Just wanted to note, while I’d generally been enjoying this series, this post did a good job of prompting me to ask whether (both the issues in this post, and some raised elsewhere in the series) were more applicable outside of the realm of game design. Still mulling that over, not sure if it’ll output anything useful yet.
In a weirder way, I also felt some sense of “this prompts me to figure out what my opinions actually are.” A lot of games I enjoy in different ways and I’m sort of okay with experiencing them as a particular kind of novel art or something. I can tell what games grip me, but often that’s less about my opinions and more about “did they do a good job skinner boxing”. What makes a game that I deeply respect, for reasons somewhat idiosyncratic to me?
Thanks, this is very helpful feedback. Request for more such notes from readers.
A lot of the motivation for writing it was, in fact, to figure out what my own opinions actually were.
I do think a lot of this has implications outside game design, and I was sad that I couldn’t efficiently write this in a way that didn’t bog it down in a lot of game-design-specific detail, which means it will be hard for those not into the detail to extract the implications unless I come back to them in another form.
I can see definite advantages to writing these posts and then using them as references for another post generalizing beyond game design. They will just be object-level context references instead of meta-level context references.
In fact of the two arrangements, I think the object-level references would be more useful to me.
Just wanted to note, while I’d generally been enjoying this series, this post did a good job of prompting me to ask whether (both the issues in this post, and some raised elsewhere in the series) were more applicable outside of the realm of game design. Still mulling that over, not sure if it’ll output anything useful yet.
In a weirder way, I also felt some sense of “this prompts me to figure out what my opinions actually are.” A lot of games I enjoy in different ways and I’m sort of okay with experiencing them as a particular kind of novel art or something. I can tell what games grip me, but often that’s less about my opinions and more about “did they do a good job skinner boxing”. What makes a game that I deeply respect, for reasons somewhat idiosyncratic to me?
Thanks, this is very helpful feedback. Request for more such notes from readers.
A lot of the motivation for writing it was, in fact, to figure out what my own opinions actually were.
I do think a lot of this has implications outside game design, and I was sad that I couldn’t efficiently write this in a way that didn’t bog it down in a lot of game-design-specific detail, which means it will be hard for those not into the detail to extract the implications unless I come back to them in another form.
I can see definite advantages to writing these posts and then using them as references for another post generalizing beyond game design. They will just be object-level context references instead of meta-level context references.
In fact of the two arrangements, I think the object-level references would be more useful to me.
BTW it turns out the answer to the last question is “Minecraft”, which I will now fairly confidently describe as “the best game.” :P