But again, maybe that's natural.

Every new multimedia technology has served to increase the rate at which media and society evolves, so maybe we are at the point where we can now create, explore, exhaust and then dismantle and move past a form within a century?

It's confusing to me because I still see the art of game development as massively under-evolved, full of nieve takes and inefficient processes, but at the same time I think we really have reached a creative zenith of the medium to some degree.

It feels like we did a commercialisation speed run.

What I mean by this is that it makes sense for the "industry", while the "art" moves on: with the possibility space of the form nearing fully explored, the adventurous creators are forced outside the form into new and uncharted territory.

Essentially all forms of media "die" to some degree.

Well, I don't know quite how you're reading it, but I'd have thought any project that's gone into production without thorough testing has the odds stacked against it being good - that's an unhealthy project.

We need entrepreneurial go-getters, but we also need to be honest about the prospects.

I'd add to this that if you're already so far into development that players would have story details spoiled by testing, and you haven't playtested all the above things yet ... you're not in a healthy place, let's leave it at that.

I don't know - I always tell my students that your goal isn't to design a GAME, it's to design a PLAYER EXPERIENCE, and it can be hard to put experiences and emotions into words.

Sometimes wild gesticulation and mouth noises are a suprisingly effective way to get the idea across!

As an educator, the thing I want to do is teach less "game dev" in the sense of how to crunch a AAA title, and more "fundamental design" in the sense of "how to make rational decisions about what to make, and to understand the creative plan for what's to come".

But I don't know how much it'll help

I've heard this a few times recently from indies: even if someone says they don't need a playable proof of a concept, you'll be competing with people who have them, and you can't develop a PoC without funding and time.

I really struggle with finding an answer, because we've normalised chaotic dev.

I've been out of touch for a while, but last I checked we still had people in the big money AAA sphere acting like it's all just an extended game jam where you kick off with a theme, setting and genre and away you go.

Weirdly, I've seen more indies with a better approach (but also worse ones too)

Our industry is really, really, really bad at actually DESIGNING things and doing pre-production.

Controversial opinion, maybe, but if you don't inherently know the ins-and-outs of the fun of what you're making, you're still in pre-production. You don't yet have a viable product.

I miss this bit!

I used to do it in reverse: I'd get handed scripts and treatments and had to come up with games. It was a great exercise: scouring them for repeated actions and motivations, and then using those to construct game systems.

I used to have a colleague that played in a band, and they'd sometimes have a night where they invited people on stage to play the NES Super Mario Bros while they did all the SFX and music through percussion, which was pretty cool.

Honestly, I loved watching the Dutch system. It's the end goal of democracy: a genuine melting-pot of different ideas that results in constant fighting, compromise and nobody getting anything they actually want.

It's ineffective and frustrating specifically because it does what it's meant to do.

call them whatever you like, the reality is 'smart glasses' are surveillance devices designed by tech companies to violate consent and rewrite social norms. social shaming is still a more effective a deterrent than the law. @hypervisible.blacksky.app

www.theverge.com/tech/807834/...