Talk:Cruelty scale

Removed gratuitous link to truffle recipe. -- OKB 2002/11/20

not sure i understand this scale... does "stuck" mean unwinnable? if so, does it mean a game filled with "instant death" is merciful because you cant make the game unwinnable and can just undo the death move? -- 14:16, 14 January 2007 Nespresso

• To be honest, I have difficulty understanding this scale as well. As far as I know, yes, "stuck" in this context does means making the game unwinnable. However, no, a game filled with "instant death" is not merciful. UNDO is a "meta-command" or otherwise called an out-of-world action and shouldn't be counted in reckoning game cruelty. In TADS games and some Z-code interpreters, you can UNDO multiple turns, which could potentially make an unwinnable game winnable again, and, well, you can see how allowing UNDO into the discussion makes cruelty assessment meaningless, I hope. So, at best, an instant death game is Polite.
  
  I suppose we should start seriously appending some sort of clarifications on the cruelty scale page and give examples. We may discover there's even more confusion than we thought. -- David Welbourn 00:17, 15 January 2007 (EST)

I have difficulty understanding it, too. The extremes (Merciful and Cruel) seem rather easy to understand, but the others... Maybe this RAIF thread could help a bit? --Eriorg 09:07, 15 January 2007 (EST)

Quite frankly, the middle scales seem to be meaningless. The thread Eriorg referenced helps differentiate polite, but not much. In order to be actually useful, a rating system should make it's differences clear. Having to cross-reference outside material proves that people are confused about what the definitions are. We have no way to understand what different editors mean when they say "tough" or "cruel" because they appear to have the same definitions. -- Knight Errant

I agree, while I can moderately understand the difference between merciful, polite, tough, nasty and cruel, the description of something like "being stuck, but not that obviously stuck or irrevocably dead" seems meaningsless to me. For example, I don't understand why "when you do something irrevocable, it's clear" would be more nasty than "it's immediately obvious that you're about to do something irrevocable". How can we rate his rating system ? I'd vote for "cruel" because anything seems obvious... (btw there are only 3 games in the Tough games category, it means the system should be improved)

I'd suggest some better rating system could take in account at least 3 criterias, and could help the beginners :

• Level or style of language used : easy (or plain), average, advanced. (especially useful for foreigners who wish to play an English game)
• Difficulty of the clues / plot / puzzles : easy/merciful (cannot get stuck), average /tough (some tricky parts), advanced/cruel (may seem impossible to win for a beginner / when you get stuck or loose you must start from the beginning)
• Time for playing it (in average) : short game between 2 and 15 minutes (typically speedif), middle game between 15 and 30 minutes, long game : more than 30 minutes.

It know it would be a bit difficult to give a precise time this way, but it may be an indication. --otto

I think that the scale is theoretically very clear but practically sometimes difficult to apply; it's very useful for design/theory/coding/deep reviews, but less appropriate for players, wiki-editors, and brief reviews. The main grey area tends to be Tough/Nasty, not because of any theoretical fuzziness but rather because individual game quirks frequently muddy the waters.

• I support extending this entry to include examples, particularly paired examples designed to illustrate the distinctions between adjacent cruelty levels.
• I don't support changing the basic structure of the cruelty scale, although minor rewording for clarity's sake is okay.
• I would be interested in an alternative difficulty rating system to be used alongside Cruelty (Cruelty is not the same thing as difficulty at all, and we should probably clarify this).

-- Maga 18:01, 31 August 2007 (PDT)

My suggestion, based on watching how this sort of thing can get out of control, is to assemble a group of people, a review board or guild or whatever you want to call it, and then that group devises a rating system, and then you apply it to the games. Then you make a page for the review board showing who is on it. That way the scales are accountable, and the biases and situations of the group are in one place. --Jason Scott 22:52, 31 August 2007 (PDT)