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Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

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Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#4
post #2

> Overall, HHS teams are more likely than professional teams to create truly creative game designs. That's a pretty bold statement to make in the highlights in my opinion.

This matches my expectation, it's just that I'd expect the household-invented games to be novel/creative and bad on average.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#7
This kind of thing has been shown in all sorts of creative endeavour. But it ignores consistency, which is the main mark of professionalism.

Yeah, if you disregard all rules and norms sometimes you come up with something AMAZING that no-one following the rules could ever conceive of.

But most of the the time it's just crap.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#8

This kind of thing has been shown in all sorts of creative endeavour. But it ignores consistency, which is the main mark of professionalism. Yeah, if you disregard all rules and norms sometimes you come up with something AMAZING that no-one following the rules could ever conceive of. But most of the the time it's just crap.

That's why it's so fun to go to things like band competitions. Everybody plays about four songs. You see so much variety there. I guess it doesn't suit those people who just listen to the radio. Same about random small cafes or bars with live music.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#9
Sometimes I think researchers do not understand second-order effects of their pet theories.

The societal/market result of stuff like this will inevitably be something like "Let's crowdsource more of these creative activities, so we can drive down the already rock-bottom compensation rates of the few jobs that cannot be automated - this research says we're not going to lose anything on the quality side anyway". In the (laudable) quest to make amateurs respectable, they might well end up stripping even professionals of what little respectability they had accrued.

It's likely that democratization of creativity is a fundamentally unstoppable force in itself (like we've seen in photography, music, video etc); there is no need to hasten its rise though.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#10
This is not exclusive to board game design. When I work on a personal project, I can be really creative and produce some good looking applications. However, as a professional developer working for someone else, I have to follow some guidelines that can result in boring, generic-looking stuff. This boring, generic-looking stuff allows me to consistently make a decent living, though.
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