thread: 2013-05-25 : Complete Games
On 2013-05-27, Dan Maruschak wrote:
The way these issues get framed has an impact on how we feel about them. "Unwilling to sacrifice" conjures images of an obstinate designer, arbitrarily falling in love with something against their own best interests. But it's also the case that you can't arbitrarily excise stuff from a system and still be guaranteed to have the same system—what are you "unwilling to sacrifice" from game X because if you cut it out it wouldn't be game X anymore? I don't think a game's complexity is an arbitrary knob that you can tune independent of other things in a game. I think even framing it as a "necessary evil" that you sometimes need to tolerate as a consequence for achieving certain other goals is a distortion. Do sculptors and painters aim to minimize the scale of their art relative to the visual impact they're aiming for, or do they consider scale one of the intrinsic elements of a work of visual art that interacts with other elements to produce an overall effect? It's easy to fetishize going to extremes along certain dimensions, and that can certainly be an inspiring and motivating constraint for an artistic endeavor, but it's rare that going to an extreme on any dimension will be guaranteed to translate into "better" in some overall sense.
