thread: 2014-03-09 : The Dark Ages are in the air...
On 2014-03-11, Josh W wrote:
There's something funny about encouraging multiple people to work simultaniously on their own heartbreakers. I'm in favour of it in terms of people getting to make their personal settings, which is of course brilliant, but I also think that the parallelism can cause a kind of game design car crash:
Suppose everyone takes on the project and goes off to design their game, in an isolation lit only by the allure of kickstarter? Well we'll all come back with our lovely sparkly books full of highly personal art, but also we will have by working in parallel recreated the kind of ignorance that defines the fantasy heartbreaker; the books will each be full of ideas that immediately cause you to want to rewrite the other games in the set!
In some ways this is a good thing, designers having opportunities to learn from each other etc. but if I compare it to people learning from each other's games that push boundaries, that's a situation where there's a kind of gentle pace to mutual inspiration, you can stretch your brain to incorporate insights from other very different games, or just enjoy how different they are from yours. There's no "head slap .. obviously!" to it.
Like there's a kind of implicit courtesy among game designers about not designing the same game from five angles, "I heard about your game and liked it, so I paused my game not to step on any toes", or developing it in conversation with someone else's design to make them each more unique, or deciding to collaborate, but the implicit idea of "go back to your pre-internet design sensibilities and design them with modern experience" pushes against that. It's like design in the internet age has gained not only skills but a certain set of helpful social dynamics.
It's still totally do-able, but when doing overlapping personal work, it's harder to process other people's insights, and yet there's a lot you can learn from each other. I can picture a lot of people finding themselves getting inexplicably wound up about discussions of weapon lists, like the good old days!
