Agile Darius
This is in response to Darius’s post on Agile development. I post it on my blog because, well, Darius only allows people with Blogger accounts to post comments to his blog and I refuse to get a Blogger account. I don’t know why, I just do.
Anyway, Darius talks about how the Agile process used in the book Getting Real doesn’t work for game development. Here’s why he says Getting Real works for web apps:
Getting Real works for webapps, because it’s about delivering a limited feature set, launching early, fixing bugs as you go, and adding or subtracting features as users demand them. Which is kind of useless if a lot of your players have already finished your game by the time the first major update comes around.
My response would be that “users” aren’t always end customers, though in the case of the book I’m sure that’s true. The system of early “launch,” fixing bugs as you go, and subtracting features is really just a more formalized version of rapid prototyping in my mind, something I know Darius likes and I’m firmly behind as well. Instead of thinking of deployment as deployment to the outside world, you can think of deployment as a locked build to your testers. Programmers develop requested features quickly and get it to the testers, who are then able to actually work with said features and decide if those features work in the grand concept of the game and request that they be changed or removed as necessary.
That’s just the way I see it though.
I will say that I think he’s right about how games are different from web apps and I’d like to add a little thought of my own to it. Although it’s not the central point of his post (in my mind, I could be wrong) I have a feeling most of the responses on his blog are going to focus on it. Anyway, Darius says: “I play a game. I beat it. I’m done, and I’ll probably never play that game ever again, unless it’s my favorite game in the universe, or it has infinite replayability.”
I personally want to emphasize that I think this is how we should think about games. I’ve heard way too many people (in academic papers and books about interactive story and narrative) assert that truly interactive works must be played through multiple times to be appreciated, and I think that’s ludicrous. As I stated in my thesis, an interactive work should be able to be appreciated the first time, as if it is the only time it will be played. The fun should come from (either implied or actual) agency in the work, not from the exploration of multiple branches during multiple times through.
I think that the pure enjoyment of agency as a form of fun on it’s own is something that most interactive story does terribly (and I haven’t seen that many people working on it that actually recognize this as the actual problem), and I think it is something that more “classic” games (meaning non-story based games) do very well.
I need to say more on this, though in a sense I already have. What I really need to do is pull out the most important parts of my thesis and write a much short document for people to read. A statement of purpose if you will. 5 pages tops, as opposed to the 140 that is my thesis. What can I say, I’m just long winded.
By the way, I’ve been extremely busy over the past few weeks preparing my room for a new tenant. As such, updating anything (let alone my blog) has been an uphill battle. Once things settle down, I will get around to updating.
