[UA] OT: Thought and Language

[Liam Routt]

Patrick O'Duffy wrote:
> (And even when writing, I only think in words when I get to the grunt stage
> of sticking words onto paper/screen. All the plots, characters, themes and
> whatnot are developed in this non-verbal form of thinking.)
> 
> Anyone else think like this?

A lot of the planning I do for my rpg campaigns (UA and others) revolves
around a "sense" of what is happening and might happen. I rarely put
this stuff into words, and most of the time, doing so seems to hurt the
ideas (right now, as I think about it, I'd liked it to
calcification...). Then again, I run my games with a large amount of
spur-of-the-moment improvization... I can say that unless I make a
concerted effort, it is hard to recall what happened in previous
sessions, and my notes about the plot tend to consist solely of NPC
names... :)

I also do a large proportion of my mechanics design in the same way. I
allow the bare framework of a set of mechanics to form, and then boot it
around in a pre-worded form in my mind for a few days or weeks. When I
finally sit down to try to phrase and refine it, I usually find that
I've nutted out most of the problems without ever once even settling
upon the mechanics in a formal sense.

I liken all of this to constraint programming (a field of computer
science I have personal interest in), where you tell the computer the
constraints that affect the problem, and as the computer to wrk out a
set of values that are consistent with those constraints. This stands in
direct contrast to the usual programming scheme of telling the computer
*how* to solve the problem and pushing values into the black box
created...

Take care,

Liam
-- 
Liam Routt                                               liam at routt.net
Darcsyde Productions                           http://www.darcsyde.org/

        -- still waiting for the Absolute Destiny Apocalypse --

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