how to make a game: followup

[quarrel]

Some explanation on my last post. It’s a bit of a rant about how mainstream game design has become so rote in the wake of Zynga’s social “game” experiments. As someone who designs games for a living, I find less and less of my time on a project is associated with designing the game and more of it is in managing the integrated marketing factors. Some of that is to be expected at a company as small as mine, where the designer on any project is also the producer. But the other side of the coin is that an increasing percentage of my job is just going down a checklists of best practices. Not that there’s anything wrong with best practices. It’s nifty that people before me have tried different things, discovered what worked well and what didn’t, and recorded their findings for others to use. But going down a checklist doesn’t take a whole lot of skill and it isn’t satisfying, and there’s only so much time I can spend on a project.