thread: 2005-06-24 : John Kim on Craft and Innovation
On 2005-06-24, Brand Robins wrote:
Matthijs and Chris,The things you bring up are part of the reason why in the post I did at Yudhishthira's Dice on this topic I mentioned paradigmatic thought, and its strengths. By this I mean that when you have a group that is working on a similar field in a variety of ways you will get usually get better results when looked at over the long term than when you try to leap from individual genius to individual genius.
The individual genius model is one that we often fall back on (one person will make a great game, then a greater game, then the greatest game!) but that is often not the way that a lot of fields work in reality. How many scientists win more than 1 Nobel Prize? The reasons you bring up are things that are important to look at in the way RPGs have developed historically. Often it has not been one individual genius ??? though they have brought about innovations it is other people working with those innovations to make them tighter, better, faster, stronger that has resulted in some of the great points of RPGs. When someone took the great idea that was the insanity mechanic in CoC and turned it into something else, which turned into something else, which turned into the madness meter in UA or the Personality Traits in HeroQuest, you get real craft.
At the same time I don???t want to punch down the idea of the individuals ability to achieve either. Someone like Ron or Vincent, for example, may have a journeman game out and be working towards a masterwork game of their own. I think that is a noble goal, because the counter balance to group-thought is that without the occasional shining star the group can flounder and get mired in ???the way it is??? philosophies. (Look at the decade by decade inbreeding that has happened in RPG history.) So someone like Vincent always striving to push forward is a good thing.
And when he makes his masterwork game, the rest of us must fall upon it, strip it for parts, and carry it???s holy relic corpse out into the gaming world to mill and churn out something even better.
