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July 29, 2004
The Laws of Online Gaming
I sometimes fancy that I could be a valuable contributor to game design. Then I remember that the average person believes themselves to be of above average intelligence, but I digress. In thinking about the underlying concepts of game design, one could spend months tearing through their own personal feelings about what's important and what isn't, and if they're good enough, constantly worry that their opinion is single minded in it's nature.
Or you could read Raph Koster's view on the subject. He's a Creative Director for Star Wars Galaxies, and has developed into quite the guru on the subject. This guy has a really big brain.
"Game design is an art and a craft, and like all arts and crafts, it has techniques and approaches, and that implies that it can support a criticism; said criticism exists though it is not very sophisticated. Mud design is also an art and a craft, and it also has techniques and approaches, but there is no criticism, no self-evaluation, no standards defined, no study of what has gone before. And without self-critique, it cannot improve except in fits and starts. If this genre is to evolve into more than game design, which I firmly believe it has already begun to do, then it will have to support at least the critical apparatus of game design, and preferably the critical apparatus of many disciplines that most people do not bother to link: server design, and writing, and hypertextual theory, and art (for graphics are coming and will dominate, it's not worth fighting over), and psychology and sociology... Game designers today generally do not know even the short history of computer game design; we must as a community educate ourselves and each other if we want the community and its art and craft to grow."
Posted by at July 29, 2004 04:44 PM
