On 2008-02-05, shreyas wrote:
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Okay, so, as a designer I don't just need to know what happens when games are played. "What happens when a game is played" is what that thing gives us (let me reiterate here my distaste for the term "big model"). That is enough information for me to draw conclusions from play, but with only that knowledge, I'd be like a bridge builder who can tell you what went wrong when the bridge collapsed, but doesn't know what to do to prevent that; I only have enough skill to be stuck in an indefinite loop of trial-and-error. The thing I need to get out of that loop is predictive knowledge about, like, what materials and structures make a bridge that can hold a particular weight over a particular distance, or in the case of games, what techniques and tools I can use to evoke a certain kind of play experience. To be a good game maker I need to have this engineering knowledge. It also doesn't say anything about the aesthetic process of making a game, which is fine because I think that is something you have to approach yourself, or the communicative process, which isn't fine, because there are a lot of things about communicating to strangers through instructions that we don't know, or are kind of bad at, and communicating badly is a huge problem in game making today. There is no excuse for the community to have failed to discuss this topic and educate each other about it. |
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