Best post from Raph. Totally unexpected.
If only he would go in THAT direction instead of reducing everything to abstract systems…
Which brings me to flame Danc.
Danc at Lost Garden is one of Raph’s dearest puppies. The complicity between the two is understandable if you read what they write and their approach. They both have the proprensity to overanalyzing everything, researching to the extreme, rationalize, schematize. They have a great mastery of the medium. Think about it and you’ll see how these qualities would be the very foundation of what makes a Great Designer.
Well, I don’t agree. I’m not saying that the opposite is true, but that those points aren’t so determinant as implied. Maybe here I’m being just “defensive” because they are able to do something definitely out of my reach but, even if there some truth in that, I still believe that my critics can be objectively valid. And it seems I’m not alone thinking this.
I found Danc’s last article particularly irritating. But in this case not (only) because he already did a wonderful work at presenting his thoughts and schematizing, but because he points a trend that I consider just bloated, superfluous, too self absorbed, complacent.
On the forum thread I linked people criticized the “tone” of what he was writing, that form of partially concealed “arrogance”, but that’s not the part that doesn’t work, from my point of view. What I criticize (and that links above to that article from Raph) is the excessive rationalization in general, excessive schematization. These should be valuable tools availabe for a designer, and they ARE. But in this case I see them becoming more TRAPS than useful tools. I see the creative process, but even its concrete realization, as something much more alive and changing. Free of cages and chains.
Wittgenstein has always been one of my myths. It’s a lot of time that I don’t go back to study that, but I remember his most important thought that concludes his most important book (“Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”). He consider the logic and the knowledge as a “ladder”. His book is also defined as a ladder. But when you are done with it, you are supposed to take it and throw it away. Completely forget about it.
This is also my idea about game design. I often repeated that I see game design as a process of observation more than a proces of rabid creativity. But the observation is about “something else”. The object is external. Sometimes, instead, while reading Danc or Raph, I feel as if the observation is not only the subject observing, but also the object. Completely autoreferential. It seems as if everything starts and ends there. Convoluted. It becomes a process alienated from its context and purpose and, no matter how this process is refined, it is just going off-track. And it’s not anymore useful, it becomes just redundant.
They seem too much self-absorbed. They are wonderful observers, but they seems to observe too much themselves (their brain processes) more than what is outside. Like if there isn’t anymore a displacement between themselves and their wishes.
An excess of qualities that should bring elsewhere, and not just back to themselves.
I don’t think adding another dude with a beret will make programs better.