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One Canuck built the #ttrpg tag and the #mecha tag. And that was me.

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DieselBrain
@DieselBrain

Rather than fully explain one’s feelings on certain design choices or attempt to engage in those as artistic decisions, I feel like I just see “bad game design” thrown around as a thought terminating cliche


mrhands
@mrhands

Ergo, there is no such thing as "bad design," and you should instead ask yourself what the designer of a game was trying to say with the mechanics and whether it comes across.

But that's haaaaaard


ring
@ring

When this is aimed directly at (mostly studio-employed) developers by fans, I call it Temporarily Embarrassed Game Developer Syndrome because while it's obviously far easier to yell about how a game is bad and the developers should feel bad than it is to make a game, it's also very hard to fully understand that when you have a passionate interest but no actual experience. So there are lots of gamers out there who have penned or recorded thousands of words of commentary about "bad game design" that essentially boil down to, "You're squandering the opportunity to do my dream job. I should be there, not you."

This resentment leaves absolutely no room for nuanced criticism or even self-reflection about their experiences, because what they're actually saying is that the game's creators are incompetent, and they would have done a better job. While they're probably not consciously making this calculation, the more the "incompetent" devs are fired or ridiculed, the more room there is for fans--the people who really know how to make games--to replace them.

What I find especially interesting is that if these types make a strong enough case to other players, or their presentation is polished enough, they do get fan followings who adopt their ideas and consider them experts on game design; sometimes they'll even lobby studios to hire them or dogpile developers who piss them off.

And they're always talking out their asses. I've never seen one attempt to actually learn how game production works beyond inferring things from industry news, which usually leads them to treat the most boring-ass office day job minutiae as vaguely sinister omens. They don't want to think of it as a job. If you think of it as just a job, you don't belong there! They love games so much that they'd do anything to be there. They'd sleep on the floor, accept shittier pay, work all through the night--anything except learning or doing the boring shit all by themselves that might dispel the illusion of it being more than just a fucking job.

It's super hard and kind of thankless to do creative stuff on your own with no audience; it's way more fun and immediately rewarding to yell about what you'd totally do right if you had the resources of an entire studio, and sometimes you can make more money doing that, too.


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in reply to @DieselBrain's post:

god, the way people have MANGLED the term "plot hole" fucking infuriates me.

and we cant even say its only viewers cuz we see this shit bleeding into actual creators too and suck the life from their own projects!!!

i hate it!

I used to be one of the people who paid attention to stuff like this because I'm always trying to avoid making mistakes, and I think there's something really comforting about the idea that if you can just learn the formula to avoid doing what's objectively bad, you'll avoid embarrassing yourself--almost like a system of manners. It's bad manners to use the steak knife to cut your bread. It's bad manners to have a prologue in your novel; you'll offend your audience's sensibilities, etc. It really did stunt my growth as an artist/writer and I picked up some bad habits of doing that kind of thing myself.

What broke me of it finally was being behind the scenes with a few people who do nothing but rant about craft pitfalls and pet peeves on social media in that aggrieved "UGH FINE this makes me want to BLEACH MY EYES so I'll explain it for you" tone and learned that they did not do much actual work and were very unprofessional in general. My rule of thumb now is that if someone spends all their time talking about how they're a good [creative] (not like those bad [creatives]), their actual job is probably not creating. It's posting online.

I remember being in middle school and discovering the concept of a trope and even then I immediately recognized "these are just common patterns, why the hell are people criticizing something for having 'tropes.' That's like accusing a smoothie of having 'chemicals' in it."

Yeah it'd be great if people would at least explain themselves more often, even when I disagree with someone's take on game design decisions I still usually like hearing them talk about why they feel that way.

Also whenever I see someone talking about any kind of art and they use the word "objectively" I wanna send them back to kindergarten for a refresher on the difference between facts and opinions. People keep pretending art has rules and it drives me nuts

yeah if someone thoroughly explains "these design decisions had X and Y effect on my play experience and thats why i didnt enjoy it" i can respect that so much more than "UGH I HATE THIS MECHANIC ITS SUCH BAD GAME DESIGN, THE DEVS ARE DOGSHIT" like i end up actually seeing more often

especially cuz like, SO many design decisions can have good OR bad implications on a person's experience in different contexts!

Tangentially: for the love of god stop treating "good flag, bad flag" like scripture, it's producing a torrent of bland flags that look like the logo to some trendy gastropub in Seattle.

Yes I can see that it is pristine and clear of text and is all simple and easy to draw and identify and all that. I can see the very obvious symbol you shoehorned into the middle of the flag and designed everything else to frame.

I look at the new Utah state flag and I see a checklist.

in reply to @ring's post:

YEAH it's funny because I know these are the people everyone is trying to warn off when they say "there's no 'Ideas Guy' job in games" but unfortunately a number of them really do end up in jobs that are basically Ideas Guy.

i like watching good ui design vs bad ui design in games videos and on one hand i’ve seen a lot of things i agree with, but on the other hand man is doing ui in games so difficult. they give you basically nothing to do everything and every actually good ui system involves shipping part of a web browser with the game so you can actually use a real language made to do ui in. i didn’t do ui in games very much after realizing how much it sucks to do (i am a baby)

ui design is a lot if you’re using web tools where you can properly lay everything out. it’s a whole different lot when your tools in unreal are so much less powerful and turn out to be way more image based (at least from what i remember)