One fact that has slowly dawned on me over the last few months is how many of the principles that I think apply to good game design are also principles of agile development.
For example, agile development mandates that developers of software not speak of “the user” when talking about the person who will eventually use the software. You have to break out your user into different groups. If you’re building blogging software, some of your users might be the poster, the regular reader, the sometime-reader, the searcher, the RSS-only user, the designer of the templates, etc. This allows you to focus on user stories that are non-generic. If you speak of “the user” all you can really say is “the user uses our software and it works.” But if you’re more specific you can say “the guy who only uses RSS probably wants all the formatting of the original post to show up in his reader.”
Similarly, in game design, you want to break out your players into different types, and not just design for “the player”. Do you have something for the explorer? The creator? The warrior?
Anyway, I just thought it was a neat parallel. To be sure, there’s more parallels out there. Maybe I’ll list some more in the future.
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I’ve been thinking on this matter quite a bit in recent months.
Another interesting parrallel is that in talking about “user narratives” in regards to different play focuses you’re essentially threating a dynamic interactive narrative, if only in conceptual framing.
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