Gounemond(Fabio)

• Gounemond 1 Jun 2023 17:25 UTC

  3 points

  1

  on: The challenge of ar­tic­u­lat­ing tacit knowledge

  This post really hits the nail on a recent situation I found myself, mentoring some of my Jr colleagues on game design and project management.

  I have had trouble for more than a year trying to teach my approach to my Jr colleagues. I’ll articulate them following your categories, as they helped me now to map better the problem:

  1) [Complexity] A lot of situations while preparing a game design are based on the subject to design for. Theory teaches you some “design rules”, but then you have to mix the “ideal game mechanic” with the kind of user target, the time at disposal for them, and foreseeing problems that could occour.

  2) [Curse of Knowledge] This happens a lot because I have computer science skills, so I am able to quickly visualize “complexity” of what I am thinking, hence my design choices are driven also by this.

  3) [Personal Context-Dependence] Last but not least, I am a very intuitive person, and lot of the knowledge I have and that I apply on the job is not even “formalized”. The hard part on this is to try find how your “intuitive skills” are named and explained. If you even can isolate those intuitive skills.

  To work on 1) and 3) I recently found that a possible solution was easier than expected: use the person you’re trying to teach to, to observe you and “deconstruct” you. A person craving to learn from you this tacit knowledge will be very happy to “study you” and try to write down what you do and how you reason, finding a way to explain your tacit knowledge and map it.