Tomb Titivator
Posts: 911
Joined: Thursday, 17th December 2015, 02:36
defense of hidden numbers
You don't want people agonizing over numbers.
What is disconcerting is that everybody accepts this argument at face value, admit that it's a con, and play the pro vs con game.
What should be established is that this bizarre claim is baseless to its core in the first place.
It is definitely untrue in this context, and I don't think it's true for any game, fiction, or literature ever.
I think the nurturing element of the sentiment can be so seductive - you're taking away people's agony! - that you forget to ask if it's even true.
I've never seen it, the so-called "paralysis by analysis", in action.
On the other hand, I have been and seen people struggling to make decisions because of the game giving no way to evaluate your options.
That's true paralysis - you have nothing to go on.
People are very good at filtering out information they don't want or can't handle, and at making decisions based on a combination of rough estimation and intuition.
Lots of games give you a bunch of info - and they are not worse for it, even if you're not interested in it. If something is not helping you, you scroll past it when you find it. It is, at worst, a minor and non-intrusive distraction. We observe people play without figuring out e.g. what AC actually means, even though it's pretty simple.
The goal when you start your first game of Crawl is to figure out how to move around and hit monsters. The functional approach to this problem is to ignore stats and the right-hand panel. You may even starve to death. It is only when you get a grasp on basic gameplay, and wish to get better, do you pay closer attention to details. This goes on, slowly, to the point where players want to make informed decisions, and start caring about their odds.
Suppose we showed HD in the xv screen, passing it off as "monster level". Is anyone convinced that when people find their first rat, they will think "oh my god it's level 1, I need to do some serious analysis on this to inform my tactics with this rat"? Of course not, they will just see that it's a very low-level enemy and hit it. But, people could accrue some impression of what HD entails, and it could be used in place of dangerousness indicators. You could mention that polymorph attempts to transform monsters into something of similar level, and suddenly it would be clear rather than spoilery why you wouldn't want to polymorph Gastronok.
We also see pro-obfuscation people get a pass when they move goalposts when talking about numbers versus #s and !s: if you count #s or !s, you're misusing what they are there for, but if numbers are available, then you're expected to draw some kind of perfect information by using those exact values, and those numbers must allow you to predict outcomes with absolute precision.
If I were to see "EV: 38" I would think "whoa that's a lot of EV", not "OK so by exactly how much is this stronger than 37 and weaker than 39" because that would be absurd. Following the pro-obfuscation argument further, if that number was given 10 times more precisely (e.g. by including decimals, like "EV: 38.2") then people would be forced to be that much more exacting with their number crunching. It doesn't work that way! It's evident from how you see taverners analyze numbers.
Indeed, now that hex success rates are shown, you can't say people are suddenly making optimal decisions when wanding monsters, just better-informed ones.
I think abstractly, in ranges, like others. But I do this much better if I see precise numbers, and form my own abstractions independently, than if I am handed down some guy's preconceptions of what ranges I should consider.
As for those souls that do analyze everything with spreadsheets and simulations, one thing you can't call them is 'paralyzed'.
Hiding numbers blocks an opportunity to play the game on a deeper, more direct and sophisticated level.
Showing numbers does not obligate the player to any kind of play.
If you showed e.g. monster damage numbers, number-averse players would look right past them - godspeed to them (and me as I would often do it too) because that works too.
Paralysis by analysis is a myth. Paralysis by impossibility of analysis is common. Like sasquatch and mice, respectively.
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