Rare is the leader who can actually write well
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
That's because being a good writer is about more than words. Good writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else's shoes. They know what to omit. They think clearly. And those are the qualities you need."
You can't fake writing. You've got to have the right skills to write or else it won't work. And a lot of the things that make writing good - empathy, flair, organization - are things that help in any situation.
I usually tell people I have an affinity for metaphors, and remind them that their desktop, folders and files are all electronic metaphors.
For instance, take Super Mario Bros.: the developer would write the graphics rendering code, physics, make a level editor, etc, but it's the game designers who decided beforehand what the concepts would be, and work afterward to create and playtest the levels themselves until the game is fun.
For a more modern example, in World of Warcraft, developers push all the polygons and worry about collision detection and timing of spell effects, while game designers say "the fireball spell should do n damage at x range, and the Whatzisname questline should have such-and-such a set of rewards; here's the dialogue script."
If you prefer, you can think of developers as providing the toolkit, and designers as building the game with it, but in a much more iterative process.
Are you in that job right now, to my parent post? What sorts of things have you learned from it? What trends do you see developing within the industry?
"AAA" games, the real earthshakers like Halo and World of Warcraft, can only be made by large teams with multi-million-dollar budgets. Inescapable truth. Success in conventional game development has come to depend more and more on a corporate lifestyle: no loose cannons, no lone geniuses. Game developers have to master their C and C++ and perfect their 3D optimizations; game designers have to be very lucky, very hardworking, and very low-paid. (The design side is much harder to break into.)
Games from established studios have to be guaranteed moneymakers, mostly appealing to 15-to-35-year-old males, which is why we see lots and lots of online gunplay and me-too rhythm and karaoke games. The sudden upswing in rhythm and karaoke games points out the increasing mainstreaming of video games, though, which brings me to point 2:
Independent development. The internet has made it extremely easy to write a simple game in Flash or something and get it plastered all over the internet. You go viral with a decent business model, you can cash in, and quite a few games have already been optioned for downloadable console ports after an online success. Especially for casual games -- pick-up-and-go entertainment, usually in the puzzle category -- this can be a great road to recognition, and it's the only one available to the reclusive-genius solo programmer.
Solo development with internet distribution is also the only way to release game types that just aren't that popular these days. I've been playing a game named The Spirit Engine 2 [ http://thespiritengine.com/ ] lately; if you look at the screenshots, you can see that it's not the kind of game that would fly on the mass market.
In fact, my advice to anyone who wants to "make games" is just to make games. Don't go work for a game company. You'll do more work for less pay than you would in any other programming job, and you probably won't even scratch your game-creation itch -- you think you'll be slaving away on Doom 7, but it's far more likely that you'll be fixing graphics buffer glitches in Horsez [ http://www.amazon.com/Horsez-Nintendo-DS/dp/B000GJ0J1K ].
game design : fun :: computer science : information
It's important to make the distinction: fun doesn't only apply to games. A ludologist would be perfectly at home in UI design, for example, or education (and also obviously things like toy and amusement-park design.) You could hire a "game designer" for those positions right now, but people would look at you funny because the branding's wrong.
However, just as there's a difference between computer scientists and programmers, there's a difference between ludologists and the risen-through-the-ranks game designer that we see today, so it wouldn't be a perfect fit. The game designer may know some facts about how to make things fun, and have some theories as to why certain game design patterns produce fun, but they've been "hard-won" on the street; they've never formally studied it, mostly extracting it from their practice in other game-related disciplines (art, coding, level design, etc.) That kind of game designer is half-developer (or artist, or playtester, or what-have-you) working in a sort of cowboy fashion to advance the field.
Of course, ludology is in its absolute infancy (it's about 20 years younger than formal Computer Science) so it's still not even recognized as a separate discipline; thus, the only ones working on it are making their advances in the field, similar to the original computer programmers who had to be Computer Scientists, because no one had thought the thoughts they needed to think to base their work on.
As I said, I'm taking CS and English courses. Tack on a bit of psychology and sociology, some media history courses, and whatever it is that teaches game theory (economics? basically, "fairness" as it relates to fun), and you'd have a good starting program for the actual teaching of formal Ludology. I was always thinking about being a CS professor one day; I might have to change that plan a bit, and perhaps write up my own curriculum ;)
I wonder: do a lot of CS people feel connected to writing? I never thought so, though I know music is a common connection. But most people here write fairly well, and you get a lot of eloquent posts. Is that a common trait among hackers, that they write?
It's a global workforce. Yet too often, I see a colleague send a brain dump of 3 or 4 paragraphs to someone in another country. Imagine yourself having to use a translation dictionary for half of that?
It really helps if you use just common English words, in brief sentences. And yes, this might take extra editing time. Yet, this helps anyone reading it, not just those with English as a second language.
Let the recipient use a dictionary. After a while he won't have to anymore.
More on-topic, I think the title is wrong. People who can write well tend to be better at social organization. Mao was - among other things - a librarian and poet.
Jefferson gets all the good press, but Franklin was more accomplished at more things. (Ben did fundamental work in electricity.)
Yet I've never got much feedback about my writing style. With ten thousand posts of careful practise, I would presumably be pretty good by now. What a wasted opportunity.
Stories are different, though learning to construct an argument helps you plan out stories. Learning the aesthetics of a language isn't something forumming helps with. And poetry is an entirely different entity from either: it's almost all aesthetic.
The problem with feedback is that each thing you do is trying to do something different. If you state yourself clearly online, there's not much more you have to do. And yet look at somebody like why the lucky stiff, who's elevated his writing style to a level above anything I've encountered online. He doesn't have to do that, but he does it anyway.
"1 + 1 is 11" "acccctually, it's 2"
Isn't Mao's Little Red Book one of the most printed books in human history?