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Missing the 'Whole' Point in Game Development
An Anonymous Reader wrote to tell us about Walter Kim of the Ludonauts. He has an interesting argument about game design: "many videogame developers, particularly the Western ones, approach their craft with far too much of a hard-headed pragmatism, a nuts and bolts mentality about development that has, consciously or unconsciously, extended itself to design. What you end up with are a bunch of games that, while they may exhibit a great deal of cleverness on the level of individual level design, are stitched together with about as much finesse as duct tape."
These are the kinds of threads I like to spend my mod points on, but I'll bite the bullet and respond.
While there are a lot of good items to digest in the article, what we have here is a commentary on filmmakers who think about game design in terms of filmmaking. But game design is NOT filmmaking, no matter how much people these days like to equate the two.
I can think of a hundred counterexamples to 'there's no reminder, nothing refreshes who these characters are' and I am sure you can too. Ico springs to mind.
The problem is that STORY and GAME tend to be very discrete elements, where in a movie STORY and MOVIE are one and the same and this is where that expectation comes from. Level designs that ignore story (as discussed in the article) or story that obfuscates (or simply makes unimportant) the game elements (see Xenosaga and many other RPGs), is simply bad design and while it may be a State-of-the-Medium issue, I believe as games get more and more into the cultural forefront, we will see better and better designs where STORY and GAME are one in a way that filmmakers simply don't comprehend right now.
That's just my optimistic opinion though.