An unequal balance

As I set about the task of finding a new home I wonder at the similarities between this task and planning to make a video game.

Location location location, a common mantra, but what are all the component choices we make when searching for a new home?

It is the same in the kitchen when setting about to make a large meal. You first have to decide what to serve, or where to live, or even what kind of game you want to make.

Then you try to visualize all the recipe items.

• Nearness to shopping, schools, bus routes
• Price
• Size and amenities
• target audience
• control schema
• technology
• time frame
• investment
• allergies

Regardless of what we have at the start or what we think we need for the future, we realize that planning can only take you so far before you are forced into doing.

Expectations come before experience, and it is this unequal balance which creates stress.

Best practices can mitigate the gap between expectation and reality.

In life outside of game development, nearly everyone has an opinion that they believe to have equal weight. This is the root cause of teenage angst, and it creeps into our work lives in meetings and the little choices we make.

A course of action then would be to both reduce the level of expectation and the level of planning.

However, without proper planning you will fall into many obvious pitfalls.

Perhaps planning for the worst as well as planning for the best would be a sensible course of action.

Desire

It would seem that the more desire that is injected into a project the less directed it becomes.

The further away you are from desire the closer you are to cohesion and understanding.

The more direction that is required the less likely it is that multiple party's desires will be met.

With individual interference into a project comes individual responsibility for the chain of events that will lead from the born desire.

It is critical that those desiring then become more involved with the project once they have injected their desires into it.

Direction is lost the more you introduce desire, therefor always remember to take responsibility for your desires.

Duality

Is there up without down?

When designing games for kids; how much of our adult selves do we take out, examine, and then decide not to put into the task?

When designing games for adults; how much time do we spend recounting childlike things in order to satisfy our adult desires?

Certainly there can be down without up.

Commonality

For most of us our decisions are guided by some moral or immoral compass. Your tools then are made from the rules you define yourself by. Our design philosophies are also made from these self constructed rules.

When you mix divergent people together on a design team and try to find a common ground you soon come to know there is no such thing as complete agreement. The closest we get is compromise.

Similarily thinking people will of course often come to the same conclussions. I am not interested in this dynamic, since by nature it isn't very dynamic.

Starting Points

Where do we drawn our inspirations from? When we wake up in the morning where do our motivations spring from? What drives us?

No matter what your answers are, a common thread is that these ideas are very deep and personal. They make you who you are. They tailor your speech, they are the rules and the filters of daily social interrelationships.

I imagine that these concepts and feelings shape our design decisions more than perhaps we recognise.