If Warren Specter came to me in a vision and said to kill infidels and not eat pork so that I may live in paradise forever with a bunch of slutty virgins, well goddamnit I’d be taking flying (but not landing) lessons.
A pretty reactionary statement. Glad you’re not a schoolteacher. (I hope.) Sounds like you’d be telling the kids to ditch their dreams and go work at Wal-Mart like god intended.[/quote]
Um, no it isn’t, and you’re an idiot. All Kool Moe Dee is saying is that part of being a competent artist is having a realistic self-appraisal of the limits of your own talents. Are you really arguing that artistic merit is based upon a sweeping vision with absolutely no objective introspection on your own actual ability? No wonder you are so impressed with Costanwhatsit.
That’s mighty impressive rhetoric.
Possibly. However, it sounded to me much less like your bland interpretation and more like an expression that you have to be “hot shit” in order to strive towards creating something outside of the status quo in gaming. That strikes me as an excuse for copping out; creating something revolutionary isn’t very likely (because you, the advice implies, are probably not “hot shit”), so you might as well give up now and settle into working on mediocre games. Who can blame anyone for producing crappy mediocrity when only a few select “hot shits” are expected to do anything innovative?
However, it sounded to me much less like your bland interpretation and more like an expression that you have to be “hot shit” in order to strive towards creating something outside of the status quo in gaming. That strikes me as an excuse for copping out; creating something revolutionary isn’t very likely (because you, the advice implies, are probably not “hot shit”), so you might as well give up now and settle into working on mediocre games. Who can blame anyone for producing crappy mediocrity when only a few select “hot shits” are expected to do anything innovative?
I see. In your view, mediocre talents with an exaggerated sense of their own capability and armed only with enthusiasm and negligible ability at qualitative refinement are just as likely, if not more likely, to produce something revolutionary than talents with a confident but introspective realization of their own limitations. In other words: you’re subscribing to the “ten million monkeys can write Hamlet” approach to revolutionary game design: any idiot can do it if he keeps obliviously smashing his slack-jawed face against the keyboard.
Let’s face facts: vision doesn’t mean anything unless it is a good vision, and that takes introspection and qualitative revision. This “revolutionary” jazz you are talking about is almost never a completely new idea in art, but a gradual refinement process where evolving techniques of elucidating an old idea suddenly make it an entirely new idea. This “eureka” originality you are promoting just is not what happens most of the time, because belching out random ideas without a good, hard introspection process just produces bad ideas. Anybody is capable of having an idea for a game - what separate good game designers from bad is their ability to realize where, why and how an idea sucks (even if that idea isn’t their own!), and transform it into a better one.
The “every kid can be an astronaut” ideology you are upbraiding KMD for not promoting is a hypocrisy because it promotes the opposite of the objective self-realization necessary to be an astronaut. Because being great is about having both a dream and then looking at yourself in the mirror and asking, “How can I be good enough to pull this off?”
No argument there. What I objected to, and this may very well not have been Kool Moe Dee’s intent, was the adoption of defensive “you ain’t such a hot shit” attitudes by certain entrenched cynics who are threatened by idealism because it challenges their own choices in life. Certain folks accept things the way they are in order to make a buck without rocking the boat, and find it threatening when others come along full of idealism and determination to make a difference because it makes them look bad for having settled for less than the best they themselves could have done. So they want to knock the new guy down a peg or two in order to reassure themselves that their diminished expectations are all that anyone has a right to aspire to.
A pretty reactionary statement. Glad you’re not a schoolteacher. (I hope.) Sounds like you’d be telling the kids to ditch their dreams and go work at Wal-Mart like god intended.[/quote]
Um, no it isn’t, and you’re an idiot. All Kool Moe Dee is saying is that part of being a competent artist is having a realistic self-appraisal of the limits of your own talents. Are you really arguing that artistic merit is based upon a sweeping vision with absolutely no objective introspection on your own actual ability? No wonder you are so impressed with Costanwhatsit.[/quote]
I believe Mr. Dee expressed his thought wrong, and if I got it wrong please correct me Mr. Dee: What he means to say is that it’s pretty much established fact that NO artist EVER thinks they are all that good**. Most musicians will full on admit that they can’t stand to hear their own music, and most actors never watch their own movies beyond the premier, hell Cindy Crawford thinks she’s fat. There are exceptions to this rule of course, but most of them suck.
So, if you can look at something you created, or want to create, and see it as the end all and be all of whatever you are working on, you obviously are looking at it through biased glasses, being so close to your work you can’t HELP but see thousands of flaws, unless you are blinded by your own ego of course.
** (I’m using ‘artist’ here to refer game designers, I believe the induvidual parts that go into a game can be defined as art, but not the game itself)
Having known him for years, I can assure you that Greg isn’t that way; he doesn’t worry about self-promotion of this sort, he just tells it like he sees it.
“Sounds like you’d be telling the kids to ditch their dreams and go work at Wal-Mart like god intended.”
If someone has a dream, he won’t listen anyway. So it really can’t touch him, all those negative vibes.
DeanCo–
Van Gogh committed suicide because he thought his brother lost faith in him. =/
Van Gogh committed suicide because he thought his brother lost faith in him. =/[/quote]
And he was also insane.
Ben Sones wrote:
I still wish someone would do a Paranoia game for the PC, though. Sorry, Greg…
Costikiyan got the rights to Paranoia when the original publisher briefly went bankrupt. He’s licensed it to Skotos for development into a MUD, and although they haven’t released anything yet, Costikiyan confirmed recently on his blog that they had renewed the license.
The extended-pineal gland thing is from From Beyond, though, so you need to fine tune your pop-80’s-Stuart-Gordon-films-reference gland by poking a bloody q-tip into the hole and swirling it around until things click. From Beyond has the best Barbara Crampton interracial dominatrix sex scene ever, though (with Ken Foree from Dawn of the Dead playing someone named “Bubba Brownlee” - my last name!). So you’re close.
Yeah, all those 80’s horror flicks have gotten scrambled in my head – you’re right, the Pineal Gland is from the “Inspired by Lovecraft” (heh) From Beyond. Regardless, Reanimator did have the best disembodied-head-cunningilius-sex-scene ever. If I were to make an Lovecraftian movie starting Greg Costikyan, it would definitely have at least two or three of those scenes in there. The Monster That Ate Sheboygan, indeed.
To my knowledge that scene wasn’t in the theatrical version. It appeared on the “unrated” video tape version.
“I’ll take obscure geek trivia from the 80s for $500, Alex”
Well, um, I got it straight from Stuart Gordon’s commentary on the Re-Animator DVD, so take it up with him. It seems likely though that the movie’s PREMIERE would, in fact, have been unrated.
Postal 2 is vying to top Reanimator on that score by letting the player use a severed neckhole as a sexual orifice if you hit the F9 key within three seconds of cutting off someone’s head, then moving the arrow keys back and forth. Depending on whether you hit the shift key while doing this, you can decide whether or not to pull out before climax.
Pretty damn sick.
I’ll try to better express what I was trying to say earlier. There is very little that is truly innovative in games anymore – if there’s one or two innovative games a year, that’s a bumper crop IMO. On the other hand, a game does not have to be innovative to be a great game. BF '42 is Tribes in WW2, if you’ll allow me such an exaggeration – all of the concepts in BF have been done somewhere else before. But it’s still a great game because of the way the pieces fit together, and because of all the little things it does right that are not innovative at all.
I think it’s a much more attainable goal for a game designer to strive for “best of breed” nowadays, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. But hey, if someone takes that long hard look in the mirror, and still thinks they have something special…then by all means, go for it. I just think that people need to take a harsher look at what they’re bringing to the table before charging off to make an “innovative” game.
I am not a designer, so it’s not professional envy. :D I just think that “revolutionary” things tend to be sold with a lot of chest-beating, and not a lot of critical examination. (This is true in a lot of other fields, too, I guess.) I think you’re more likely to find innovation from people who are their own harshest critics, and they would certainly never advertise their ideas as such.
That sounds like MOO3.
I’ll disagree that BF1942 is Tribes in WW2. Vehicles play a far more important role and the style of play is quite different. Evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but better for it nontheless. At least if you can get the idiots on your team to stop fighting over planes or sniping when you need assaults, ATs and engineers to capture and hold flags. ;[
I think that’s always been the case, for the most part.
If you have one “great idea” that “you have to get made” you’re probalby a pretty lousy game designer. If you can have a great new idea every day, then you’re off to a good start.
But from my experience the path to a great game is evolutionary not revolutionary.