On 6/7/2020 7:03 AM, Rebecca wrote: > On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 11:44 PM Kerim Aydin wrote: >> On 6/7/2020 1:00 AM, Rebecca wrote: >>> I personally greatly prefer Referendum (and voted for it) because it's >>> intuitiuve. The rules need less incomprehensible, unintuitive terms of >> art >>> (like Switch!) and more like Referendum imho. >> >> Huh, interesting. The switch language always seemed really intuitive to >> me (and was a great improvement on what was there before). Sometimes it's >> odd that certain things implemented as switches (like when we implemented >> "currencies" as switches) but the underlying metaphor of flipping switches >> always seemed pretty clear to me? >> >> Officer interest, for example, is a switch, and that can be "flipped" to > any list of the five ministries, including a list with multiple of the same > ministry. That is not how I would expect it to work. Karma is an integer > number that we've shoehorned into switch for some reason. > > The most unintuitive and pernicious type of terminology is not totally made > up terminology (like Blornsbwerg or whatever). It is terminology that works > similarly, but not quite the same as, its intuitive meaning, which means > that the name actually undermines the full meaning in the rules. Switch > would be intuitive if it were only applied to two or three possible values > which could be flipped.
Using computer programming terms, it's useful to have a base class such that instances of that class (1) can take on a specified range of values and no others; (2) have sensible default behavior and/or error-trapping built in; (3) have a set of methods useful to everything in that class (e.g. "is self-ratifying"). Is there a better word/set of metaphors to use for that? The ancient version used "properties" e.g. "one of the properties of G. is that eir karma is 3" but that was pretty darn ugly. I agree, however you slice it, many of the use-case extensions do end up being unintuitive (the way the Ribbon switch is structured stands out for me as not what you'd expect). Regardless of the metaphor used, it's always challenging to figure out when to extend the base class versus creating an entirely new class (along with all the rules language overhead that requires). -G.
