Maybe not, but that sounds kind of awesome.

Communicating accurately and engineering for results most definitely has its place – especially in the sciences and some forms of philosophy. And most definitely – in many kinds of games! After all, it wouldn’t make sense to have a surrealist ‘Serious Game’ where firefighters are supposed to learn the fundamentals of firefighting by reflecting on the form and color of the burning house!

Well, I must be misinterpreting you then – because I happen to see a lot of meaning in what you’re saying

Well fair enough, I’m not trying to set up a dichotomy.

To the first part: I tend to take for granted the idea that all these systems are going to be incomplete and imperfect, and that noise will be introduced in the transmission. Essentially this is the reason behind the interpretation phase of communication and it’s what makes possible the divergence of creator intent and audience interpretation in any field of communication outside hypothetical direct brain-to-brain contact. I’m not implying that this would be ideal, serendipity and emergent features are some of my favourite things, but I can see why you would want to communicate accurately what you know/feel about yourself because when there’s some methodology behind it you can improve your odds of getting the results you want and opening those lines of communication with people.

Speaking of communication I can’t help but laugh at how much I’m writing and how little I’m saying. That and that we both had divergent interpretations of the same comments by other people!

Re: Lyx – the way that I interpreted his comments was not to say that they were not insightful or useful (aside from the personal attacks) – it was more to demonstrate that his conception of artistic expression is more ‘philosophical’ (read: rational, logical) than ‘poetic’ (read: irrational, raw and feelingful). To make things clearer:

He says that, “… you need a good understanding about meanings and semantics… so, it also has a lot to do with psychology. You need to understand yourself, before you can efficiently express it to others. Because if you yourself dont even understand what kind of meaning exactly you are trying to express, then how do you expect others to understand it?”
His stance seems to be that I, as a thinking-feeling-reflecting human being, must understand myself (my expressions – who I am, what I mean, what I think) before I can express myself. If we compare this claim to lived experience – we know that it cannot be true: the great majority of the world does not understand themselves or what they mean when they speak, they simply speak! Their expressions are cleared up by others who ask, ‘What did you mean when you said _____ ?’ or when they sit back and think about something they just did/said. Think: it would be strange to pre-think and pre-understand everything that you’re going to say before you say it – we simply act most of the time and figure out the meanings later. In fact, as I write this I’m constantly surprised by my own meanings – and suspect that the meanings you’ll see in my words will be different from how I read them!
So, when I say that only an ‘engineer’ knows what meanings s/he intends to express – it is because they have spent time pre-reflecting on them before they express them. This, to me, is a strange way of interacting in the world and denies others the ability to interpret what I say/do and tell me “You didn’t really mean that! You meant ______!”

At the same time, Lyx’s philosophy is absolutely a step-forward from the “Well, I’m going to just close my eyes and hope for the best” philosophy. It’s just that I thought I would make the claim that there is another philosophy of language/art out there that’s even ‘better’ (in my opinion!).

I totally agree re: Jonathan Blow and Jenova Chen’s comments. The analogy of fishing goes far, although I think it’s important to recognize that Jonathan said the equivalent of ‘We’ve already explored enough territory – stop casting the line and look deeper beneath your feet! Life is infinitely deep the deeper we dig!’ Innovation, as you said, is a technology – a tool – that allows us to extend our creative reach into the world – as long as we don’t focus on the technology for the sake of itself.

And regarding AGS adventure games – you are absolutely right to critique the creative stagnation in them, hence why I was hard-pressed to come up with an example of something fresh and exciting in that genre. (At the same time, I don’t spend a lot of time playing new AGS games – so someone please feel free to correct me). To restate myself for clarity – the verbs, art, control scheme – everything – are simply tools to allow a story to unfold. Without the story – they are meaningless.

I very much appreciate the analysis/response – after all I cannot possibly see all ends alone! Welcome to the AG – I hope you find something else sufficiently stimulating. Thanks again for the excellent critique.

In fact his philosophy seems more sensible to me than people who would simply throw up their hands and rely entirely on chance. I’m surprised how polarizing his response was considering that his point boils down to “you can’t be just creative, and you can’t just have a good systematic approach, you have to have both.”

It’s an interesting subject of discussion though. Johnathon Blow made this analogy about fishing where he points out that innovations serve to sort of expand the territory of what’s possible. Jenova Chen added that one should also cast the line in a particular direction. I think they were on to something. Innovation emerges from an understanding that the tried and true method of doing something is not always the best, and when you start exploring these possibilities you might hit on a method that’s unusual or untried and that can allow you to do things you otherwise couldn’t. Even a control scheme shouldn’t go unexamined.

“AGS games … Being ‘true’ to a genre is one of the best ways to work creatively!” While I can see the principle of this statement it’s also one of the things that seems to hold back amateur adventure games. Rather than thinking “this is the story I want to tell, now how do I do it?” they have a scenario and go straight into item-combining puzzles and escape-the-room scenarios because those are the norms that are so well established in the genre. There’s no reason for the same verbs to even be present in many games except that it’s the way Sierra or Lucasarts did it in their golden ages.

I don’t intend to sound overly negative. This is the first I’ve seen of your blog and it’s an interesting post so I think I have some catching up to do.

Re: AGS games … Being ‘true’ to a genre is one of the best ways to work creatively! That’s one of the things that I should have clarified in the article: ‘genres’ only exist as tools or technologies. Genres allow gamers to easily understand and categorize a game – and truly creative and imaginative developers can ‘play’ with a genre and surprise the player with new ideas. They don’t even have to innovate the genre itself – they just need to use it to tell their story in the most creative way possible.

Oh, and some times being true to genre can be fun, provided of course it’s a good game. Most AGS adventures for example aren’t innovative, but are still fun to play and sport interesting stories.

Now, let just sit and wait for gaming’s H. Miller.