that the unfolding of events can resemble real life (with options limited purely by the power of the player's imagination and the laws of reality) as easily as it can be completely identical to a computer game with all the restricted freedom and constant negotiation of power over the narrative between player and game as that typically entails.
That's a lot closer to the choice open to human beings in real life than videogames, but it's not quite real life, with all it's little trivialities and strange happenings.
The argument isn't different in nature from comparing videogames to real life, I don't believe, but it seems to me that making that comparison would be much harder to grasp and deal with.
Anyway, yeah, you probably are at a disadvantage in this discussion. While my background in philosophy is limited to a high-school class, I have studied logic and computability, so I'm very aware of just what computers are theoretically capable of. If I seem particularly firm in some of the things I write, that's because I think it follows from what I learned there. That doesn't means I couldn't have made a mistake somewhere, obviously, but you're probably ill-equiped to recognize if I have. So...I apologize if I sound patronizing, but I'll try to show you the background reasoning as best I can for someone without a background in these things, and you might be able to tell me where your disagreement lies, or where you think something funny is going on.
The simplest argument I can make when it comes to the easy divisibility of choice is the following:
You can always make a rule which slices an infinite spectrum in two.
Consider the following:
For every second of your life, you were either breathing in air, breathing out air, or holding your breath...or some combination. The seconds where you were breathing in air conform to the rule, "Jonas breathed in air during this second". The rest of the seconds do not.
Seconds are discrete (as in seperate, distinct) units, of course, but time doesn't need discrete units. You could just as well divide the time you spend alive using that rule, into the time which you were breathing in, and the time in which you were not.
In other words, if you can make a rule that classifies your actions a certain way, then you can put those actions into an equivalency class; all those actions are equivalent according to that rule.
My argument is, for any given situation, there will be a limited number of relevant rules you can make. You could obviously make an inifinite number of rules for infinite equivalency classes, but further down the line, only a limited number of those will turn out to ever be relevant. Infinite rules would be like...during this action, did you hesitate for 1/x seconds. Since x can assume any mathematical value, you could make any number of those rules, being ever more precise about exactly how hesitant you were during any of the infinite permutations of actions open to you. In other words, each of these infinitely many rules would still denominate equivalency classes filled with infinitely many actions.
With me so far?
Ok, so my argument is, during the storyline in Mass Effect, for each distinct situation you find yourself in, a limited number of rules put in by the designers seperate the infinite amount of actions open to you into equivalency classes. Infinite, you say? But usually I just get up to 5 choices for every node in a conversation!
Yes, but theoretically, the game could know how long you hesitated (which it does use on occasion). Same argument with regards to precision as above, although the game could probably only reach about 1 billion rules for hesitation per second.
The actions are still technically unique to you and your character, but because the game presents the equivalency classes much more overtly by giving you a list, it feels like your actions aren't.
So the big distinction here is, for Mass Effect, the rules governing the equivalency classes are chosen by the designers at the time of development, whereas the rules governing the equivalency classes of our tabletop roleplaying game don't have to be determined untill the game master has returned home and is planning the next session. He can decide between sessions which details of the players actions will turn out to be important, after the player has already made those actions.
So the question is, once the dungeon master returns home and decides on these rules, what options are open to him; which rules can he reasonably make? And how different are those rules compared to the ones a game designer could make?
Jaedars argument is, it is primarily a question of some orders of magnitude in increased responsiveness. That if the mass effect game developers pushed 1000 people through each situation in a P&P setting, put their actions into as many reasonable equivalency classes as possible (ie. steve and joe acted about the same, so they're the same class), and then put these in the game...and the game then allowed you to choose an action belonging within one of those classes, you would end up in the same equivalency class your dungeon master would have eventually put you in on account of your "unique" action.
Which I tend to agree with...though going over it again, I can imagine that if you're a very unique individual and you always choose things noone else thought of, then you may be forever alone in your equivalency class.
I think in the general case, that's not how it's going to be, and I think the group of people who behave so uniquely that none of 1000 other players would do sort of the same thing is very small. Take for instance my proud moment of decapitating the guard captain and putting his head in my bag. That's pretty unique, but it fell into the same equivalency class as simply making the body unrecognizable, or hiding it. I don't know that the GM had anything planned, and he may have eventually used it, which would probably make it unique enough among 1000 players to illicit a special response noone else got...but presumably, all we would get would be an extra combat encounter, or an extra conversation, both of which could theoretically happen during a video game in response to carrying contraband of some sort, so all humanoid bodyparts would merely need to be named contraband. You of all people know how incredibly responsive videogames can be made, because you made one =P
So yeah, I think it's theoretically possible to get videogames to be about as responsive as P&P for 95% of all players, discounting the improvised mannerisms and actions that put players into the equivalency classes.
). The designer is dealing with, according to your example, perhaps a thousand possible decisions. When the GM sets up consequences, he's dealing with one decision - the decision the player actually made. You're not worrying about the entire spectrum of possible decisions the player might want to make (which might as well be infinite as far as the time and resources you have available is concerned), you're only thinking about what actually happened. The difference is so huge that in the latter case, the GM doesn't even have to go home and plan things out, he can just improvise the consequences on the spot. The game designer invents the choices and the consequences. The GM only invents the consequences because the player handles the choices.
