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
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in reply to @DieselBrain's post:
Same thing happened with movie/shows criticism with "tropes". Pointing out "plot holes", "lampshades", "jumping the sharks" is lazy and reveals NOTHING about how the movie relates to us. It's quite literally sludge content.
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!
I'm glad "troll levels" blew up because it's a very specific edge case where you have to do "bad design" on purpose to do good design.
especially considering every single video about Dark Souls for the last full decade has been about how galaxy-brained it was for Demon's Souls to do Bad Game Design on fucking purpose.
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.
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