Comments on: Emergent Game Design http://www.mcmains.net/2007/12/27/emergent-game-design/ Come for the words, stay for the...HEY! Come back! Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:20:22 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6 By: Scott Morse http://www.mcmains.net/2007/12/27/emergent-game-design/#comment-56477 Scott Morse Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:45:31 +0000 http://www.mcmains.net/2007/12/27/emergent-game-design/#comment-56477 It sounds like EGD is to old-school game design as object-oriented programming is to GoTo code. Can that be true? But does that mean the distinctive development of EGD is object-orientation? But then it would have taken off earlier and bigger. What about "shooting a cylinder with poisonous gas" -- isn't that a trivial maneuver from Awful Green Things From Outer Space? And why allocate two hours on "Desktop Tower Defense," as the author recommends, when one may perfectly well expend an entire weekend, resulting in the inflamed and tender ganglia I am now experiencing? To return to the point, I can't imagine game design is stuck in pre-object architecture, while the tools used to build the games have all shifted to object-oriented. For one thing, you could almost say object orientation was modeled in the paper-based role-playing game architecture of GURPS. (Is GURPS an historical precedent for OO? Graduate thesis anyone?) GURPS: Empty, unformed, opaque. Who wants to do all the work of developing a GURPS game, anyway? Judging from the quantities of this-world that-world GURPS manuals, someone did. A clever someone with an organized mind and a latent affinity with computers. If most games are still built around GoTo, someone has some explaining to do. It sounds like EGD is to old-school game design as object-oriented programming is to GoTo code. Can that be true? But does that mean the distinctive development of EGD is object-orientation? But then it would have taken off earlier and bigger. What about “shooting a cylinder with poisonous gas” — isn’t that a trivial maneuver from Awful Green Things From Outer Space? And why allocate two hours on “Desktop Tower Defense,” as the author recommends, when one may perfectly well expend an entire weekend, resulting in the inflamed and tender ganglia I am now experiencing?

To return to the point, I can’t imagine game design is stuck in pre-object architecture, while the tools used to build the games have all shifted to object-oriented. For one thing, you could almost say object orientation was modeled in the paper-based role-playing game architecture of GURPS. (Is GURPS an historical precedent for OO? Graduate thesis anyone?)

GURPS: Empty, unformed, opaque. Who wants to do all the work of developing a GURPS game, anyway? Judging from the quantities of this-world that-world GURPS manuals, someone did. A clever someone with an organized mind and a latent affinity with computers.

If most games are still built around GoTo, someone has some explaining to do.

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