I started out with about a dozen unfinished attempts and one complete small game before doing my first large game (and I mean "large" - 100+ quests, hundreds of areas, hundreds of NPCs with sometimes extremely complex dialogue trees, and so on). You know what I thought after having completed that last project? I wished I had done more theorycrafting. I agree that just starting to walk down the road is better than forever staying home looking at maps because then at least you'll eventually end up somewhere, but if the journey is going to take years (as you noted yourself), maybe it's not actually a bad idea to make sure you know where exactly you want to go and how you're going to reach that place. Though I guess that depends on how important it is to you to reach a specific destination...
The only insertion I have to say to this is: Sometimes where you set out to go is not really where you wanted to be. Starting down the road is important in that regard. As humans, we frequently think of goals of where we want to be and what we want to be doing and reaching those goals frequently doesn't give us the satisfaction or fulfillment that we had envisioned (or even the result!).
It's important to recognize that a person can learn any and everything they want, but if they never do anything with that knowledge, then it is a moot point to obtain it.
Using my entire life as that example, I can tell you that the things I wanted to be as a child are not the things that would've ever fulfilled me as an adult. Likewise, the games I wanted to make all along the way would never have been the one that I'm making right now, which I am proud of.
Theorycrafting is useful knowledge to have, but it can be obtained in a variety of ways. The best of which (in my opinion) is through personal experience. If learned in this way, it resonates with us better and we internalize it much easier. Reading about it through a book isn't as useful as attempting to enact it yourself or even circumvent it.
After all, it's hard to replicate the construction of a clock if you don't take it apart yourself.
Indeed, your attitude is hard to miss. Of course, this requires the assumption that you're in a position to teach other people something, i.e. that your ideas are somehow more valid than theirs.
I innately reject the ideas that "there are no wrong answers". To me, this always feels like a cop out. A way to say "I'm still right, even if you've proven I'm wrong".
Everyone has plenty to teach other people even if they don't think they do or want to do it. Even if my ideas are wrong, if you're smart enough, you'll learn something from it.
A smart person will realize when they've learned everything in the world. A wise person realizes that knowing everything in the world means they know absolutely nothing.
A person does not have to agree with me at all to learn something valuable from what I say. They need only put away their own biases and contempt from someone telling them that they disagree and are wrong in order to learn anything from it.
Learn or don't. Up to you.
Apart from being slightly mistaken, this view also has the problem that you won't ever be able to advance your own concepts by incorporating the ideas of others, since by your definition they cannot hold any merit.
The problem this line of thinking has is that you are assuming those ideas haven't already been considered. They haven't already been tried. Or dissected. Your assumption is that someone who holds a different viewpoint has never once considered the opposite viewpoint. Its an assumption born from personal ego rather than reality.
You've never once even inquired how I came to my conclusions or how I decided on the things I believe. Your thought process on it went no further than, "this person disagrees with me, so I must prove them wrong".
Meanwhile, all this time, I've been analyzing everything you've been saying to get a clearer picture of you as a person and make logical deductions about what has lead you to hold the opinions you hold and take the actions you've been taking.
This is probably why my forte in game design has more to do with player manipulation than anything else. I figure out who they are, why they do what they do, and then design game systems around that behavior.
Your assumption is that I can't learn anything from someone if I don't agree with them. Your assumption is that I dismiss someone else's opinion that I disagree with out-of-hand and out-of-context. My posts prove otherwise. Now, granted, this is how most people act. They shut out anything they don't want to hear because admitting someone else might be right is as much a sacrilege as admitting error in thought or action... But, you'll find such an assumption is dangerous to make. Especially when you run across people who aren't so concerned with being wrong and are more concerned with learning the best way to do things.
Put simply, if I express something holds no merit, it is for a few reasons:
1. The intent of what its purpose is, is not achieving the desired effect.
2. The design of something is antithetical to "fun" in any way, shape, or form.
3. Something is needlessly complicated, which means it has a lot of moving parts, and a lot of ways to fail.
4. It's poorly implemented with no thought behind why it was implement and is done strictly as "because it's cool and I once played a game that had this feature in it, and that game was fun, so having this automatically makes my game fun". Or, to put it bluntly... the dev thinks like EA executives. Steal ideas from other games and put them into their own game divorced from context and purpose in the hopes that by sheer osmosis, the system or feature will be fun for simply existing.
5. The system or feature just isn't going to be fun for the intended audience. Usually this is an issue of genre (like putting MMO systems into singleplayer games), but most often it's just that the dev has done no proper analysis of the game they're trying to create and what they want their players to be doing.
I, personally, don't like many of the most popular design choices for RPG's. Minigames. Crafting. Puzzles. On-Screen Encounters. I'm not inherently against them, however. I know several ways in which they can work and to spectacular degree. These can be done well. The problem is that most really aren't, so I often recommend devs not include such systems.
A dev needs to be prepared to scrap any mechanic or system they ever implement because it isn't working as intended. If they can't bring themselves to do it... they have no business being a dev to begin with. A dev also needs to be prepared to put in as much work as is required in order to make something provide the experience the dev wants. That includes knowing the drawbacks to any system and working hard to mitigate those issues.
Most devs on these forums really aren't interested in putting forth the effort to study how their own preferred systems are terrible and how they could mitigate existing issues with them. Most of them are only interested in pushing their own agendas and defending their own work.
That's all up to you, of course, but you might be better off starting a YouTube channel for teaching.
I prefer text format. I also prefer to have lengthy conversations in which people can be directly and easily opposed with facts and information rather than in a format that is easily dismissed out-of-hand like YouTube.
Plus, I don't like to talk and really don't want to be associated with any sort of "fame" in any way possible. If I had my way, I'd go through life as the guy from the Twilight Zone episode "What You Need". If you haven't seen that episode, I suggest you go find it and watch it. That's the life I want to lead.
Personally, I disagree with you on so many points I don't think it makes sense to continue. For instance, why are video games supposed to require an audience by definition, but a book doesn't?
The difference in how they're consumed. With games, players find their own fun in them. The experience a dev crafts is often not the experience the players have. A player can hate the story of a game, but enjoy the mechanics and have a great time as a result. Or, vice versa. Or, the player can enjoy only the characters and not enjoy anything else, so they play for the character interactions. Or, the player can enjoy purely the gunplay of the game and nothing else about it, and still enjoy the game.
A book, on the other hand, is consumed quite differently. If a reader doesn't enjoy the characters, they aren't going to enjoy the book. If they don't enjoy the story, they aren't going to enjoy the book. Etcetera. Most forms of artistic expression are very "all or nothing". Books are no exception.
Likewise, there is a difference in creation. A person paints because they have a drive express themselves. They aren't usually doing it for an audience. Writers are the same. Musicians too. Sure, some want to be famous, but most of that is a simply from a drive to be understood... or just to be rich.
Game devs, however, make games because they want people to play the game and praise it. No matter what game devs you see that will tell you, "I'm making a game for me", they're lying to you and to themselves. We all make games because we want to create an experience that most of the world enjoys and will talk about and will create walkthroughs for. We do it for personal validation. Most other creatives aren't doing their craft for validation, they're doing it because it's the best and easiest ways for them to communicate with the world.
But this is basically what you've been doing for most of the thread.
Actually, it's what everyone else has been doing in the thread as a means to dismiss my point of view rather than trying to refute it. There hasn't even been any sort of real discussion on the points I've raised about why it's better to not use a stat point system for a binary check. There were a couple half-hearted attempts at it, but once I refuted them, the discussion stopped and quickly turned over to whether or not D&D was an MMO or not.
People arguing semantics rather than the points, because they so desperately want to be right. That, and they think that proving one small thing right means it invalidates everything else a person says. It's rather naive.
"Perfection is the enemy of Greatness," as they sometimes say.
