Is Q&A official?

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by BigJ

I'm no game theory expert, but I'm not sure if you could ever cover all the possibilities of a real life game in a meaningful way without human judgement. That's what makes D&D with a group of friends way more fun than say, Halo

I'm no expert, but I've dabbled, and have some limited professional game-writing experience...

Pretty much every game in existence (save Calvinball) is permissive: you can do exactly what you are given permission to do, and you may not do anything in-game that you are not explicitly allowed to do. This is true for everything from football to Monopoly. (Football has a bit of proscription-flavor in the realm of human physiology, but not much.)

FIRST games are not permissive, they're proscriptive: by their nature, anything you aren't prohibited from doing is legal.

Proscriptive rules sets are much, much harder to write than permissive rules sets, and I daresay that it might be impossible to make a proscriptive rules set that is both judgement-free and accessible in terms of length, usability, and so forth.