When you design by consensus, you end up with this. When a single person is responsible for most of the major decisions on a project, the project will either spectacularly fail or will be amazing, depending on the genius of the person. But when you take the same genius, and force him to change his concept to bring in elements of more traditional people, you will tend to create a normal product.
Designing by consensus will always lead to an average product. The only way to create a blow-out success is if a single person handles the design part of things.
No major artwork was created by a comittee. None of the great books were written by a newsroom team. Engineering has to go the same way. Let people use their imaginations without being constrained by the opinions of tens of other people.
Actually, William "The Princess Bride" Goldman argues in his famous book about screenwriting (Adventures in the Screen Trade) that all movies are created by committee. He lists a bunch of people that need to do their jobs correctly in order to make a movie any good, starting (obviously) with the screenwriter and the director but also including: The cinematographer, the casting director, the designers and costumers, the film editor, and the composer. To say nothing of the producers, who need to come up with sufficient money or the film doesn't get made.
Goldman makes this point in the course of lampooning the "auteur" theory of criticism, in which entire films are attributed to the genius of one person -- usually the director. It's because of those auteur theorists that we tend to speak of "Hitchcock's" North by Northwest, ignoring the fact that a lot of that film's genius was contributed by Cary Grant, to say nothing of Bernard Herrmann.
A great example is Star Wars, which as we all know sprang from the brow of George Lucas. Except, of course, for the parts that were actually created by Ben Burtt (sound designer), John Dykstra (FX supervisor), Rick Baker (makeup artist), Ralph McQuarrie (production illustrator), John Williams (composer), and Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch and Marcia Lucas (film editors). And that's just scratching the surface.
A game on the scale of Spore is also, inevitably, created by committee. The question is whether you can keep the committee on the same page. It sounds like Spore's team had some struggles, which had to be mediated, and which were ultimately resolved in a way that isn't quite to my taste. Which is not to say that the enterprise is a failure. It's sold a lot of copies, and no doubt many people are pleased with it. I played with the creature creator, and it was very cute.
I upvoted the comment, and definitively agree in general, but of course there's no rule without its exceptions. Half-life for example was very much designed by comittee, and we all know how that went ;)
Mahito Yokota originally wrote the soundtrack as an homage to Mario 64: goofy and kid-friendly. Kondo told him to scrap it: he said that if you aimed for kids, you'd get a worse product than if you aimed for something with a more timeless feel. So he changed the music to a full orchestra, and the result was the brilliant soundtrack to Galaxy, which is incidentally absolutely worth owning.
pg said almost the same exact thing about arc's design philosophy:
"Good design is timeless, and if you want something timeless you can't pander to the limitations of some hypothetical 'average' user. It's too vague a target. It's also a moving target: the average user might not be as stupid as you think."
http://www.paulgraham.com/design.html
The reason I was disappointed with Spore wasn't because it was fun at the expense of being scientifically inaccurate... it's because it wasn't all that fun period.
I enjoyed most of the Sim games because they give you a complex system with rules where every little decision has some slight impact on the way the game turns out. Part of winning is learning the rules to the system and strategizing (whether or not that system really reflect the reality of what it is ostensibly a simulation of).
There are too many things in Spore that don't make any difference in the gameplay. Most of the influence from one stage to the next is purely aesthetic or otherwise very limited. And everything except the Space stage was pretty simplistic with few opportunities for strategy.
Yeah. I mean, I love The Sims 2. Still have it installed: it was one of the few games, other than Civ2 and Pharoah and Lords of the Realm that I moved over. And I love it because it's so incredibly detailed. So intricate. Everything combines into everything else. And Spore PROMISED that. I was expecting to have to balance different types of flora to maintain the ecological balance on my planets. At the very least, I was expecting some very intricate classes. Because that's FUN. Always has been.
Spore was one-dimensional, start to finish. (Though I didn't play too far on the space stage: from there I'd lost interest.) There was no interaction. I wanted the first stage to be the simplest. I wanted rapid iteration of complexity. Something for everybody. I got none of that.
It's a shame, because the technology was so incredible. It just went into an awful game.
Yeah. I'm feeling the exact same way about my copy of Spore.
I bought Spore, even after seeing all the warnings about piracy, because I had such faith in Will Wright and Maxis. I thought that they would make my money worth it. Now? My list is down to Valve and Maxis. If The Sims 3 or Spore 2 comes out, I'm going to pirate it first to make sure it's worth my money. I'll buy it afterwards, but my trust is gone.
I have always intended on purchasing a copy, in spite of all the DRM stuff. I wanted to play it three days early though, and obtained a copy online. I was disappointed, but I still went out and bought the copy on the launch day, hoping to have the experience improve with online sharing.
Turns out that the creators, and sharing your creation, and then pimping your creation IS the entire game. Your meticulously designed creation which took 3 hours to make is evolutionarily no better than a 10 year old's cell with legs and googly eyes, with the only difference being how much time you have to "sell" it on the official forum to get any attention. It's an intelligent introvert's worst nightmare: your works will not be noticed amongst the hundreds of millions based on merit, but on how marketable it is and how much marketing resources is backing the creation.Your beautifully designed planet with semi-realistically balanced ecosystem performs absolutely no better than a randomly generated neighboring planet inhibited by "variations on the theme of vomit-green spheres."
As a new best selling game it's not bad, but I was looking for a "simulation" game. I did find a spectacular one though, so this year wasn't a complete loss : http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves
That and SimLife were pretty much scientifically based models of planets and biological systems. They were both quite difficult to play (you had to understand quite a lot) but very engaging. They definitely taught me a lot. But I don't know where you'd find them any longer.
This puts words and an explanation to the sinking feeling that I had earlier this year, as I compared the reviews of the release version of Spore to the Wil Wright demos and lectures of previous years. It turns out that the lectures were by the "science team", but the final game is more influenced by the "cute team".
I dunno. You could argue the same about the works of Shakespeare, Citizen Kane, The Big Lebowski, and on. Really, you could say that anything great is a time drain. (I'm about to start watching all of The Wire, which is a hundred-some hours long. But from what I've heard, it'll be worth it.)
I'd have preferred something great, and then decided not to play it if I wanted to spend my time more wisely. There's no excuse for what Spore became.
You absolutely can say those things about The Big Lebowski, The Watchmen, The Wire. It's not a slippery slope. If you're good at building stuff, you enjoy doing it, and it's sane to be scared of competing enjoyments --- especially when, like a game, they suck hours away at a time.
Yeah, but... I don't think it's good to say "It's a good thing it sucked, look at how much time we saved." That leads to people thinking it's good to suck.
I'm just saying, it's a silver lining. If someone comes out with some new totally hyped up MMORPG, I am going to be relieved if it sucks and terrified if it is the greatest thing since Trade Wars. I lost friends to EverQuest.
Spore isn't supposed to be a scientific simulation, it's a form of entertainment. Programmers tend to prefer their games to be strictly rule-based simulations, but that's not necessarily what the target audience want and it doesn't equate to good game design.
I'm not saying that Spore is perfect, just that it's very easy as a game developer to get carried away with stuff that you find cool, only to find there's no game there.
The irony is that Chris Hecker is pretty much the man who popularised (and evangelised) the use of simulated physics in games. Virtually all papers on inverse-kinematics in games reference his essays.
I agree with your comment that Spore is an entertainment game, not a scientific simulation, and I definitely see why EA went with the "entertaining art" version of Spore.
the only problem is that Spore wasn't advertised to many of us that way. We got a beautifully decorated cake, but wholesome multi-grain was promised to the masses who have been starving for the past 5 years.
a summer spent playing with pattern language and cellular automata
if they had followed that route, the game would probably have been a lot more fun to play. games should really be
done in an exploratory way, since what comes out is a universe of ideas, closed over itself.
I have yet to test Spore, but I must admit that I am really a bit concerned about this. I suppose ultimately Spore is a product that will promote Creationism, and it targets kids.
Care to explain why Spore is a product that will promote Creationism?
There is simply no element of creationism in the game. All terminology and interface point to an (albeit inaccurate) model of "evolution". Guided evolution, panspermia, saltations, probably. Creationism, no.
On a tangent:
Spore has specified organized religion as a viable route to planetary domination, on the same effectiveness level as economic and military take-overs. Elements of conversion and religious assimilation also comes into play in the space stage, somewhat. But even if I replace the word "Creationism" with the word "religion", your "think of the children!" sentiment is still...naive at best. One could equally ineffectively argue that the game promotes ruthless economic colonization, militaristic violence, wasteful exploitation of resources, intentional extinction of entire species.....
Designing by consensus will always lead to an average product. The only way to create a blow-out success is if a single person handles the design part of things.
No major artwork was created by a comittee. None of the great books were written by a newsroom team. Engineering has to go the same way. Let people use their imaginations without being constrained by the opinions of tens of other people.