"The term 'GNS' is moronic and annoying" – well this should be an interesting interview

[Thomas Shey]

There is nothing less realistic, as far as fighting and injury are concerned, about the fiction we create in Prince Valiant than the fiction we create in Rolemaster - eg, when a PC knight was run through the shoulder by a skeleton lord's magic two-handed sword, his recovery took a long time. And it doesn't create long periods of uninteresting calculation and technical reasoning at the table. But it is all done by GM stipulation, not "organically/emergently".

Does that give you a sense of what I have in mind?

[Wanted to note I found most of this post well put together and on-point, since I'm going to take some issue with this part.]

I think, as with most such ad-hoc GM decisions for things, its more accurate to say "there's nothing automatically less realistic" here. "A long time" is very vague by nature, and can range from "about right" to "way off". When it comes to adjucating such things, people's judgments can vary considerably in quality. There's no assurance that a set of rules has it right either, but it at least A) has the benefit that you can pretty much count on everybody participating being on the same page and B) if it matters to you (and to make it clear, it may not much) it can be addressed systematically which is pretty hard to do with one-off decisions.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't know...the word "design" does not have within it the need to poll the public. Folks can come up with good ideas, executed well, that other people enjoy, without getting the public thoughts beforehand.

Not the best way to bet, however, unless you already have your finger on the pulse of your potential market (and market in this context doesn't have anything to do with money).

 

[zakael19]

Not the best way to bet, however, unless you already have your finger on the pulse of your potential market (and market in this context doesn't have anything to do with money).

I just wrapped up watching a GDC Indie talk by Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb games - he notes that for his entire game making career he's ignored his forums/steam pages/feedback, made the games he wants to make that fit within his capabilities, and if those stop selling he'll retire and go sell shoes.

I guess you could say that for him "my lazy game didn't sell well, so I put a lot more effort into my next 2" is listening to an audience if you want to get that general.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Well, it can be. There's nothing forcing it to be so.

Right, we can all half-ass things.

Seriously, though, I'd wager that's generally a recipe for mediocre games — very few of us can pump out quality work first time that wouldn't benefit from any revision.

 

[Emberashh]

Yeah I kinda have to point out the incongruence of insisting on listening to one's audience but then also saying you don't strictly need to iterate.

Its kind of like one is saying design a game for a specific audience, but then it's whatever when it comes to verifying that that audience is receptive to the game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't know...the word "design" does not have within it the need to poll the public. Folks can come up with good ideas, executed well, that other people enjoy, without getting the public thoughts beforehand.

Having been responsible for the UX and UI design decisions for MANY pieces of software my response is "you could not be more wrong!" Read any book on this stuff, there's a RICH literature on the subject, and the first and most important rule, beaten into your brain by every author, is go to the users first. Find out what the people who are going to use your thing want and need before ANYTHING else! Keep going back to them, never stop talking to them, they're the soul of design. Without that design is almost a meaningless exercise in empty personal aesthetics unrooted in experience.

Successful design is collaborative, interactive, and iterative, and highly goal-oriented. It is incredibly rare to come across any instance of design success where the designer didn't start with users. That being said, simply catering mindlessly to users without a conceptual framework/approach/set of goals probably won't work either in most cases. So, design is a pretty subtle topic, but the core lesson is it is fundamentally a form of communication, and if you are doing it alone somewhere in a box, you are probably not going to get far.

 

[kenada]

A non-iterated design would have to get everything right up front without any kind of feedback loop (from testing or otherwise). I think it’s so unlikely that such an approach will produce a functional game that it can be assumed as impossible. Building anything non-trivial requires a feedback loop. There are things you just don’t know that have to be discovered (unstated or assumed requirements, implementation details, etc). Some methodologies may use loops that are too long (e.g., waterfall development as it’s often implemented), but the feedback loops are still there.

While it may true in a sense that you’re not forced to iterate, there’s no practical option that successfully creates a game where you don’t.

 

[niklinna]

Having been responsible for the UX and UI design decisions for MANY pieces of software my response is "you could not be more wrong!" Read any book on this stuff, there's a RICH literature on the subject, and the first and most important rule, beaten into your brain by every author, is go to the users first. Find out what the people who are going to use your thing want and need before ANYTHING else! Keep going back to them, never stop talking to them, they're the soul of design. Without that design is almost a meaningless exercise in empty personal aesthetics unrooted in experience.

Successful design is collaborative, interactive, and iterative, and highly goal-oriented. It is incredibly rare to come across any instance of design success where the designer didn't start with users. That being said, simply catering mindlessly to users without a conceptual framework/approach/set of goals probably won't work either in most cases. So, design is a pretty subtle topic, but the core lesson is it is fundamentally a form of communication, and if you are doing it alone somewhere in a box, you are probably not going to get far.

This all assumes that the developer/designer is not the (or a) user, of course. But yeah, in general, feedback/testing is vital, and that means iteration.

 

[Manbearcat]

Well the issue with emergent story in Narrativist terms, is that it’s a form of ‘story after’. Narrativists basically don’t care about emergent narratives. As you say, all games produce an emergent narrative.

Let me see if I can clarify your post the futilist, because it seems like there might be some confusion on what you're saying. It seems like you're using "emergent narrative" a tad idiosyncratically here. Let me know if I've got you right?

1) "What narrative has emerged from a game" is always branded such (a thing that has emerged and a thing that is a narrative) only upon reflection after play, ergo the relationship to play = Story After.

2) Narrativist games attend to staying in the moment, preoccupied with resolving the blow-by-blow continuously until the game is over. Consequently, the participants of such games aren't preoccupied by the idiosyncratic form of Story After in 1) above.

---

I think that is what you're getting at? If so, I (obviously as I've attested to it a million times!) agree. However, it does rely upon a rather idiosyncratic usage of "emergent narrative" here and an inference of relationships to all of (a) time (when story actually aggregates), (b) labors (all three of the design phase of games, the play phase of games, and the post-play reflections), and (c) the cognitive & emotional space of the participants during the actual play of a game.

 

[zakael19]

Having been responsible for the UX and UI design decisions for MANY pieces of software my response is "you could not be more wrong!" Read any book on this stuff, there's a RICH literature on the subject, and the first and most important rule, beaten into your brain by every author, is go to the users first. Find out what the people who are going to use your thing want and need before ANYTHING else! Keep going back to them, never stop talking to them, they're the soul of design. Without that design is almost a meaningless exercise in empty personal aesthetics unrooted in experience.

Successful design is collaborative, interactive, and iterative, and highly goal-oriented. It is incredibly rare to come across any instance of design success where the designer didn't start with users. That being said, simply catering mindlessly to users without a conceptual framework/approach/set of goals probably won't work either in most cases. So, design is a pretty subtle topic, but the core lesson is it is fundamentally a form of communication, and if you are doing it alone somewhere in a box, you are probably not going to get far.

This may be true for software design in a commercial setting, but the context here was creative works. Lots of people are making games, digital and otherwise, with at most small scale “does this break” testing and input and not looking for creative vision feedback.