On 2008-02-05, shreyas wrote:
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Hm. I'm about to put words in Jon's mouth! J, stop me if this is terrible: "Toolbox" can mean modular game, but it doesn't have to. I'm viewing 'tool' as 'a thing you do in play.' Looking at the less peripheral indiegames, I think you can see a common set of tools (are these techniques if we're speaking in arcana?) that's recombined to make games that, while distinct, have a really obvious structural affiliation. Some of those things are: - intense characters - engineering problematic situations - the rhythm of 'playing toward an untenable point and consulting the system to see how it falls out' - using explicit procedure to derive highly specific story forms - etc. If you're pulling out different tools, then you get different stuff, but you're still basically woodworking. But suppose that you want to do metalwork or weaving instead, then your toolbox might look like: - abstract/implicit characterisation - detailed positional knowledge of characters (rather than detailed internal knowledge) - a rhythm of 'adjust characters to perturb equilibrium, play until you return to an equilibrium point' - etc. So, like, that's also a family of games right there, and the play experience is going to be way different. If you explicitly make new tools for every game, then that'll make them that much more distinct. |
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