thread: 2010-03-18 : First game theory, second game theory
On 2010-03-26, Matthijs wrote:
I can't relate this directly to my own experience. I started designing games almost as soon as I started playing - house ruling Fighting Fantasy when I was eleven, designing a fantasy heartbreaker which I xeroxed at school and sold to my friends when I was fifteen. Several more games during my teens. But most of these were derivative, improvements on existing game ideas, or based on insights I'd read about elsewhere.
One of the first games with real insights of my own which I tried to implement was my Earthsea campaign, which turned into Archipelago about ten years later. But there were other games before and after that. Few felt finished.
I do feel like I'm trying to create a working body of insight, though. It's based on ritual, intuition, piggybacking on non-conscious processes and social dynamics. I'm not sure if I'm able to articulate what I'm doing. Like Kaare says at the end: "Maybe because I have internalised the previous stages, or maybe because I don't know what I am doing".
