[jcard]

These last three posts get to the fundamental reason I struggle to enjoy OOTP: basically, the inescapable ignorance in which users are asked to operate. It is pervasive enough that the experience feels less like actively and purposefully managing than passively choosing ill-defined inputs and generating various outputs, with a detachment between the two that proscribes any sense of causal mechanics. Just as knowing exact formulae can be said to be an exploitation of the exigencies of the binary computing universe, the shrouding of the nominal quantities used in those formulae is artificially obfuscating—in real life, we can recognize at least some traits with a positive or negative correlation to the likelihood of certain outcomes. At this point, I would like to see a positive official affirmation that (whether dimming or playing) that the engine processes each plate appearance as a discrete and independent event, as well as identification of which variables are factors (nominally, not quantitatively) in a process.

For myself and perhaps others, the overwhelming disenfranchising pursuant to such widespread ignorance precludes any feeling of discovery through experience. Instead, each session feels like a new yet familiar turn in the dark blindly flipping switches between options in an unknown language, with the circuitry activating nubs that generate heat but no light.