RPG Design & Musical composition

In a post on The Forge titled "The whole model - this is it" (referring to the GNS model), Edwards has a neat analogy between RPG designers and musical composers:

"Design, when all is said and done, means authorship of a rules text. . . . As I now see it, rules texts are not and can never be "role-playing," but rather are recommendations regarding the model, if you will, in hopes (shared by the readers) that people who read it can get that version of the model into action.

"Therefore the goal of design, it seems to me, is to make sense to the reader in terms of the whole model. It's like a musical instrument, or several of them, as well as instructions for how to play them, and finally some music or chords to work with."

Just as a musician can sit down in front of a sheet of music and recreate a song she has never heard before, so a person who has never played a particular RPG before should be able to bring that game to the table from the text alone. The better written the score, the more closely the musician can reproduce the song, and the better written the text, the more closely the player can reproduce the gaming experience. And of course, there are elements of the song and game that are impossible to denote through the writing, so a musician might listen to another recording to pick up part of the spirit of the song that cannot put into words, and a player might find an Actual Play to pick up part of the spirit of the game that has evaded the designer's language.