Shjade said:
Pretty sure this is also the source of all the "pretentious" remarks from EC's vocal detractors. It's very easy to mistake a concerted effort to keep things simple and available to a broad audience as "talking down" or being pretentious, particularly if you are a member of the audience to whom the simplified concepts are already intimately familiar in more complex forms.
I wonder if this is true. I get the feeling the ones who use "pretentious" a lot are those that disagree with EC's conclusions. I consider myself to know a lot about design theory and I've never found EC offensive. They express ideas well that I want to see expressed. People aren't offended by people on their side with an attitude problem. They're offended by people who marginalize their opinions by disagreeing, _then_ over-simplifying, because then it reads like: "I'm expressing an idea, simply, because the reason you don't understand is because my idea is too complex, not because you have a valid counter-argument." Then the discussion moves in the wrong direction, instead of where it should be, on the core points EC is trying to make.
I think the greatest value of EC is the creation of these focal points for discussion, even if you're just using them for bouncing ideas off yourself. But unfortunately they over-sell the ease-of-application of their ideas - probably worried by people who won't appreciate their value - then people get confused over what the meat of their message is, and conflict over the things that don't really matter. A lot of designers and devs create games, then try to pull a theory out of their experiences that the rest of us can follow, or maybe more generally, that they can follow themselves for more ambitious projects. Normally they produce something that goes like this, "when you encounter a situation that looks like the one I was in, do something like what I did ... ." It's very anecdotal. The critical ideas get glossed over, and we get into a position where no one knows what makes an in-game decision interesting. So you get teams of people operating from hunches, making it difficult to organize under a novel vision, and everyone is saying "risk vs reward" because it's the only thing everyone can agree on isn't bullshit. Proof-of-concept: we've had that term (risk/reward) for a long time, and it's yet to be replaced by something that has wider application (risk vs reward is very narrow), because anything that's suggested is biased or anecdotal. Extra Credits tries to relieve that problem, and they're the only ones who can, because they're developer "like," yet they're interested in behaving like journalists.
Ah, Jim grows on you. Once I realized his content was underneath this contradictory satire angle I didn't find him irritating anymore. He took a little practice. Now I respect him.
Everyone learns differently, but that's no excuse for ignoring good content. If you want to be the best at something you have to get practice, and you have study your peers, and you have to understand theory. Each person will have strengths, but dismissing the value of any one of those things only indicates that getting better at what you do is not a critical priority for you. Strip away ECs faults and you have something that doesn't have an alternative. If you're a game designer for games that have action/platform elements then you have no excuse for not studying Mario. EC isn't Mario, but it's something that's relevant to the development of all games. If you let its faults stand in the way of you absorbing its strengths, you're doing yourself and the fans of your games a disservice.
I think maybe what ECs biggest weakness is - that I just realized now - is that it's a game dev theory show retro-fitted to be a consumer education about-game-dev-theory show, so that it can find an audience, and so that it can hand-wave its misunderstandings about game dev when it might have them, and instead say, "hey, we're a show for consumers, not developers." If they focused on their strengths, they'd have to defend themselves a lot more, but the resulting discussion would be a lot more on topic.
You read arbitrary forum threads, right EC?
