I believe that many if not the majority of the woes in this industry are imputable to people sitting on the wrong chairs

A stab at Raph, part 2 :)

This time less flaming but still strong and provoking (I hope). And again a direct reply.

By the way, I throw in another heresy: I believe that in a company everyone should be paid equally. From the president to the tools programmer there shouldn’t be distinctions of merit. “Game designer” shouldn’t be a promotion from another level, it’s just a different duty, equally important and fundamental. Hierarchies within a company are a big mistake from my point of view and the first reason that brings to my accusation in the title. People should strive to do in their life what they do better, not what is defined and then perceived as more qualifying of the personal value.

Problems start from there and bleed all over the place.

Actually go and reward more those duties that are always disqualified and noone wants to do.

Invert the ladder.


Hmm.. Hmm..

I’ll have to think more later about this. I read it as if those four steps work in a hierarchy, where you are free to choose one and put it at the top, dominating the others.

I’m not convinced by the last two because you bring the example of your “healing game” for the metaphoric level which instead I consider JUST mechanical. And I also think the narrative level blends with it. I find hard to separate the two.

The point is that I see those levels much more dependent one from the other. Your “healing game” instead was a metaphor completely independent from the mechanical layer (spurious). So, that example started from the metaphor or from the mechanic?

I see the whole discussion like this: if it started as a pure mechanic it would hardly translate in that type of metaphor. I mean, If I have that mechanic I’m probably going to present it in a different flavor when I go to choose which metaphor is more appropriate. If instead it started from the metaphor, well, again I would design the mechanic to be MUCH different and more appropriate to the metaphor. To achieve better the communication of that metaphor.

Which also means: despite I recognize the hierarchy, sometimes the result is the same whether you start from the end or the beginning (as things are connected).

So, from my point of view, you can take it either way and that example is still something that doesn’t make sense.

– Were I to do a game “about healing” I would be starting with the metaphor.

If this is true, it means that the mechanical level would STRONGLY depend on the metaphor. Again following the model as a hierarchy where you decide to start from the metaphor and, from there, figure out the other parts. Tabula rasa. You start from a blank paper, set a point wherever you want, and then start to draw the first lines. The rest will be progressively derived accordingly to what is on top of the hierarchy. So everything is connected.

If you see them as hierarchies, I agree that those level exist and they are always ALL present in every game. I also agree that you can freely reorder the hierarchy as you want. We have concrete examples for every possibility.

That said, I believe there’s a “bias” and we are definitely, unavoidably going in a precise direction that is the one of the metaphor (the one I’d say should be higher on the hierarchy). Even the cinema started with the technical experiments to then move to bring up the emotions. I see a definite progression where the mechanical level will be progressively overshadowed and enslaved by the other levels. For example there are “narrative techniques” to obtain certain effects, but these techniques are bent to be functional to the narrative.

Games in general have always been more tightly connected to the mechanical level, also because they started from the *interaction*. But I think that, whether we like it or not, we are going toward the emotional, symbolic level where the mechanics will become progressively hidden. As with the use of computer graphic in a movie, the best case is the one where you don’t see it, where this technical level becomes completely functional to the narrative needs. As I wrote in the post you linked, we are made of symbols.

Let me rephrase: games in general has always been more tightly connected to the mechanical levels, because there’s a definite predominance of programmers and because “game design” has always been considered superfluous.

I believe that many if not the majority of the woes in this industry are imputable to people sitting on the wrong chairs.

The more we’ll see genuine game designers and not programmers-recycled-designers (through the social treadmill called “promotion”), the more the games will start to shapeshift into something else. And the technical constraints will loosen up.

When this will happen games will finally truly become a “medium”. Hopefully shying away from becoming completely autoreferential as 99% of the garbage that arrives on TV and instead telling us something valuable about ourselves and the world outside.

This breakdown is, perhaps, why game designers must be multidisciplinary.

I continue to disagree on this point. Game designers “may” be multidisciplinary. It’s surely useful and helpful. But not “obligatory”. That’s just blindness from my point of view.

Knowledge can help but it isn’t everything, nor what is truly important. As you don’t need to go to a writing school if you want to become a writer. I just refuse to codify this, there are many different approaches and the game designer with the most knowledge isn’t going to be the one univocally making the best games.

He’ll have an advantage, but I wouldn’t give that advantage a fundamental role.

Actually I’d say that designers should know the less possible about programming, if not the general ropes to be able to comminicate with the actual programmers and share the same language. But they should retain a very high-level approach to it. Another person should have the duty to connect the two and define the systems more suitable to reach the goals set.

Not because knowing the programming would be useless, of course, but because it becomes also a danger. It strictly codifies the way you approach a problem. It becomes a cage that isn’t always easy to escape. Having different points of view is important, but you risk to get trapped into one.

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