I am finishing an article on matching tile games, and the question of imitation and originality keeps coming up. I’ve often heard the idea of “the bad artist imitating, the good artist stealing” attributed to Picasso, but it is actually from T.S. Eliot in a 1922 essay:
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
Spot on for game design: The good designer welds his or her theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad designer throws it into something which has no cohesion.
No professional designer seems to have enough time to play enough games to be able to steal like that. They all moan about the fact that they don’t have anytime to play games anymore.
At the UK Develop conference earlier this year there was a design panel where each panelist brought an item that represented what they though was wrong in gaming today, and put forward the case for having it never appear in a game ever again.
A panelist bought-in a cardboard box to represent stealth (Metal Gear Solid) because he thought stealth was something that should never be seen again. Peter Molyneux who was also on that panel had no idea what the connection between stealth and the box was! Fable also had one of the worst stealth sections of any game. So these designers might be considered masters today, but they don’t have the time or experience to steal effectively. That then begs the question as to wither these so called master designers are really masters at all and what direction the industry is heading in if nobody can iterate on previous designs effectively.
Interesting. Molyneux head is shiny because it’s been up his own a***. I bet he doesn’t even play games he just talks about them.
Well that’s what I think.
Nice writing, but I think a false worry and strange comparison. Game designing is different, it’s less individual, less about meaning…