Quote:
Originally Posted by 45Auto
Wow, apparently you have never worked to a set of real world requirements!  |
Thanks for the backup from another perspective.
The funny thing is that I'm not an engineer (though I have some experience with both semiconductor manufacturing equipment and quantum cryptography): my degrees are in theoretical physics, linguistics/ASL, and education, not engineering. I have, however, at one time or another been a professional freelance game designer, so my perspective on this -- and thus my disagreement with Tristan and my defense of the GDC -- comes primarily from what I know about writing game rules as opposed to engineering.
Until you sit down and write a set of rules, and then have people try to play a game (even a mock-up of that game) based on those rules, you have no idea just how hard it is to write good rules -- and that's not even taking into account whether or not the game is fun to play or fun to watch or both.
And as I said before, permissive rules sets are easier to write than (good) prescriptive rules sets, and each lend themselves to a very different type of game. Writing a prescriptive rules set that you know is going to be picked apart by tens of thousands of highly motivated, intelligent people is, to put it mildly, a daunting task. In light of that task, the expectation of language so precise that it can't be gamed is completely, utterly unreasonable.