Ralph Trickey

There's an interesting article in the latest ACM communications about game design and immersion.

Why do you say that as if they are exclusive of each other? </font>

Hey, I never paid him a dime. What did you mean by the above comment, BTW? What other options do you see as viable?

That would explain why I couldn't find the terms with Google. My apologies then, given the title of the thread, I assumed that you were referring to TOAW in your post. The problem with asking the TOAW community is that they see only the minor changes and tweaks that TOAW can use within the confines of the system, and not the bigger questions. Ralph

OK, I was going to stay out of this, but I have to take exception to this post. BTW, out of curiosity, what is your profession? TOAW was designed to cover roughly from 1900 to the near future. It does best at certain scales and time periods, and there are some settings that make life VERY challenging for the designer. TOAW does a resonable job of covering that period, although, of course, compromises are made as you get further away from the 'sweet spot,' this is arguably the scale that the Korean war scenario was designed to cover. Instead of locking everything down and trying to cover everything from within the engine silently, it allows the designer to override some behaviors depending on the operation being covered. I wouldn't call that 'cheating' any more than shifting my car into 2nd gear instead of cruise when going down a hill is 'cheating.' It's adjusting the system for variables that can't be anticipated by the system. No engine can take into account all the possible political and economic factors that affect the combat, that's why TOAW allows the scenario designer to adjust those factors. Thanks, Ralph

Do you have any references for those terms? I've never heard of them, and google doesn't bring up anything like that. What you're talking about sounds more like what in a QA environment would be called White Box Testing and Black Box Testing. In essence White box means that everything is known and there are no unknowns. That means that you can do complete testing. Black box means the opposite, you can set the inputs and test the outputs, but you don't know what actually happens inside. As applied to games, I have no idea of what you're talking about, that's why I asked if you had some references. Thanks [ March 15, 2007, 07:20 PM: Message edited by: Ralph Trickey ]