Blogs of the Round Table: The Product of a Great and Terrible Designer

In January, Nerje from Ludic Thoughts wrote about bringing the relentless logic of Richard Dawkins to a game he titled Super God Delusion 64.

SGD64 challenges a player to question all manner of faiths. It provides a small handful of papercut-inconveniences as a push to discover a deeper world in the game of internal consistency and rational thinking. The core assumption of the game is that players might be lead by the game to attempt to realize that the logic of the game is based on sound empirical thinking that might equally apply to the real world.

There is some inherent irony in attempting to present an argument for a godless, empirical universe in the form of a game. The presence of a designer or designers in a game's sculpted world is often quite apparent. To some extent I'm fascinated by the conundrum of trying to suggest a world without a designer through a designed virtual world. One possibility would be to posit some sort of very procedural world, but such a beast is perhaps beyond the scope of current technology.

I've also been thinking quite a bit about the designer's voice in a game. Various conversations lately have been about the use of an unreliable narrator in a game and the extent to which a game can be "not fun" and still played. There have been people wondering how well a game might be received if it were designed particularly to be challenging in the literary sense; many books with high regard are hard to read, but benefit the reader in their own ways and ...