Expression

My first 'end' for games is (hopefully) the most egoist of them all. Not in the derogatory sense, just in the sense that it had mostly to do with me and what I want and need. It is simply the fulfill my need to express myself.

Games are a media, and by that I mean only that it can communicate ideas, regardless of any other capabilities it may have. I'm pretty terrible at any other conventional mode of communication. I can't play an instrument, my drawing never really makes it past the crappy sketch stage, and my writing is mediocre. Note that I don't actually give a shit, I will continue sketching or scribbling and such, but I know that I'd like to produce something really nice and I dunno, good.

So yeah, that's one goal I have for my games, but I have others that are not so self-centered.

approaching games

Sorry about the absence from blogging but who would have thought that having philosophy as major would mean so much reading and writing? Anyways...

I've been thinking about my approach to games (go figure) and I find that I need to clarify my thinking by putting some words down in text, and I intend to subject the Internet with my rambling.

First off, games are means to some end, they are not ends themselves. A game for the sake of itself is silly. You can have a basic end i.e. fun for a game but it is still not for itself. Now, like Aristotle said you can't really reason about ends, only about means.[in Nicomachean Ethics] Strictly speaking, we can choose any end that we want, or that makes sense to us, but of course some ends are better than others...

Having a well defined end makes determining the means much easier. You can tell from the game design blogs out there that those with strong, robust theories and interesting thoughts are those with a firm idea of they want to do. For Perko, one of his ends is creating robust social simulations, for Corvus its story creation. etc... (I know those are really huge glosses but bear with me) One of my problems I've noticed is that I don't have any well defined ends with regards to games. Some vague ideas about creating an "experience" and maybe "weirding people out" but those are so general as to be worthless (or nearly so).

I have been working on this though. Stay tuned...