On 2008-02-11, Adam Dray wrote:
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For me, Forge jargon and the Big Model and so on are, in order of increasing strength, structure for designing games, tools for analyzing play, and a shared vocabulary for discussing game design. I might use the Big Model to do structural analysis of my game in progress, maybe to see what I have forgotten. I tend to design more by instinct though. Then I playtest. When something breaks or works really well, I want to understand why. Sometimes the Big Model gives me important insights into why. More often, I want to discuss how my game works with other designers. One way is to talk about a playtest and what happened, and that's cool, but it takes a long time and you sorta had to be there to really understand it. But I can pretty succinctly sum up how I think something is working using Forge jargon, if the other person speaks it, too. As long as two people mean roughly the same thing when they use a term, it makes discussing complicated game design problems a lot easier. It doesn't matter if the Big Model is accurate or not. |
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