Comment on “Second Thoughts”

The problem, I think, is that people want to automate the wrong things.

Computers are fantastic at crunching numbers and serving data from storage. But instead of people making more and more powerful programs to mimic or automate the world-expanding stuff you do manually (i.e. scanning big chunks of data to provide factual motivation for a game system), they are instead automating stuff that needs no automation. (For example, my pet peeve is virtual representations of physical dice and of paper books, both of which are present in the linked video.)

An alternate direction for automation which would expand the game is to provide greater ability for even the non-technical DM to source world data for processing into game rule bases. These types of things do exist but you usually have to be technical to apply them, and usually various tools must be chained to get anything useful.

to sum up, I think that people are trying to turn the ENTIRE D&D game into a program when what's really needed is D&D "helper" tools, since humans can pretty much take care of e.g. gathering in one place, socializing, rolling physical dice. I'm against all-in-one package* solutions, and for individual programs - one to make characters, one to produce environment groups, etc. You're doing it that way, which is why I tend to agree with your views on the role of technology in the game.

*Of course if enough good-at-one-thing tools are arrived at, they can be packed together. The goal is to avoid virtual simulation of "D&D as we play it on a table".