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Save me from prescriptivists in all things. We should just accept that all taxonomies have weak boundaries and move on with our life. "I know it when I see it"
by andrewla 7y ago
Save me from prescriptivists in all things. We should just accept that all taxonomies have weak boundaries and move on with our life. "I know it when I see it" is a fine answer for something like this.
Is there ever a situation that you'll have to deal with where a matter of life-and-death hinges on a definitional absurdity like this? Is there a situation where anything at all hinges on this, except someone says "let's play a game" and you suggest Legos and they say "technically that's not a game" and then you stop talking to that person?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoThe seems specifically to be an exercise in descriptivism. The point seems to be to build a vocabulary, not to draw hard boundaries.
- andrewla 7y agoThere is no reference here to common usage or to any sort of establishment of standard practices, etc. This is just naval-gazing to put hard boundaries on something that is intrinsically not well-defined. In particular, all of the things that are explicitly excluded from "games" are things that some people would argue are games, that the author is arguing is not, which is an explicitly prescriptive practice.
- Smaug123 7y agoTo quote the article: > I want to stress that I don't believe it's important that everyone have the same definition of games…