Fullerton summed up some of the major points in this weeks chapter fairly well in her conclusion, writing “Understanding your role in a team and having the interpersonal skills to work within a team structure are as important as any of the design skills I have discussed to this point Game development is a collaborative art, and game teams, large or small, are involved in complex and innovative work that requires every bit of social skill you can muster” (pg 412). This is crucial to many lines of work and is particularly important in game design. Games are a very artistic and technologically advanced form of entertainment, so it is no surprise that it takes a well structured team to create the games we know and love.
As games develop and become larger franchises led by several teams of developers and publishers, we see how these different groups can sometimes have conflict on the larger stage. For instance, the entire ordeal with the Sonic movie showed how publishers trying to sell a game franchise in a certain way can have immense conflict with the original designer’s intent. We have also seen games not make it to being finished or having a well deserved sequel, not because of bad quality fo the game but because of the team structures within companies falling apart (for me this includes Fable IV and the full version of PT, but i am sure all os us have games in mind that deserve more than what they got because of inside company issues). This is one of the many examples of a skill that goes unnoticed when it is working well (the skill being teamwork) and then standing out like a sore thumb when it is not done well. This makes it so the importance of teamwork in the creation of games (or anything else on a large scale really) can be severely underestimated in terms of its importance.
I would also like to conclude this blog post by mentioning how excited I am for all of the memes in the discord server as we retreat to it due to the pandemic, please do not hold back (but also don’t be a dumb edgelord please, wholesome memes are so much better). At what point are we in a Black Mirror episode?
Works Cited:
Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, 4th Edition. 2019.
I find it interesting that you bring up conflict within development, and I do agree that Sonic is a great example of conflict. The movie had discourse in idea and vision between the movie developers and the original game designer. Something I feel is important is that in a sense, the intended audience or consumers are also part of the development team in spirit, as it is them that the product is being designed for. The Sonic movie is also a great example of this, as it was the push back from the audience that prompted change in movie direction, it was their input that garnered attention.
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