The Von Neumanns of Story
Just a bare snippet of a thought today on the drive to work.
Game designers don’t create stories. We create procedures that create stories. We in fact create procedures that let other people create stories. We’re like, three steps removed from the actual end result. What a weird little hobby we have.
March 30th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
I prefer to think of game designers as the equivalent of application programmers- they make the tools you use to make cool stuff.
March 31st, 2006 at 12:13 am
Ah, that’s probably more accurate. Good call.
March 31st, 2006 at 2:50 pm
I’m uncomfortable with such sweeping language. Perhaps /Narrativist/ game designers are the tool-makers of story. But a lot of us other designers don’t build ’story first.’ I’ve played in many games where you could only get away saying it had story if you include a serial recount of events as ’story.’
However, in story games, you guys completely rock!
Fang Langford
p.s. I’d say that role-playing game designers are grocers of imagination. (As opposed to the chefs….)
April 1st, 2006 at 12:37 am
The “grocers of imagination” - that is so uncool that it rules.
However, I don’t think we are realising the full job that a game designer has to do when we characterise them as the people who make tools that others use to tell stories. For the game designer is also at least the following:
- a social engineer, whose game creates a social situation that could not exist without it (I was impressed by how easily Bacchanal created a situation that would never have come into existence without it)
- a dramaturgists, who gives thought to the meaning of the stories and can manipulate this meaning through the rules,
and probably many other things as well.
PS. What does any of this have to do with Von Neumann?
April 2nd, 2006 at 3:02 pm
Self-replicating machines. Von Neumann machines are designs that create other things (albeit the same thing). No, it’s not entirely accurate, but that’s why it’s a passing thought.
April 3rd, 2006 at 6:08 pm
Game designers are world-builders who manage (if they’re good, or lucky) to give people more than just a glimpse of their worlds, but provide vehicles for meaningfully exploring, manipulating, and expanding those worlds. I haven’t decided if that’s better than what novelists do, but it is certainly on par.
April 3rd, 2006 at 7:04 pm
Replace ‘world’ with ‘experience’ and you’ve got 100% agreement from this corner, Quentin.
April 4th, 2006 at 11:35 am
Just when you think Von Neumann did absolutely everything that mattered in 20th century mathematics and mathematical physics, you find out that he did some more things you hadn’t even heard of!
April 9th, 2006 at 12:35 am
Quentin — not what novelists do.