I’ve started following the Zen of Design blog, which strikes me as an intelligent repository of commentary on the world of game design and development. What I like about it and other developer-driven blogs is that there’s a purpose to the writing: making progress toward better game development and game experiences.

On the surface, this kind of writing is similar to the kind of inquiry you see in serious academic study (think “film studies”). Though I’m all for serious acadmic study, I’m sometimes frustrated with their encroachment game design. They still somehow miss the point…they’re not necessarily creators, and they may even get in the way.

A discussion of one Mark Barrett’s response to this essay can be seen on Intelligent Artifice. It’s kind of an interesting essay from a theoretical, categorical perspective. But the Barrett response cuts to the chase:

If academics are going to be helpful in solving the interactive storytelling problem, they need to be explicit about their intent, exhaustive in their historical analysis and rigorous with their language. The danger in failing to do so is not simply that confusion will arise, but that academia will perpetuate the reinvention of the wheel among the transient student populations in the same way these issues have reappeared a number of times in the transient commercial industry. And from where I sit, as a creator, the last thing any of us needs is another generation of designers thinking they’re getting in on the ground floor of the interactive storytelling problem when they’re not.

We have seen this happen over and over again, but from the perspective of fun video game experiences, not the academically-acclaimed ones. We saw the old play mechanic of Dragon’s Lair return 20 years later in the CD-ROM game Johnny Mnemonic… and it wasn’t. Here’s a quote from the 1995 Wired feature:

“In a traditional adventure game, the user is mainly presented with a static screen and controls what happens to a sprite,” says Norris, an MIT Media Lab graduate with several productions under her belt. But Norris points out that most full-motion videogames, like Trilobyte Inc.’s 7th Guest, are stuck in “explore mode”: you can look around, but heaven help you if you want to fight because the technology isn’t really there to help you. Thanks to some nifty video-compression hacks, you can do both in Johnny Mnemonic, where, Norris says, “the video forces the action and you must react in a real-time manner.”

Uh huh. To be fair, it was 1995, about a year before iD released Quake and 3D hardware acceleration was yet to be firmly entrenched. It seems like a good market decision, leveraging the quality of streaming video and CD-ROM that could support them. What we didn’t know was that even Hollywood production values could not make a film-based “interactive experience” fun. Just look at Rocket Science Games, who churned out highly polished 3D rendered CD-ROM games…I still have a cherished copy of LodeStar’s somewhere. Great looking stuff. Just not very fun.

Perhaps the split is fundamentally based in the mindset. Academics tend to be observers. Film people are focused on passive viewing that leads to suspension of disbelief. Game Developers are something else: part dictator, part squad leader, and part crack dealer. But above all, they want you to have a good time doing things in their world, suspension of disbelief occurs because you’re too busy doing things to question the logic of it all. That’s a different approach vector from film, though both game developer and movie director have to carefully consider setting expectation before the audience sits down.

As for me, these articles have helped clarify what’s important to me in pursuing game development again: advancement of the interactive experience through practice, not theory. I am incredibly out of shape with regard to the practice, but knowing that there are others on the same path is encouraging.