"Meaningless Phrase" is a meaningless phrase.

[RFLS]

This is something that I have a real disagreement with, and I'm going to spend the next 4 posts detailing why.

Joke's on you. I'm doing FIVE. And a paper. And a documentary.

[Vitruviansquid]

Over the years I've become so allergic to the "but definitions!" thing that my gut response to any demand for definitions is "no".

Note:

You can also conduct argument dishonestly by refusing to explain what you actually mean to people who ask, and speaking very mysteriously in order to constantly be able to tell other people they are wrong or have misinterpreted you.

It's almost always followed by some asinine bit of sophistry and logic-in-a-vacuum that "proves" they were "right" all along.

@Pronounceable: Here is another explanation for why people would be in an internet argument to begin with.

[Max_Killjoy]

Note:

You can also conduct argument dishonestly by refusing to explain what you actually mean to people who ask, and speaking very mysteriously in order to constantly be able to tell other people they are wrong or have misinterpreted you.

Which is why I try to find ways to explain what I mean without doing the "definition dance".

[RFLS]

Which is why I try to find ways to explain what I mean without doing the "definition dance".

Can you define definition dance, please?

[Knaight]

It's turns out "collaborative storytelling" is a great example of a phrase being tossed around without a particularly clear meaning. What people think it means varies quite a lot.

It turns out that when you really drill into the meaning of a phrase there's subtle differences across definitions. Welcome to language - apart from exactingly defined scientific terminology built to fit particularly well understood fields, or a lot of the terminology in math (which is well understood by being tightly defined and basically designed around exacting precision) this is pretty standard.

Take the word "chair". It seems easy to define, but soon you start running into "bench", or "stool", or "couch". Then when you start adding precision to try and find the exact borders between these words you find that people have different definitions, because those borders aren't being drawn consistently by different people.

At this point you have two options. One of them is to acknowledge that this is an intrinsic feature of constructing language, if not an inherent feature of imprecision in human perception. The other is to shy away from that acknowledgement/realization, and treat it not as a feature of language and instead as a weird quirk that just happens to apply to almost every single word you dig deep enough into.

[Cluedrew]

Building off what Knaight said, I think the issue here is the difference between "no meaning" and "an imprecise meaning". Collaborative storytelling has a meaning, and I think that we can agree it applies to a book written by 2 or 3 authors and does not apply to a frog. That being said, to me there are some role-playing games that are defiantly collaborative storytelling (like the All Guardsmen Party), others that are not almost certainly not (the purest of dungeon crawls) and many I'm not so sure. And that has a much to do with I'm not sure where the line is, rather than I don't know where those games fall.

And in those cases, I think it is better to just talk about the lower level features rather than try and go through this intermediate step of nailing down a high level concept to that level of detail. Arguing those details seems to be where most of that meaninglessness comes from.

[SimonMoon6]

The problem is that too many people are Humpty Dumpty:

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

[Lorsa]

No, I don't. Even less so since the thread in question.

As multiple people made clear in the other thread, which you appear not to have read in detail (and for which I don't blame you ), people gave many meanings for "collaborative storytelling". Some that are hugely broadened from anything I'd understood the term to mean and even from what you stated above. And many of which meanings I don't think are true statements themselves, since they were global claims to my behavior which I disagree that I do.

It's turns out "collaborative storytelling" is a great example of a phrase being tossed around without a particularly clear meaning. What people think it means varies quite a lot.

Whereas the statement "When I play roleplaying games, they are about collaborative storytelling" is definitely true statement for many people. But I still wouldn't know what they meant without clarification, specially now, given the variety of meanings people ascribe to the phrase.

It turns out that when you really drill into the meaning of a phrase there's subtle differences across definitions. Welcome to language - apart from exactingly defined scientific terminology built to fit particularly well understood fields, or a lot of the terminology in math (which is well understood by being tightly defined and basically designed around exacting precision) this is pretty standard.

Take the word "chair". It seems easy to define, but soon you start running into "bench", or "stool", or "couch". Then when you start adding precision to try and find the exact borders between these words you find that people have different definitions, because those borders aren't being drawn consistently by different people.

At this point you have two options. One of them is to acknowledge that this is an intrinsic feature of constructing language, if not an inherent feature of imprecision in human perception. The other is to shy away from that acknowledgement/realization, and treat it not as a feature of language and instead as a weird quirk that just happens to apply to almost every single word you dig deep enough into.

Building off what Knaight said, I think the issue here is the difference between "no meaning" and "an imprecise meaning". Collaborative storytelling has a meaning, and I think that we can agree it applies to a book written by 2 or 3 authors and does not apply to a frog. That being said, to me there are some role-playing games that are defiantly collaborative storytelling (like the All Guardsmen Party), others that are not almost certainly not (the purest of dungeon crawls) and many I'm not so sure. And that has a much to do with I'm not sure where the line is, rather than I don't know where those games fall.

And in those cases, I think it is better to just talk about the lower level features rather than try and go through this intermediate step of nailing down a high level concept to that level of detail. Arguing those details seems to be where most of that meaninglessness comes from.

I was going to respond to Tanarii but found that Knaight had already done so with pretty much what I meant to say...

Language is fuzzy. We all use words differently.

All these "X is a meaningless phrase" threads should really be rewritten as "I don't understand what people mean when they say X", because that is essentially what they boil down to.

Tanarii found that people use the phrase "collaborative storytelling" in TRPGs in slightly different ways. Each of these people still mean SOMETHING with it, therefore it is not meaningless. The phrase HAS a meaning, but that meaning may change depending on the person speaking.

Still, after listening to enough meanings, you may start to see a pattern. Borders emerge, so that when someone say they want to run a TRPG as "collaborative storytelling", you can at least tell what it isn't. Same with "sandbox". People use it to mean different things, but that doesn't make it meaningless.

And, as we've seen in the forum, people say "meaningless phrase" to mean "a phrase I do not understand the meaning of".

[kyoryu]

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful

[Pleh]

I don't think argument's a bad thing in itself.

The problem is when the argument is conducted dishonestly, with semantics.

Even semantics themselves aren't the problem. It's the misuse of semantics to confuse a topic with details rather than clarifying with them.

A quick clarification of definitions can actually resolve conflicts so effectively that most of the time it usefulness goes unnoticed. This unfortunately leaves us with the bitter taste of all the times people abuse semantics to confuse an issue and society begins to view the argument of semantics in a negative light.

Building off what Knaight said, I think the issue here is the difference between "no meaning" and "an imprecise meaning".

A critical distinction.

Also, it's easy to point and say, "what you said makes no sense to me," it's ridiculous to then conclude "therefore it never had any meaning to begin with."

Just because you inferred no meaning does not mean they implied no meaning. They perceive meaning, therefore there is meaning no matter how much the communication of that meaning can fail.

[Tanarii]

Take the word "chair". It seems easy to define, but soon you start running into "bench", or "stool", or "couch". Then when you start adding precision to try and find the exact borders between these words you find that people have different definitions, because those borders aren't being drawn consistently by different people.

In this case, the problem turned out to be some people are using a phrase to mean "chair", others to mean "stool", and then yet others (the one's I'm objecting to) to mean "physical object made up of atoms". And calling them all "chair". Some very few even tried to use "chair" to mean "black cat".

Tanarii found that people use the phrase "collaborative storytelling" in TRPGs in slightly different ways. Each of these people still mean SOMETHING with it, therefore it is not meaningless. The phrase HAS a meaning, but that meaning may change depending on the person speaking.

I found that people use the phrase in drastically different ways. And many telling me I was doing something whether I wanted to admit it or not, despite me making it very clear I was not.

[Mike_G]

In this case, the problem turned out to be some people are using a phrase to mean "chair", others to mean "stool", and then yet others (the one's I'm objecting to) to mean "physical object made up of atoms". And calling them all "chair". Some very few even tried to use "chair" to mean "black cat".

I found that people use the phrase in drastically different ways. And many telling me I was doing something whether I wanted to admit it or not, despite me making it very clear I was not.

I will submit that this is all evidence that some people are *****, not that the phrase is meaningless.

[Cosi]

In this case, the problem turned out to be some people are using a phrase to mean "chair", others to mean "stool", and then yet others (the one's I'm objecting to) to mean "physical object made up of atoms". And calling them all "chair". Some very few even tried to use "chair" to mean "black cat".

And some people (you, Max) were vehemently opposed to the idea that the four-legged thing they were sitting on was a chair for reasons that are as yet unclear.

[Max_Killjoy]

And some people (you, Max) were vehemently opposed to the idea that the four-legged thing they were sitting on was a chair for reasons that are as yet unclear.

Asked and answered countless times in that thread.

Short version, in order to make what we were sitting on "a chair", the definition of "chair" had to be expanded to "anything anyone ever sat on anywhere ever". So yeah, sure, technically, what we're sitting on is now a "chair", congratulations on your internet win points. Meanwhile, your definition of "chair" doesn't differentiate a horse from a barstool from a stump from a couch -- and when one person describes sitting on a horse, someone else immediately points and crows "SEE, you were sitting on a chair all along, even if you didn't realize it!"

[Cosi]

Short version, in order to make what we were sitting on "a chair", the definition of "chair" had to be expanded to "anything anyone ever sat on anywhere ever".

I mean, "cooperative storytelling" has always meant "roleplaying games" every time I have seen it used. I guess you didn't know that, which is fine, but this is not a conspiracy. This is just you getting really angry when people use terminology you didn't know for no reason.

[Max_Killjoy]

I mean, "cooperative storytelling" has always meant "roleplaying games" every time I have seen it used. I guess you didn't know that, which is fine, but this is not a conspiracy. This is just you getting really angry when people use terminology you didn't know for no reason.

Nice ad hom.

Bye.

[Max_Killjoy]

I will submit that this is all evidence that some people are *****, not that the phrase is meaningless.

Meaningless is probably the wrong word... it's just very open-ended and carries so many different meanings and implications that it's not a usefully specific term on its own (as detailed at length in the other thread).

But as for what Tanarii describes, yeah, that's largely just certain people being whatever's under those asterisks -- the term in question in that other thread is just a convenient way for them to try to assert "dominance" over other people's "how, why, and what" of gaming.

[Mike_G]

Meaningless is probably the wrong word... it's just very open-ended and carries so many different meanings and implications that it's not a usefully specific term on its own (as detailed at length in the other thread).

But as for what Tanarii describes, yeah, that's largely just certain people being whatever's under those asterisks -- the term in question in that other thread is just a convenient way for them to try to assert "dominance" over other people's "how, why, and what" of gaming.

Back a few years ago, when the optimization police were all over the forum, I felt that I was being told that I play D&D wrong. That just convinced me that they were terrible people, not that "optimization" was a meaningless term, even when they played semantics so that if you ever admitted to putting your highest score in Strength for a fighter, you were optimizing so--HA! GOTCHA!!

That doesn't make a phrase meaningless. It reminds us that the internet full of unwiped anuses in human shape

[Max_Killjoy]

Back a few years ago, when the optimization police were all over the forum, I felt that I was being told that I play D&D wrong. That just convinced me that they were terrible people, not that "optimization" was a meaningless term, even when they played semantics so that if you ever admitted to putting your highest score in Strength for a fighter, you were optimizing so--HA! GOTCHA!!

That doesn't make a phrase meaningless. It reminds us that the internet full of unwiped anuses in human shape

Right -- I don't disagree.

I kinda see the same issue with both terms, however. Again, not meaningless, but stretched out and distorted because someone wants to "win", and that "gotcha" is a big part of it. "Gotcha, you're an optimizer!", never mind that optimizing is a tool and the problems are in how it's used. "Gotcha, you're collaboratively storytelling!", even though to make that "true" the meaning had to be stretched way out in all sorts of ways.

[LibraryOgre]

The Mod Wonder: See, y'all, I *try* to have a weekend, and this happens.