thread: 2008-09-29 : Creative Tension
On 2008-09-29, Brand Robins wrote:
I just spent an hour writing a response. It was eaten by the net.
The very short form of it is that I think the sausage grinder effect is linked to this. A game that takes an area that should, for a given group, be a source of creative tension and overly mechanizes it to spit out a generic result, isn't doing the best job that the system could be doing. Games should provoke towards creative tension, not remove it by reducing to the lowest common denominator or removing the process of judgment.
I also think some games have trouble, in their design, in telling whether they are provoking or controlling the substrata or the texture, and in so doing either become too heavy handed or too hands off.
