Game in the Brain

GURPS looks at relationships of point cost to Adventuring Utility, and not Real World Utility. If you are familiar with gurps and like observing humans overcomming challenges, then you will notice a lot of things are far cheaper in the adventuring mindset than in the RW utility.

Ambidexterity, Photographic Memory, and a ton of the advantages and disadvantages all can be measured as respect to adventuring utility. To argue on the side of Adventuring Utility, its easier to measure things… as compared to RW utility, it is much much harder.

Real World Utility takes into consider economic realities, and economic repercussions. RW-utility is not static, its dynamic and fickle. A piece of technology can reshape an entire economic landscape and thus change the “market price” of an advantage. Details become more important; and sadly it becomes a very long shopping and check list to track when you move into RWutility.

Its just too much work… but thats not exactly a problem. You buy a product because somoene did the work for you, and is trying to get rewarded and compensated for their trouble, effort, talent and inspiration. So I guess its up to someone to make a RW-utility Book of all things of the human condition.

GURPS Magic or Magic Game Systems
This is where RWU and AdU butt heads really badly. We suspend our disbelief, if we have trained ourselves to see RWU; we look through AdU as part of our RPing exercise. But lets talk about that elephant in the room…
… what happens with RWU of how magic systems of various game systems are set up…
Chaos and an unimagined and alien world. The power of magic will affect market forces because it makes Many many things that have a cost in Infrastructure (soft and hard) and Market to be ignored.

What happens is an alien and strange world; far stranger than the world we live in. When you remove the fundamental problems we have everyday: mortality, suffering, hardship, waste, the diversity and intensity of human beliefs and capabilities – the world with magic is something so alien because these elements we take forgranted is how our human psyche deals with things. its like how even infants have an instinctual grasp of gravity; we have some fundamental hard wiring about the world that get screwed at this level.

Example is if your Social Survival Skills vs the typical RPG set up.
I’m in the BPO world, in a fast growing industry with a lot of corruption. I have to be on guard and always reliant in multiple sources of information and continuous looking for weaknesses in the logical consistency (to a point my wife remarks I can be a bit robotic) all these dangers are due to the cognitive and economic environment. In a fast growing industry; more “pretenders” will be around, because there is a demand for talent but not the resources to vett and evaluate it. Fast growing industries has an emphasis in timely delivery instead of risk management. Opportunities are plenty so; there are the cognitive factors that sets things up like the viscous cycle found in Gambling.
So there are the fundamental laws of cognition and economics allowing for all this… and to remove economics or cognition from the equation is a world that is alien to me; i will be spoon fed information… I cannot ask questions… which is a big problem.

I say I cannot ask questions is because; that scientific principle is just thrown out the door. If there is no rationalization; or pretending rationalization that cannot be infused into a world then the most fundamental survival skill: analysis is gone and thrown out the window.

I guess I’m pretty biased to some forms of art; where it falls under whim vs reality. To base something in reality is to base something on what I can strongly disagree with but have to accept. With whim, I cannot exercise the mental flexibility of disagreement while being able to live or accept what contradicts my vision of ideas.

I guess the contradiction is what I look for in a game. When the players give me an opposing view of the world. I can disagree with the players with a vision or idea of how things are going to work out; but I can work within the confines of my players own expectations.

Personal Comments
I get tired of work; but I can never let people be exposed and vulnerable the way I have been made so by all the crap I’ve gone through. 😛 Too bad players look for escape; I look for people who want to be inoculated.

Aw shit; I finally got why Bob left for Canada. I guess there is an amount of crap one can take; even if they are not part of the corruption, it just gets so complicated you don’t know where up is anymore and your afraid for your own morals – you don’t want to be those guys. Well if my mom and dad can live with all this crap and thrive I better be able to. After all those history lectures; what we have in the Philippines is small fish when compared living in india and china.  If i don’t survive and thrive in this; what happens when these two dictate how biz is done in the future?