For The Love of It?

The commercial game designers I worked with while I was employed as a writer for the N64 game Aidyn Chronicles (released this week! Allah be praised!) had at least a few virtues that there's simply no reason for the amateur IF designer to cultivate. They shared their ideas. They were capable of responding creatively to criticism. They worked - hard - to meet most of their deadlines, even when self-imposed. They tested all their work for bugs. (!) And perhaps most importantly, they got genuine pleasure from the dynamics of collaboration - from sitting in a circle over drinks or food listening to somebody else's suggestions and thinking "Wow, I never thought of that!"

All this having been said, it is nonetheless true that the creation of good old Aidyn was subject to certain constraints of the sort that Wayne Booth might have rankled at. It was made fairly clear to everyone from early on in the project that certain features of the game were simply non-negotiable from the get-go. Because our intended audience was the huge group of American consumers familiar with the so-called "fantasy" genre in games and literature, the game simply had to have a white, adolescent male hero, a dragon, an aging wizard, as least one or two cuddly minor races. Given these constraints, I think it has to be said that the only reason Aidyn didn't turn out to be a pointlessly derivative, cliché-ridden turkey was because we were blessed with a lead designer who'd been a passionate lover of the genre since before Gary Gygax was a household name and Tolkien was on every second literate teenager's bedside table. The process of creation often, in fact, seemed to come down to little more that waiting for Chris to come up with a clever, fresh new spin on a tired old genre and then the rest of just going along for the ride.

The values of amateurism, then, I guess, are at least in the area of game design more or less inversely proportionate to the benefits of division of labor. This is maybe a more ambivalent view that Wayne Booths, but for the hermits and eccentrics and solitary geniuses of the IF community, it still seems like a fairly hefty compliment.

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