[Wyatt Hebert]

One small clarification to one of the things I was trying to say. When I say 'mental hold', I am primarily talking about the ability to maintain the current _local_ game state in your mind. I have no problems with large and intricate game _worlds_, but the ability to maintain knowledge about what is going is crucial to many games these days.

As an example, I am a long-time RPG GameMaster. I've run about 12 different game systems in my life, and played in more, and I love large and detailed worlds. However, I can maintain the pertinent game information mostly in my head while playing, and this is merely a subset of the world.

To put it another way, I think very few people honestly are upset when they are out-played. I think true anger or disappointment with games is when they believe that it was an oversight on their part that led to the problem or defeat. In chess, it's easy to see the entire game situation at once, and people still miss the winning and losing combinations. In games of the current complexity, trying to keep the game-state in your mind is extremely difficult, and most likely impossible after the early turns. If I lose provinces due to an oversight on my part, I will be upset that I missed it, and possibly at the game engine for not being clearer.

In any event, this was just an attempt to explain what was in my mind when I referred to 'mental hold'.

Wyatt