Have you ever noticed that the true classics, like Civilization & Sim City, all seem to share a common thread?

Just sayin... :-)

It's certainly about game design, but ok...

We get it. You're an auteur. Ok.

However, great designers produce results.

Kavik Kang: American capitalism is the greatest thing ever because everyone is free to choose the trade they want and nothing stops them from thriving in it by being the best in providing goods and services that people want.

Also Kavik Kang: My failures is everyone else's fault, the system doesn't recognize my genius, I've done everything I can to break into the industry but everyone in it is an idiot and doesn't know what they're doing and out to get me so it's impossible so I give up, read my 430293402937 page blog, also my grandpa founded CIA or something. Wah wah wah fucking wah.

21 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

Have you ever noticed that the true classics, like Civilization & Sim City, all seem to share a common thread?

• Half-Life
• Doom
• Tie Fighter
• Street Fighter 2
• Starcraft
• Arkham Asylum
• Portal

All classics.  None of them under the guidance of a single overriding vision or even any involvement from Queen.

Can a single vision drive a game? Sure, look at Shigeru Miyamoto or David Braben or Hidetaka Miyazaki.

Is it essential? Clearly not.

Also... slightly ironic that you chose a song from a band where every member contributed songs, and their biggest hit features massive vocal harmonies.

The committee can generally only recreate past successes, and innovates at a snail's pace.

Doom was pretty much Romero as far as I know, and walking around hallways and shooting at things is a pretty straight forward thing to begin with.  The first FPS computer game was actually Magic Maze.  Half-Life is essentially the same thing.  Same as Starcraft... an RTS.  Dan Bunton pioneered these games, originally inspired by Avalon Hill games.  Had Danni lived, they'd be MUCH farther along that the slow pace of the committee has brought them so far.  He was very limited in what he could do by the technology of his day.

Street Fighter, again an evolution of the slow pace of the committee of fighting games.  Tie Fighter was a slightly improved version of Wing Commander, neither of which actually work at all from a space combat perspective but "gamers don't miss what they have never had", so you think they were really great.  I liked both of those games a lot, but the actual combat is terrible and "you won't get there from here".

You don't need a game designer to make a "typical FPS or RTS" or... any well-established existing genre.  Everyone involved knows what the game is already.  No designer or single vision is needed to remake Doom for the millionth time.

In my mind, anyway, "true classic" means the first of its kind that was a great game.  That is why I used the examples of Civilization and Sim City.  Neither are just another clone withing an existing genre.  The committee can do that, it can't do anything new.  This is decades old knowledge of my game industry, not something I am making up as I go.

14 hours ago, Hodgman said:

We get it. You're an auteur. Ok.

However, great designers produce results.

I have produced results, every time I've been given the chance.  I made the first mod for a commercial game ever made.  To this day, the player ratings in all sports games are based on my work.  I was one of the assistant designers of SFB during the design of the Captain's Edition.  I "rescued" Sinistar Unleashed by creating all 30 levels through 4 levels of difficulty in just 10 weeks so that they would have a game to ship by the deadline.  There never would have been a Sinistar Unleashed had I not been working there, I think anyone who worked there would agree with that.

Mikeman, you post was not worthy of a response other than pointing out that it is a gross misrepresentation, which should be obvious.

We really are somewhere between 50-100 years ahead of you when it comes to game and simulation design.  That shouldn't come as any big surprise.  You began reinventing the wheel just 35 years ago, we've been at this for centuries.  Your very young knowledge of simulation design leaves you thinking in terms of Candyland and Risk.  We are just a tiny bit beyond that, and Rube is the next generation beyond that.

I finished the work.  I arrived at the final answer to what 300 years of the design of complex simulations that run on simulated time had been leading too.  Any competent group of game designers would be interested in the "Holy Grail" of simulation design.  The fact that not a single person in your industry is interested in it says everything that needs to be said about you.

You are amatures who began reinventing the wheel just 35 years ago.  We've been at this for centuries.  Welcome back to reality.