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[bvanevery]

Calm down he just meant roughly 15 minutes or so, just as an example of how long it might take a gifted person to learn.

I'm calm; I'm making a point about different people's ability to grasp "depth."  Tic tac toe seems pretty engaging to 5 year olds, after all.  I talked about my life experience of chess because it has meant different things to me at different points in my life.  None of those points has ever included "formal chess study," which is exactly what chess means to a large class of chess players out there.  Possibly the majority: are you really a chess player if you don't study opening books and so forth?  Yet I play chess decently against many of them; go figure.  One of the problems with these discussions, is that if we can't establish objective metrics for "depth," it disappears into the realm of the subjective pretty quickly.  That in turn makes some people upset.

But which game is more hardcore, less casual? chess or d&d?

Historically that has changed also.  AD&D went through a fad phase in the early 1980s when literally everybody was playing it.  Everybody in 6th grade, even normal girls.  That was my memory of it.  People weren't geeks for doing it.  Then some people got killed for real in some caves underneath MIT, and all the media hoopla about violence and Satanism got started.  Then the fad shrunk back down to its core audience, the socially less skilled creative escapist nerds that played the game before, and have played the game ever since.  My dorm in college had a big contingent of such people.  Probably because the dorm was a Tudor castle, had a real armorer working in the basement, and the Society for Creative Anachronism practiced on the front lawn every Sunday afternoon.  We called the D&D players "CLRries," which was short for "Central Living Room," the place where they gathered to play D&D.  The joke was that there were only 3 permissible topics of conversation at the dorm's dinner tables: sex, computers, and D&D.

BTW when I bring up some of these details of my own life, it's so you can compare them to your own lives and see if there's any "aha" of cultural pattern.  You ever known your own "CLRries?"  What does that say about the casualness or hardcoreness of D&D?

How would you objectively measure the depth of chess?  or D&D?  Can their depths be meaningfully compared?

[RCIX]

One of the problems with these discussions, is that if we can't establish objective metrics for "depth," it disappears into the realm of the subjective pretty quickly.  That in turn makes some people upset.
<snip>
How would you objectively measure the depth of chess?  or D&D?  Can their depths be meaningfully compared?

Well, that gets back to my idea of repeatedly analyzing rulesets to find interactions that make new rules until you can't do it anymore, which i imagine would be really hard to do with something like D&D.

[bvanevery]

Well, that gets back to my idea of repeatedly analyzing rulesets to find interactions that make new rules until you can't do it anymore, which i imagine would be really hard to do with something like D&D.

There's almost enough material in the Nth order game to start such an analysis.  If there isn't, there soon will be.  Uh, unless I get banned and no one else shows up to write, of course.

One metric I already observe, is how much "meta tension" builds up until the participants feel a need to say something about the direction of the game.  I started to make a separate thread about the evolution of the game yesterday, as some things were bugging me about it, but I held off in order to see what would evolve without my interference.  I don't think it's coincidental that shortly thereafter, you added a new rule about "making it more like writing."  Although we may or may not share the same views on what's going on, it's clear that we both realized that the system was reaching some kind of point of strain that was going to require some kind of "director's cue."  Games do exist about implicit unspoken contracts, for example Contract Bridge, but I'll hazard a guess that implicit contracts can only get a group of players so far.  At some point they have to talk explicitly about what they want from the game.