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Re: No math in games, thanks
your premise is self-contradictory with what you claim you want in the "no healers" article linking to here.
your desire for a "simulated world" goes against the "no math in my game" article. the simulation just means that the math becomes invisible, it's not transparent rules for the player - it's part of the world. in order to achieve that the game has to have non-transperent math: it's the point of "complexity" in which the player stops considering the math and starts thinking of it in the way it's presented, which is the world itself.
basically, to create immersion on a mathematical device (a CPU), your exploiting two major tendencies in the human mind:
1) when faced with overwhelming complexity in a system, we start using our intuition instead of knowledge of it's mechanics and details.
2) when our intuition fails to to recognize a pattern, we simply associate the closest pattern we already know.
this way you either make people feel the game world is a reality (applying the same tool they use in real life within the game world - intuition), which would allow them to find even non real things (such as magic) "realistic", or at list that it's our familiar reality (associate it with recognizable systems from day to day life). either way, you gain immersion, and you did that because you where able to outsmart the player's ability to recognize the game's math, you never gave them the chance to do so.
of course, there you go into the difference between emulation which mimics the symbolic result of the phenomena, and simulation, which mimics the circumstances of that result. this isn't a clear cut line: the deeper you go down the cause & affect, the more basic the causes you have, the more of a simulation it will be, and that's a bottomless pit. but the result is that you've created a higher level of complexity, and you've made it harder for the player's mind to recognize your math and break it's own immersion.