Weekly Links #163

Hello, everyone! After a gaming break, and working on a game design inspired by it (which will be revealed in due time), a sudden revelation means that my research into outliners becomes immediately relevant, with much less work required on my part. So I hope to have a surprise for you soon.

Until then, let's see what happened this week. For one, Jason Scott just launched a campaign to archive all Apple II software, especially originals that couldn't be touched before due to copy protection. In related news, Techdirt mentions yet another case of games preserved thanks to piracy and emulation. You know my opinion of this, so I won't insist.

In other news, we have a couple of articles discussing game design issues. Like this one about the importance of choice, even in historical games. Which reminded me of the time when I played a historical gamebook, and choosing what seemed like the fair, stay-the-course choice led to an untimely death, because it wasn't what the historical character had done in that situation. And I can understand if you're trying to test a student's knowledge of real-world history, or simply if you don't want to deal with the complications of imagining plausible counterfactuals, but it was such a disappointment at the time. So I was glad to read about a better approach.

Similarly, Jimmy Maher's latest article discusses the problem with procedural generation that many games have. But I'll say once again that PCG itself isn't the problem. We can make generated worlds more diverse, detailed and believable. It takes work, but it can be done. What we can't do automatically is make them matter. Because, you see, people don't tell stories -- or listen to stories -- for the sake of it, but in order to share meaningful experiences that soothe, teach, amuse... whatever. And meaning can only come from personal experience.

As I pointed out before, it happens all too often that a fictional setting will be lovingly handcrafted, all coherent and plausible, yet utterly bland. Conversely, playing a roguelike can become very personal very quickly. So I'll state it once again: the method of creation isn't to blame. Forgetting the "why" is the usual culprit.

Last but not least, here's an interview about the development process of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. And the key to it all is this passage:

The number one most important qualification that the developers discuss when deciding if they should add someone to the official dev team isn’t their design, art, or coding prowess. It’s their social skills.

It goes for all software development, really, or for that matter any human endeavor. But for too long now, we lived with the illusion that technical excellence somehow trumps being a decent person. Well, look around you. Enjoying the results?

Until next time, remember to care about people.