thread: 2009-04-27 : Dice & Cloud: a Symmetry
On 2009-04-28, timfire wrote:
Thinking back to "what happened" in '05...
Well, '04 saw the first wave of successful "short form" games (after MLwM, of course), with Polaris, Fastlane, The Mountain Witch, With Great Power, and whatever else I'm forgetting.
Following that revelation of sorts, I think there was a general desire to see just how "tight" game design could be pushed. I think that interest is still present today, but now I think designers have learned a couple lessons that weren't fully internalized back in '05.
In particular, now I think there's a bigger focus on structuring social interactions, while back in '05 there was still a pretty big focus on guiding play through mechanics. I think that's why those games tend to involve a lot of interaction between the people and the cues, and less between the people and the fiction.
(Hmm, was there a reaction against that type of design in '06/'07? Vincent, do you see IaWA's focus on fiction-people interaction as reactionary at all?)
And for the record, that crop of games in '05 have long been criticized as being rushed to market. There was a ton of complaining in '06, and many people ended up doing revisions of their games.
