On Not Using the Published System
So Mo is advocating in Getting Around to (One of) the Point(s) (and I thought I liked parentheses) that players can, if they don’t like how the published system does something, do it another way and get the same result.
Judson is talking in the Story Games thread The Akido of Game Design about how games can be designed with the naive assumption that all rules will be followed, with the even more naive intent to make the rules unbreakable, or turn the whole thing around and design the game rules so that “exploiting” them is how the designer intends it to be played.
It’s not a new idea that players will ignore rules they don’t like. However, I’ve read a big pile of posts and threads and articles where indie players and designers avow that they play their games “exactly according to the rules” or “exactly as the designer intended” which is, when you get right down to it, more or less impossible. (Short version: authorial intent has an influence on reader reception, but it does not and cannot dictate reception exactly due to the very nature of language.) Players will interpret rules, even if they don’t introduce formal house rules.
A great example of this is Lacuna Part 1, where Jared refuses to allow players the illusion that they’re following the rules exactly and producing a play experience as he intended. How you play Lacuna will be determined by your personal idiosyncracies, and in fact how you play says something about you as a person and as a gamer.
Process and Product
Rules channel play. They determine not only what happens but how it happens, at what cost and with what side effects, guiding players to interact with each other in specific ways. Rules are about creating a product and provide a process to get there. Players select rules based on both what those rules produce and how they go about it, and players abandon rules when they either produce something they don’t like or when they do it in a way they don’t like.
Mo’s central conceit is that the point of a game is to produce a certain end result — a product. Dogs is designed to put players in a situation where their beliefs are challenged and they must either escalate or let their beliefs be trampled on. Primetime Adventures is designed to foster a groupthink atmosphere where the players collaborate on creating a television serial. And so on. There are many different techniques (processes) that will get players to that same end product, and different players have different technique preferences. A given game book may offer a desirable end product but an undesirable process to get there. Mo’s argument is that, assuming that the social contract allows for it, players may elect to use processes beyond those presented in the book to get to the end product that is.
Judson and later comments in the thread point out the potential disconnect between the product that a book promises and the actual product of the process the book provides. If a game says that it is about epic derring-do and then hands you a character who has trouble killing rats, well, there’s a problem there. You might want to modify or abandon the process that ends with your character covered in rat bites. The designer might see you changing things willy-nilly and put out a new edition. The new rules do not make your character triumph over the rat population; they make it harder for you the player to change things around in the published process (or make changing this less effective). Or to put it more kindly, the designer may try to provide a system that does not “need” to be modified in order for it to be played. I suspect that this impulse usually comes from a Design What Doesn’t Matter philosophy — you needn’t be spending your time worrying about rules when you should be playing.
One strand of indie design inverts the problem by putting a focus on creating a set of rules that “hits the target” of a specific intended type of play. These games provide a rule set which encourages players through overt and subtle means to play a certain way and get a certain result — the process rewards the players to keep them on-target to create the end product. This shifts the emphasis from liberating players so that they can create the end product on their own to showing players how to reliably create the end product by specific processes. While the end product is still the eventual goal, these games focus on the process that creates it; in many ways it is not an exagerration to say that the game is the process.
Which seems to bring Mo’s proposal in direct conflict with this design philosophy. If the game is about the process, about the steps and obstacles and progression towards the end result, avoiding that process in favor of another one is, in effect, playing another game entirely. One of my own designs, Agora, is an extreme example of this. One of the prime tenants of Agora is that in order to create any progress, you have to risk what you’ve already got. This is exemplified in the dice mechanic, in which any die roll risks losing that die. You roll in dice representing the things that you are risking in the conflict, use those dice to make the other side lose dice, and whoever runs out of dice first loses their stakes. Usually players will surrender their stakes rather than continue on, since the risks can easily outweigh the potential gains. The product of the game is to put yourself and your followers on the line for your vision of future society; the process is a pretty straightforward matter of risking dice representing things that you care about.
Now, I can easily see players disliking that process. Deciding to sidestep that process in pursuit of the same product, though, changes things. Resolving all conflicts in, say, open negotiation as to what you’ll lose in order to gain your stakes, would result in an almost completely different game — much more staid, controlled, less dangerous, less risky. And that would be perfectly fine.
Publishing Books, Popularizing Games
I am not going to explode in a puff of smoke if somebody plays my game differently than I intended it to be played. There’s no reason whatsoever for me to point out that they are playing it wrong, that they are ignoring important rules, or that they won’t possibly enjoy themselves playing that way. Most likely, they are enjoying themselves playing that way; that’s why they play that way. And in fact, if somebody out there took something I wrote and played something based off of that material and had fun, that’s a cause for celebration! I’ll more likely ask to hear what they did and what happened, because that’s absolutely awesome. I will no more count it a failure than I would count it a failure if someone used a sculpture that I made as a decorative doorstop (which, for reference, my dad still does ten years after I made that sculpture). Here’s why: I design games and I write books. I don’t write games. So when somebody reads my book and enjoys a game that comes out of it, I count that as a success.
Mo’s proposal that an undesirable process can be sidestepped in favor of a more desirable process is not (generally speaking) changing the rules of the game being played. It’s simply using rules that weren’t presented in the book. Back to the Lumpizzle Schiprizzle: “System is the processes by which the players agree on the characteristics and development of fictional content.” This has no direct correlation to the rules presented in any book anywhere. This refers only to what happens at the table. If Mo’s table uses some rules they found in a book and some other rules that they found somewhere else and they have fun doing it, that’s awesome. If the end product of following these patchwork processes resembles the end product promised by the book in question, that’s just gravy. What’s important is that the end product they create is something that they all want to produce and the process that they use to get there was entertaining for everybody at the table.
The book is not the game, and that has some pretty significant repercussions for the production of the book. This is actually a portion of the publishing process where the mainstream guys are leagues ahead of the indie guys. A book is a product sold to customers and read by consumers; a game is an experience enacted by players. That the players may be the consumers or that the customers are buying the book in order to play the game does not equate the book and the game any more than a chicken farmer made my dinner last night. The book and the game are related, certainly, but they are not the same.
Some people buy the book without playing the game. Some people buy the book without any intention of ever playing the game. There are a ton of books out in the world that were written and published in order to be sold, not played. The obvious examples are tie-in novels the likes of which White Wolf and Alderac both produced with a good measure of success. Less obvious examples are sourcebooks which provide flavor and background, whether or not the events of an actual game ever take place in that location or directly concern the faction or technology or whatever the sourcebook is about. These books provide two things. The first is simple: context. If I’m playing Changeling, the material I read in Kithbook: Redcap will be useful to me even when I’m not playing a redcap or opposite a redcap. The second is a little more amorphous: inspiration, both in terms of fictional content and in terms of process. I have not yet played Exalted or The Shadow of Yesterday, but having bought and read the books, the content has inspired me to create epic storylines like Exalted and tie flags to character advancement like TSOY. And to be perfectly frank, White Wolf and Clinton have my money despite me not playing their games.
Some people play the game without buying the book. This may sound odd, but this is actually the majority of gamers in the world — one guy buys the book and plays with his four friends. One sale, five players. I’ve played Nine Worlds without having read more than a paragraph out of the book. I’m sure you’ve played games that you haven’t read the book for, too. From the designer’s standpoint, they’re putting a lot of hard work into that game’s design that will be enjoyed by people who have not given them any money. For some altruistic souls, that may be fine, but there is also some more pragmatic considerations taken into account. Most obviously, simple play can lead to later sales. Games of all stripes operate on this principle, from indie games to board games to sports (gotta buy a baseball mitt). If it was fun to play the game that Jimmy brought, I’ll buy the necessary materials to play it on my own later. Additionally, this can generate cross-sales. Nine Worlds was all sorts of fun at Gamex; I’ll buy Dust Devils to see how that plays out, too. Lastly, this also helps build brand recognition, a high-level concern that the indie publishers are only starting to realize exists. To take a page from the web comics guys, it’s not a stretch to consider selling teeshirts, mugs, and dice bags imprinted with logos, characters, and memorable quotes, and sell them not only to people who’ve bought the books, but to people who have only ever played the game. The game itself can be an icon.
Designing for Players Not Using the Published System
So once we start looking at the book as a separate monster from the game, players disregarding portions of the book in favor of personalizing their game seems like less and less of a crisis. In fact, once you separate the book and the game, the design that goes into the book is pretty profoundly altered.
First, though, the absolute rock-bottom basics. You’re providing a book and making claims about what the book is good for. If you’re a good indie designer and have that target of intended play, the text that you provide must give clear instructions on how to follow the intended processes to get the intended end product. Players won’t do everything “right” all the time, even when they’re trying, but the text needs to get them to the point where they’re performing processes accurately enough to get the end product. In the most basic terms, you promise something (a play experience) and you need to deliver on it. Simple.
However, let’s elaborate on that a bit. You are promising a play experience; you are selling a book. When you sell anything, you present its features — this sportscar goes 120 bazillion miles a second — and so the features of the thing that you are selling — the book — are the things that need to be what’s featured. So in order to make a solid sales demonstration, you need to present how the book provides the game experience. Put the book in the potential customer’s hands; have them read a pertinent section explaining a rule or look up the cost of whatever they want their character to buy or do. Put the quick-reference chart out of the book in front of them. Send them home with the character sheet out of the back of the book. Link the book to the game. Which is all salesmanship and I was talking about design, right? I still am. In order to do any of that you need to have that easily-read rules section, equipment costs table, quick-reference chart, and character sheet. In order to sell the book as essential to the play experience, the book needs to be essential to the play experience. And you can’t make that essential link as long as you’re considering them the same thing in the first place.
However, once you’ve made that sale and the customer takes the book home, hopefully to become a consumer and play the game with others, then’s when the real design work pays off. Because the players are not going to play the game exactly as you intended. Not only may they want to make a few little changes to accomodate their social reality, but they will, inescapably, interpret the rules as they read them. The ensuing game is what sells their friends on buying the book; it’s what sells the original customer on buying a second book; it’s what sells everybody on buying into the brand.
So you give them options. At any given time in any given game, any given player should have more than one option. Options should be within and without the fiction of the game. Mo should be able to call down a conflict and throw her dice around and she should be able to offer up a mutually beneficial and mutually appreciated alternative to rolling dice. Problems encountered in the game should allow for multiple approaches, not only in terms of in-character action (sneak past or overpower?) but also in mechanics and interactions at the table (roll dice or narrate or cut scene?). Players should have resources available to them that can swing results in their favor when it’s important and some means to signify when the results aren’t important. And lastly, leave one option open, unconstrained by the processes presented in the book — the “Say Yes” portion of “Say Yes or Roll Dice.” Consider it an expansion port that they can plug in whatever procedures they’d like to add.
Additionally, design with a space for player input to make a significant difference in the game. Again, this goes for both in-fiction events and at-the-table interactions. If a game design is a rattling machine that always does one thing, it’s entertaining once per playgroup, and the players are engaged as an audience experiencing a spectacle rather than as creators collaborating on something personally significant. This can be as high-brow as thematic concerns that the story will address in play to the down-and-dirty simple mechanics of spreading points out on a character sheet. The more input each player has, the more that player owns the ensuing experience and it becomes not something that happened to them, but something that they did themselves. Not only will this reduce players abandoning the published system, but even when they do supplement the provided processes with their own stuff, the tie-in that the design guides them to make will keep them from straying so far that they miss the intended target that you’ve promised them when they bought the book.
The point, for both options and input, is that these provisions supercede silly little things like how many dice to roll when. Options and input empower the players to take the processes provided in the book and run even further afield from what you might have intended. It makes the game about the players making choices about the play experience they are creating. And it makes the game less about what the designer originally intended. It is providing the seven-cornered cube, and inviting the players — and the readers — to take what you started and create out of it something profoundly original.
And how much better is that than getting some people you don’t know on the other side of the planet to roll dice in a certain way?
June 7th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
A few nitpicks and then a more lengthy response:
-There are a ton of books out in the world that were written and published in order to be sold, not played. The obvious examples are tie-in novels the likes of which White Wolf and Alderac both produced with a good measure of success.-
This depends heavily on your definition of success.
-If a game design is a rattling machine that always does one thing, it’s entertaining once per playgroup, and the players are engaged as an audience experiencing a spectacle rather than as creators collaborating on something personally significant. -
I call shenanigans. What if the game design enables the players to collaborate as creators something that is personally significant? P.T.A., Dogs, Sorcerer, TSoY, Burning Wheel…
Many of the games I enjoy, I play directly out of the book and do ask the players to contribute and create rules. Sorcerer asks players to define Humanity and has a whole section in the end of the book about different ways the text could be fiddled with in hopes that players will do so. Burning Wheel has the Monster Burner which shows how to create lifepaths and traits, the keys to creating Burning Wheel worlds of our own.
The Shadow of Yesterday shows how to make Keys and Secrets of our own, the foundation for creating our own cultures and hence…worlds.
These are games that play gloriously right out of the book but still have bits for us to tinker with.
June 7th, 2006 at 4:34 pm
Judd,
When your group plays TSOY “right out of the book” do you play exactly the same way my group plays TSOY when we play “right out of the book?” And I don’t just mean, do we use different keys — I mean, do you think we all IIEE, set up conflicts, and narrate the same way? Approach the world or the characters the same way? Add or subtract color and detail in the same way? Set up the social dynamic around the table the same way? Have the same intellectual or emotional buyin to the game?
I’ve got money that says we don’t. So which of us is right about playing right out of the book?
As for definitions of success, yea, we can pick on White Wolf all day long. It’s fun and easy. White Wolf games are often a mess. They’re often full of stupidity. They’re also played by about a gajillion people. So if definitions of success include any of the following — making money on your games, getting people to play games, having people enjoy your games, and even (gasp) getting people to believe they could do something with a game they hadn’t thought they could before — then White Wolf has had “a good measure” of all of that.
June 7th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
Judd,
To be clearer about my point on the “right out of the box” issue — did you follow this year’s game chef at all? Because there was this interesting thing that happened in a lot of submissions, Ben called it “Boardgame-itus” and described it as when the system is designed too tightly to do one thing in a manner that gets all its input from the system rather than the players.
TSOY, Sorcerer, Dogs… all of these games do not have Boargame-itus, because they all have a “say yes” portion of the game. Vincent says things on forums like, “I figure every group is going to come to its own decisions, based on its own taste, about how much non-town play they have in their game. I also figure that a GM sitting and watching two Dogs having a funny conversation over the stew pot is doing a better job at “say yes or roll dice” than one who cuts them off abruptly to get on to the next town. She’s saying yes.”
There is nothing in Dogs about having funny conversations over the stew pot, and no mechanic for deciding how much non-town play you have. There is, however, a lot of room in the game for you to do your own thing around those. The whole ’say yes’ part, the whole “this is your game’ part. No two groups I’ve ever played with have played Dogs exactly the same, but they’ve all been playing Dogs because Dogs has that flexibility built into the game.
Which makes it a tricky thing to say “we play it right out of the box.” Because we don’t. We play the mechanics as described in the book without modification (I’ve never actually houseruled anything in Dogs) — but who gets to call conflicts, and when, and what acceptable stakes are, and how much non-town play you have, and how much freeplay you have, all of those things alter from group to group, even with the same GM. When I GMed Dogs for Josh we ended up saying very different things about who could form what stakes then when I GMed Bitches — and yet both games used the system in the book exactly. But in neither case was the game exactly the same.
That flexibility is, I think, what Josh is talking about. It’s certainly the thing that lets you have a story game that gets at things that matter to you rather than a parolor naration game suffering from boardgame-itus.
June 7th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
Brand,
Take it easy, man. I wasn’t taking a shot at White Wolf, not at all.
Let us let this simmer for a bit and come back to it.
Judd
June 7th, 2006 at 4:46 pm
Judd,
Dude, sorry! I wasn’t upset at all! My tone was kind of ironic and funny.
I know I come off as an ass online sometimes — but that’s only because I am an ass. I am, however, not an angry ass. I promise!
June 7th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
Okeedoke. I guess I needed more examples of games that fall prey to this because I wasn’t getting it.
I followed Game Chef, fascinated from a distance but didn’t follow closely enough to know about board game-i-tis.
Okeedoke.
June 7th, 2006 at 4:58 pm
Judd,
This is probably also one of those things that would be really clear if we were talking face to face, that takes about 50 billion words to explain over the net.
Sometimes I love the net, sometimes I don’t.
::shrug::
June 7th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
Yup, that’s what I was looking for with the questions I posed:
As the designer, if you want people to be able to use their personal skills to compensate for areas of your system they might have problems with, does your explicit system make room for them to do so? If you do not want this, how do you constrain this ability in your design? Is there other things we can do to expand the support for multiple playtypes, or multiple sockets or whatever? Do we even want to?
Cheers!
June 7th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
Josh,
First, good post. I think you’ve hit a lot of things I’ve been trying to figure out to articulate, so thanks!
Second, and at the risk of wandering off into theory land (which is where I live most of the time): Do you have any idea what makes roleplaying games so different from board games? We don’t talk about making board games “more flexible”, and having a “say yes” portion to most board games would be pretty messy, wouldn’t it? I know what the difference is in video games. Namely that the interface (read: procedures) are hard-wired, you have to follow the procedures provided by the designer becauase you don’t get to access the content otherwise. But that’s not true of a board game… Is it?
Thomas
June 7th, 2006 at 11:16 pm
Great article, Josh. (And if Mo happens by, I also enjoyed hers.) Judson’s thread is also a very interesting one that deserves more attention (although if I understand correctly, what he’s talking about is in contrast to what you and Mo are). Judson is pointing to an extremely important part of design analysis: if you find yourself fighting the procedures because they seem “wrong”, try instead “gaming” them to see if they (1) are actually fun that way, and (2) actually produce the right effect in what might at first be a counterintuitive way.
It all also seems to tie together with a thread I recently read (here, with an illuminating reference to a brief piece on “diceless” play by Erick Wujcik). Briefly, what’s discussed there is how, in a great deal of RPing (in fact pretty typical in my experience), it’s very normal to use “social mediation” either to resolve important questions or to frame any use of the formal mechanics in such a way as to gain maximal advantage. In my opinion this isn’t quite the same as “say yes” or “alternate resolution”: in this style of play, everyone generally expects the mechanics to be invoked in response to various triggers, and they also expect to abide by whatever the mechanics spit out. But a great deal of leeway exists with regard to whether and how the triggers occur. So, e.g., while it might take a successful Disarm Traps roll to completely neutralize a trap without springing it, a player might deduce through roleplay and description that a known trap is no threat to bystanders if it’s sprung, say, by an animated skeleton that you can conjure up.
June 8th, 2006 at 8:41 am
Judd said: I call shenanigans. What if the game design enables the players to collaborate as creators something that is personally significant? P.T.A., Dogs, Sorcerer, TSoY, Burning Wheel…
That’s what I’m saying, Judd. Those games aren’t the ‘rattling machines that do one thing’. Each of them calls for significant player input both before and during play in the form of Issues, traits, Humanity, Keys, BITs, and so on. Those games are what I’m talking about — you should leave one corner open on the cube so the players can fill it in.
Also, for reference, boardgamitis is closely related to parlor narration — the game provides everything, the players are just there to roll dice and look up results.
On the subject of boardgames, Thomas, I guarantee you that you and I play Monopoly differently. Uno is also a big nexus of house rules. I don’t think there’s actually a big distinction between how ‘open’ either kind of game is. However, the big difference that I see between roleplaying and board games is that roleplaying games have signfiicant details — very literally, details that are personally significant to the players — whereas boardgames generally do not. It’s a rare boardgame where I have an emotional connection to what’s happening on the board; it’s a rare roleplaying game where I don’t. This is pertinent because the input that roleplaying games can open up is to affect that significant game content. Roleplaying games allow me to explore women’s rights in a patriarchal society; a boardgame doesn’t.
June 8th, 2006 at 9:25 am
Hey, Eliott.
Yes, as was discussed over on Mo’s blog, Drama Resolution gets used a thousand times around a single instance of Fortune Resolution, and often not only contextualizes the Fortune but also sets it up and manipulates the sides to players’ advantages. Now I will admit an ambient distrust of Drama, if only because it’s so difficult to quantify and therefore control. I’ve suffered at the hands of people who used “Drama” along with a healthy dose of dysfunctional social pressure, to get what they wanted. But I am looking at my play with a scrutinizing eye, now, watching for how the contextual Drama stuff works…
June 8th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
Oh #$*! I just lost a long response that had me refining a lot of ideas that have been going through my head!
Well, the good part of that is, I can get right to the point. Which is, defining RPGs is difficult, but I think most people see an RPG as a “game” (whatever that is) whose procedures represent an imagined reality, which has substantial elements of freeform or nonformal procedure, and which has no prescribed motivation (like win/lose) to guide the players’ input. Hit only one of these, and you may have a wargame or a toy or maybe just people talking. Hit two of them and you might have an RPG.
So this is more of a reply to your reply to Thomas. I think you can have a game with very tightly formalized procedures and an associated imagined world, but which lacks clearcut guidelines about “what you’re supposed to do”. And I think that such a game could be seen as an RPG. My Life with Master is very close to that, except that the scope of possible action is a bit narrow and the game won’t work unless one of the players understands that they’re supposed to hate and resist the Master. The early MUDs that I played in (circa 1990) were much closer.
June 8th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
I think you can have a game with very tightly formalized procedures and an associated imagined world, but which lacks clearcut guidelines about “what you’re supposed to do”. And I think that such a game could be seen as an RPG.
You’d have GURPS. So, yeah, agreement over here!
June 8th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
Well, that’s not really what I’m thinking of. GURPS has detailed rules for many things, but it lacks an overall formal procedural structure. I don’t see much theoretical difference between GURPS and BRP (like a topologist who doesn’t see the difference between a coffee mug and a doughut).
What I’m saying is that you could have a game where, effectively, everybody takes turns around the board, with limited and tightly defined mechanical options. But the association of those options with a fictional reality, combined with the fact that it’s up to the players to decide what to do with the tools presented, might still provide an RPG-like thing.
I once mentioned how people who’ve completely mastered videogames go back and figure out how to screw around with them not with the goal of winning but of simply doing cool stuff. This wouldn’t be much different. In fact I think many of the Maxis videogames, from Sim City culminating in The Sims, is along these lines. (Pretty much skipping the win/lose part and going straight to the screwing around part.) Pointing to actual implementation in board/card games is hard, but as I also mentioned, Magic Realm is very close–even more so if you were to just play it without the victory conditions.
June 9th, 2006 at 7:49 am
Josh,
When you say that we play Monopoly differently (or whatever other board game),. do you mean that we use different procedures to decide what happens, or different trappings. Procedures would be “roll dice, move pieces around the board” while trappings would be things like “the dice must be rolled in the middle of the board”.
While you’re right about house rules, those are definitely different procedures, I think a lot of people play a lot of games as-written. There’s a sort of universality to playing (say) Settlers of Catan.
Maybe it’s tied to the “significant details” thing. I’m tempted to say that in a board game all points of significance are bounded by written procedures, while in roleplaying games that is not the case. But that strikes me as a dangerous generalization…
(On an unrelated note, my aggregator does not seem to think your comment feed updates unless your post feed does too. That means that whenever you post I get a massiv influx of comments from old discussions, and that I can’t use my aggregator to keep up with current discussions. I don’t know if it’s a problem with your feeds or a problem with my aggregator, but I figured I’d bring it to your attention.)
Thomas
June 9th, 2006 at 7:59 am
Thomas, I’m talking about procedures, not just trappings:
In Monopoly, if you land on an unowned property and don’t buy it, what happens to the property? Does it: (a) wait for somebody else to buy it, (b) get auctioned off to one of the other players, or (c) get auctioned off to any player (including yourself)?
In Uno, if it’s your turn and you don’t have a card to play, do you: (a) skip your turn, (b) draw one card, and if it can play, play it, (c) draw one card and don’t play it, or (d) draw cards until you find one that you can play?
In Catan, are players allowed to trade with each other when it’s not their turn? Are players allowed to initiate trades with the person whose turn it is?
And actually, I think it might be accurate to say that the distinction between card-and-board-games and roleplaying games is the locus of significance — if the significant details are all produced by the rules, it’s a card-n-board; if significant details are produced by the players, it’s roleplaying. That’s got potential. Must ponder.
(My feeds are totally screwy. Eventually, I’ll get tired of their craziness and re-install WordPress. Eventually. Although if I go to that trouble, I may just install a full CMS.)
June 9th, 2006 at 8:25 am
Josh,
Okay, so we’re talking about procedures, I’m cool with that. Good points re: different ways to play (though it should be noted that of course you can’t trade with someone if it’s not either your turn or theirs in Catan, clearly against the rules *grin*).
Also, your “significant details are produced by X” distinction is really interesting. I realize that you probably haven’t given it much thought yet, but consider this to be me saying “Hey, I wanna hear more about that!”
Thomas
June 9th, 2006 at 9:54 am
There’s some stuff about “significant details produced by X” in the next article, Screwing with “The Industry”.