I don't think he is saying games should become scientific, as in design by calculation and measuring brain response. He is really just advocating recognition that video games are fundamentally about learning and mastering skills. The "play" in video games is not about literally playing the parts of our character but more akin to playing in the sense an infant gradually learns to manipulate the objects on his toy table.

He does mix in things that seem awfully specific but I think he is only doing that to make a point. For example, explicitly constructing skill chain diagrams is one thing, but first and foremost understanding that your game has this purely abstract representation is important. He is saying if you can't design at this level then you are basically an alchemist struggling to perform reactions without any grasp of what is going on underneath.

I thought it was a great article, although I'm probably biased because I've been thinking along the same lines myself.

This kind of stuff needs to be taken with a pretty damn big grain of salt. This whole notion that you don't need intuition or creativity - that you can take everything apart and re-assemble it according to some algorithm or formula - has a real strong smell of snake oil.

You know, in the field of psychology, there is a similar school of thought that human psychology can essentially be scientifically understood. This point of view has done incredible damage to many people (ever heard of "psychiatric survivors"). You see, artists - and other unusual people - have continually run afoul of psychiatrists because they do not fit inside their neat little boxes; and often wind up getting drugged up, electroshocked or otherwise "compelled" to fit into the preconceived system. R.D. Laing was a psychiatrist who ripped that analytical psychiatry apart.

I am leery of this same put-the-intangibles-into-a-scientific-box thinking now. I can see an age when the suits will hand over a fresh new game design to some f*cking committee of scientists to see if it gels with the correctly-targeted psychoactive brainwaves - or some other such nonsense - before giving it approval.

If this is what game design is going to become, I dread that. In fact, I wrote a piece on this potential future a few months back: http://grassrootsgamemaster.blogspot.com/2007/03/dead-game-designers-society.html

This is further evidence that programmers, engineers accountants and other "methodologists" probably should not be at the steering wheel of future game innovation. Hey man, I'm on the side of the "alchemists" if that's how he cutting up the "problem".

This reminds me of knowledge engineering, when designing expert systems.

Grassroots Gamemaster, you evidently don't understand how scientific method works. If reality doesn't fit into the 'neat little boxes', then a good scientist will explore, experiment, and devise new theories and ideas to get a better grasp of how reality *does* work.

And what's with your arbitrary dichotomy between creativity and science? Science, like most human activities, is a creative act, an act of expression as well as learning. Mathematics, for example, is insanely creative, a whole form of expression in and of itself. If you don't see that, you simply haven't studied Maths enough.

The author of the article isn't trying to create an assembly line of near-identical game design; he's exploring the interaction between the mechanics of the game and the individual playing it, so we can make revolutionary leaps of *originality* with our new understanding. Knowledge working in tandem with intuition and personal expression is what creates great art. The old masters of painting such as Da Vinci had to learn how to mix oils, the nature of their chemical compositions, the ideas of the Golden Ratio, and so forth. This is no different.

Yah, the old masters learned how to mix oils and so on, but then again so did all their colleagues. Mixing oils wasn't what made Leonardo da Vinci great. It was an intangible element that made him great. There is a painting by either da Vinci (or is it Michelangelo?) done while a student in tandem with the teacher - the face by the teacher is wooden and dull; the face by da Vinci is alive. You can't understand that stuff by analyzing it. You either have it or you don't. But if you push analyzing shit, you may wind up in a situation where everything has to conform to rules. Rules that lock things into rigid forms that need to be smashed.

And, yes, there are boxes. The cliched phrase "scientific tunnel vision" exists for a reason.

Yes, the boxes exist. Sadly, there are a lot of bad scientists out there who try to find evidence for what they want to exist, rather than the other way round. But that is not the failing of the scientific method.

You appear to have completely missed the point on da Vinci; I never said it was his oil-mixing skills that made him great. But without an expert knowledge of the medium, he would not be able to *become* a great painter.

I find it amusing that you are so worried about formulas and rules taking over the creative process, when da Vinci himself constantly dissected corpses and analysed their proportions and mechanics, deriving perfectly correct formulas for the human figure and face. It is his *extensive knowledge* on the subject, gleaned from years of that studying, that along with his unique creative genius and intuition made his painting lifelike. These rules did not constrict him; they freed him, made getting human proportions and muscle placement correct a trivial thing for his brain to achieve so that he could focus on the grand strategies of composition and lighting.

This "you either have it or you don't" nonsense is quite disproved by those artists in modern-day who go into anatomy courses drawing human figures stiltedly - artistically, but quite wrong - then, slowly studying and learning the structure of the human figure, months later end up being incredible artists with both the anatomical knowledge to draw lifelike people and animals, and the creative spark that makes for truly original art.

You worry about formulas and knowledge and models destroying creativity. But formulas and their brethren are not rules, they are tools. Tools expand our experimentation and originality, not constrict it.

You are absolutely right that we should be very wary of anyone who tries to provide us with a step-by-step guide to designing games. This is not one of those cases.

There's a hint of anti-intellectualism in your posts, as if you believe academia is somehow strangling human expression, instead of opening it up.

Here:
http://www.wga.hu/art/l/leonardo/08heads/03profil.jpg
http://www.wga.hu/art/l/leonardo/10anatom/2head1.jpg

... are excellent examples of da Vinci studying the human face and creating formulas to better understand it. It is certainly far from 'something intangible'; it is hard work and practice and intelligence and creativity.