Make Good Games Well

A month or so ago I gave a talk at the Montreal International Game Summit - it's the first public talk I've given in some time. Since it was a keynote, I stayed pretty high level, and didn't really give the usual hardcore top-to-bottom design talk. This talk - about the manufacture of chocolate, wine and a thermonuclear weapons - argues that we need to pay as much attention to the processes we use to make games as we do to the games themselves.

Slides and complete text of the presentation are here. As usual if you view the slides with notes on, you can follow the entire presentation beat-by-beat.

Comments

[Andrew Yoder]

This got me thinking about the inertia of processes, and how a well-intended or one-off process can run away from its creators. Specifically with atomic bombs (since it's part of the talk's topic), the manhattan project was a one-off "end the war" effort, but setting up the process to make one bomb also set up the process to make more bombs, even made it seem reasonable to do so. (Once you have facilities built and staffed for refining uranium--a process required by the scientists' product--is the military really going to tear them down after the war?) And, having read some of the scientists' memoirs, I'm not sure how much they were thinking about the product of their process, or about the processes that would outlive the product. And I'm not sure whether to call that negligence, or a lack of foresight, or guilt.

We've seen something similar with the production of games (although with much less devastating consequences for humanity). Creating big games establishes a process with its own inertia, and consequently a well-intended, one-off game becomes a series, or even becomes the MO for all of a company's games, or a model for the whole industry. It makes me wonder about our industry's Oppenheimers and Feynmans, and makes me wonder what will come of these processes.

Anyhow, thanks for posting the talk's transcript! It's given me a lot to think about, and reminds me I need to read more history.

[RpgDan]

Thanks the link to the talk!

It would be great to see some processes documented and publicly available. Certain studios consistently successful and part that must come from their process.