I have been doing a ton of thinking lately. Well I would like to think, that I think most often, so that first sentence is a bit lame. Instead I should say, tt is hard for me to explore what I want...
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I have been doing a ton of thinking lately. Well I would like to think, that I think most often, so that first sentence is a bit lame. Instead I should say, tt is hard for me to explore what I want to say on a public forum, but I do feel a calling to explore the academic side of what we do for a living.
Game projects are almost always late and over budget and most of them have problems with design specifications, mis management, over ambitious goals, or under capitalization. It is a problem that I have written about in my book game development and production. It is a problem that I have wrestled with at Taldren and at GoPets.
It is a problem across the whole industry. It is so pervasive that it is somewhat accepted. I know giant publishers with great piles of cash with great people that have projects that are dead walking and everyone knows it.
I think there is something in our blood. The people who yearn to create whole worlds out of nothing. There is something about us that drives us to reach deep, far, high and into the unknown and try to make something wonderous and magical that no one has ever seen before. We want to make great beautiful places for people to live in. Online game projects take all of the problems of regular off line game projects and take it to a whole new level of scary.
Without this energy and passion these worlds will never exist - never can exist. But it is this same boundless energy and passion that causes these worlds to be so often plagued by wounds of execution that are often irreparable.
How can we simultaneously have the drive to create a new world and make it small?
I want to make the smallest online cooking game! How?
How can we develop the desire for small?
It seems to be so against our nature... we want huge houses, huge pickup trucks (at least until last year), we want huge aircraft carriers, big freaking swords, bad us super fortresses.
If big kills us, why can't we start loving small?
-Erik <div
Originally posted on LiveJournal
zhai — July 10 2008, 17:36:23 UTC
Hey Erik. I think the problem, at least in games, is that small doesn't sell -- when you're talking about the mainstream industry and not the casual games market, which operates under very different dynamics. Most of what constitutes a 'casual' game anyone with a world builder aesthetic is not really going to be interested in.It's a problem with the aesthetic of immersion. In order to be immersed we need to be sufficiently convinced. I still have yet to see a 3D game that truly immerses me, though WoW comes closest. The fact that it has taken this long with the graphical games to achieve that ignition of imagination (to induce us to start creating stories in our heads) is perhaps a testament to the scale. (Though I do know there was plenty of story-building going on inside Ultima Online. At the time the core storytellers, I think, were still hanging around MUSHes.)I don't think we necessarily want/demand big, we just want immersive, and that's hard to achieve without scale. Another dimension of it is the size of the community, which for diversity and stability has to reach a certain critical mass both in order to achieve persistence and to achieve a high enough profile to be easily discovered in the maelstrom of available worlds.The indie community, though, has learned to love small -- the successful ones, anyway. And then they started to expand. But this is what makes Raph's project so interesting, in that it bridges the gap between indie and MMOs in an easy-entry sort of way. It may be able to successfully bring 'small' to the world-builder community.
erikbethke — July 11 2008, 14:30:34 UTC
Yeah you are right, it is very hard to sell small games to financiers... but strong indie execution is just fine. Probably best to make these gems inside of the fire of personal expression.Immersion.So with big UGC like YouTube I get lost, and that is the critical mass you are talking about. So we have to achieve immersion either through super freaky good/lucky UCG systems, or through super fat budgets?
blucrowlaughing — July 8 2008, 15:28:07 UTC
have you looked at 'lost in blue'? Its on the nintendo DS, doing better on the cooking mini game makes the food better which makes the food restore your health better and makes the characters happier. Its fast and simple so your don't get board with it and start eating all your potatoes raw.Big is easy to see it doesn't require us to get involved its impersonal. Small things require our personal involvement we have to put more of ourselves into small things.
erikbethke — July 11 2008, 14:27:50 UTC
I really liked that answer. More of ourselves. That fits and makes a lot of sense.thanks for that meme.
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Published: July 7, 2008 7:30 PM
Last updated: February 20, 2026 5:04 AM
Post ID: 57cff555-96b5-4f37-aadc-2629f5f6e0d4