@Arkandel said in Identifying Major Issues:
How do you actually have a proper brainstorming conversation which stays on topic and which yields some interesting ideas that can maturate into actual systems?
We saw how this went when I tried it, so... yeah.
Some of the problems there, though, are things I did observe in that thread (and many others about game-building):
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The Wish List Dogpile: The personal thing <player> wants everywhere is how this all must be, the end. It doesn't matter if it doesn't fit the theme, system, or intended community environment, it doesn't matter if it's the absolute antithesis of the game someone is trying to create, it won't get dropped and becomes an enormous derail. People creating games are, yes, offering you a chance to roleplay out certain fantasy scenarios within the scope of the game world they're making. That latter part is relevant, because no place is an appropriate home for every idea or every fantasy scenario or wish list item and people need to get better about respecting that on the whole. There are different ways to attempt to enforce this -- world-building-wise (Arx is a good example of this) or policy-wise (many WoD games with restricted subject lists are a good example of this), and many places use a combination of both to a greater or lesser degree -- and instead of arguing about it, there's a point at which it's a case of suck it up and deal. I don't agree with the levels of contortions Arx is going through to avoid prostitute characters on grid in terms of justification in part because I think it's entirely within their rights to simply say: sure, it exists in the world <in this form that is very different from the modern real world>, but we don't want it on screen, and we don't want prostitute PCs. And I think people should leave it the hell alone at that point.
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The Jaded Chicken Little: Seen it all, nothing works, everything's doomed. Acts like they know what you're doing more than you do and flails on that front instead of addressing anything that resembles reality. Yeah, these people can frankly just fuck themselves; there's nothing useful you're going to learn from them other than 'avoid that person, they have less than zero objectivity, and cannot perceive basic solid facts'. All you can learn is that they don't learn, aren't interested in learning anything, and these people are fine to write off as a loss in terms of productive contribution.
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The Racers: Why isn't it done yet? @Ganymede nails it: good things take time to properly develop. It is not going to happen yesterday, or in a week, and rushing through results in a product that doesn't have much of a chance of surviving in the long term. If you don't care about that, game on. If you do, you still have the frustration of investing time with no rewards over a long timeline, and that in itself can become incredibly discouraging and frustrating.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. That's the easy part. Turning them into games is fucking hard work and there's almost nothing out there - other than on a purely technical level (that does exist, courtesy of many hard-working folk) - that can help make cool new games a reality.
This is less true than you might think. Pipe dreams are a dime a dozen. Cohesive ideas are not. Not even every cohesive idea is going to work, but ideas that aren't are already playing catch-up and planting the seeds for inevitable problems down the line. Maybe some people have means and ideas for handling those, but most don't, because the 'make it cohesive' step is entirely ignored and as a result, the problems that come from internally inconsistent themes/settings/systems are not something they're necessarily preparing for or aware are coming; this leaves them ill-prepared on a variety of fronts when it comes to handling the matter in a productive or efficient way.
Everything needs to work together: themes, settings, policy, code. This isn't just work, it's an extraordinary amount of planning and intentional design before a single word of IC/OOC support data or line of code is written.
People have long made a habit of approaching games as either the grudgewank described various places around the forum, or as the equivalent of the old Judy Garland/Andy Rooney musicals: "Hey guys, let's put on a show in the barn to save Uncle Tommy's farm! The whole town will come!" There's a reason that approach is charming in feel-good Hallmark Channel fiction, but it's grossly divorced from reality, as any actual theater geek can tell you. Even high school theater on a shoestring budget has more planning and development than that.