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Originally Posted by dlavery
Good attempt to bring in the prior discussion regarding the necessity for referees to ignore "intent" when making their rulings, but I would postulate that it is irrelevant to this discussion. The referenced discussion had to do with the ability of referees to determine the "intent" of a team’s actions as they played the game. In that scenario, the referees are required to make instantaneous decisions based solely on what they can observe at that moment. With only a few rare exceptions, there is no opportunity for debate or deliberation. In such a situation, the only data that can be considered reliable is that directly observed by the referees. There is no ability to determine “intent,” therefore, it must be ignored by the referee. But in the case of determining the “intent” of a rule, the situation is different. When the rules are made public at the beginning of the season, there is ample opportunity to examine, discuss and review the rules. At the kick off, teams are invited to look at the rules and to strive for the simplest, most basic “non-lawyer-ish” interpretation possible. If there is still confusion you have many opportunities, through multiple channels, to seek clarification. There is time and means for discussion to understand the intent of the rules and the rule-makers. Unlike the former example, where there is no time to discover “intent,” this is a situation where you are explicitly invited by FIRST to investigate and understand the intent of the rules and how they may affect your robot design and game-playing strategy. Thus, the prior discussion really doesn’t have any bearing on this thread.
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Dave, I certainly don't contest the primary purpose of the linked thread, but I do think that there is merit to the notion that a random FIRST team, like an inexperienced referee, may not be as well-versed in nuances of intent as we veterans are. We need to make sure that the rules are clear-cut for the hypothetical lone rookie team in deepest, darkest Utah, whose only source of communication with FIRST comes in the form of rules, updates and the official (and often inconsistent) Q&A forum. When they, as laypeople, listen to Dean and Woodie at the kickoff, they may hear motivational speeches and little more, because they do not yet have the context to understand the underlying "spirit of FIRST" that Dean and Woodie exude. It's like a Catholic visiting a Baptist church--they understand, but they don't understand it all. The rules and their kin are dry, technical documents, which, once again, provide precious little context for these people. Just as new students often don't "get it" until they are present at their first FIRST regional, a new team may not understand that which we take for granted, until they show up at a regional and find themselves in violation not of an explicit rule, but a convention that has gained the force and effect of one. We can fault them for not doing enough to educate themselves, and to an extent, that is fair; but that doesn't absolve us of the need to try to make it as unambiguous for them as possible, while still balancing the other concerns that obviously affect the rule-makers' choices. While a new referee will have but a day or so to learn the nuances, I would submit that a new team, in the absence of guidance from the FIRST community, might well develop its own concept of the competition in a similarly short time, and will continue to exhibit that mindset until it is confronted with the reality of an event, several months later. Though hypothetical, I don't think that scenario is unreasonalble; since we would probably consider that undesirable, we should guard against it as well as we can, by offering guidance to the team, writing rules that do not lend themselves misinterpretation due to a rookie's mistaken impressions, and being empathetic to the fact that ultimately, we do seek growth for FIRST--why not aspire to make it simple for the layman to understand, but not so simple as to lose the precise concepts that we wish to convey?
Indeed, I know that Dave and the others who discuss game design seek to understand and cater to the needs of the community, and while I may disagree with them or others on certain specifics (like those littered throughout this thread) I
just want to argue don't question the good intentions of those productively involved. I merely try to approach the question from an unconventional, but reasoned perspective.