thread: 2010-03-18 : First game theory, second game theory
On 2010-03-28, Josh W wrote:
When reading your post I noticed some similarities to how Christopher Alexander talks about design; if design is thought of as "creating a form that fits", then it's often easier to consider it from a negative perspective; as the absence of all the standard irritations.
This is similar to carving a statue; you work in with your negative constraints, blocking out possibilities in order to end up with a finished form.
But once you have that, you can generalise from it; you can look at the form you've made and sort of expand it in new dimensions, so a single sculpture becomes a family of sculpture changed in some dimension, while hopefully retaining it's hard-won advantages.
You can try the same with other forms you like, trying to bring bits from games or music in to try making a new working form.
Theory based on irritation will talk in terms of damage, incompatibility, lack of fun and disaster, (if only in a sort of surprised "it actually worked!" way) and theory based on analogy will pull in examples from existing working games or other pieces of entertainment/art, and talk in terms of the currently hidden kinds/levels of fun you can imagine.
Now there's a lot of me in that, but the interesting thing I notice is that as you get more established as a player designer, failures and irritations can become more disconnected from each other, perhaps because they are less common (you're hopefully playing more good games, or why are you designing? :P ) or because the failures are kept on a game-specific playtesting basis. Both of those can go together too, as better average games can reduce people's patience with awful playtest results.
Whatever the reason, you have to slowly work more and more by analogy and pattern, and hopefully you have more good stuff to work with.
That's my take on your first game/second game division.
