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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5630985" data-attributes="member: 54877">I'm more or less in agreement with a lot of the drift of your argument, but not here. I don't think game design works that way, in practice. That is, the evolution analogy is pertinent, but off in some key ways. Namely, good design in things like games is a lot like good design in software, in practice. People take their best crack at some part of it. They reuse some other stuff so that they don't have to take their best crack at it. They put it altogether. Some of it works great; some not so much. In a new version, repeat the process--often with different designers who bring their own vision.  Flexibility versus focus is a key area where this happens. The first cut of something new, if it is any good, is nearly always focused. The designer has a relatively narrow view, inevitably, compared to the full audience. So the design is focused. Then people use it. In the next version, they start to incorporate some of that feedback. (People try to replicate this with Beta testing, but Beta testing never catches everything.) Then the goal becomes to retain the essential part of the focus while making it as flexible as it can be. Of course, in the wrong hands, you can lose the focus too much. It is definitely a risk. But I don't think it is one that any designer can entirely avoid, if they want to refine a good design into a great one. All that said, there is also room for designing specifically for flexibility.  The key there is not trying to make everything flexible--doomed to failure even more so than being all things to all people.  Rather, find the things that vast swaths in practice want to be flexible, and design them that way--anchored on a less flexible, more focused structure.</blockquote>

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