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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.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-na...
> 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.
does creative imply good, though? that's the real question
Novel can be a double edged sword but useful implies good I believe.
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.
When a creative market reaches a scale where thousands or hundreds of thousands of amateurs can experiment with new designs, the number of outliers surpassing the quality of professional designs is significant.
The challenge is finding a high-throughput way to filter those amateur board games. We like to think the best games will rise to the top, but at scale this becomes a popularity contest.
Furthermore, the line between amateur and professional blurs quickly when the amateurs start selling their products. Once someone starts a Kickstarter or opens a store to sell their amateur board game, they are effectively professionals. They tend to start behaving as such.
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.
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.
A group of 20 year old musicians wrote a better song than professionally trained composer with 40 years of experience... once.
One, the measurement of novelty is bad: it's basically the measure of whether the game exhibits a novel mashup of mechanics according to the BoardGameGeek ontology of mechanics.
This is a terrible definition of novelty, as it ignores all of the other aspects of game design, both in gameplay (interesting systems, challenges, loops) and non-game play (fiction, setting, presentation, etc). Who measures novelty as "mashup of mechanics"?
Two, the measure of knowledge diversity is based on BGG reports of how many genres the designers have worked in. This is, again, not only questionable, but also leads to weird effects: imagine knocking Salman Rushdie, JRR Tolkien, or Umberto Eco for having low knowledge diversity because Amazon says they write books in only one or two genres!
But fine, even assuming that, the actual effects are not strong. Looking at the figures, the scatter plots are all over the place, and the trend lines fit poorly.
And finally, the main problem is: sure, if you compare hobbyists (who make what they want for fun) with professionals (who are making a product that needs to sell more than a small handful of copies), of course you're going to find that hobbyists are more free to experiment with wild permutations of mechanics. But in doing so, they conflate personal ability with situational constraints. What about professional designers if they were able to work without commercial constraints, like hobbyists?
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.
I have a friend who will love to hear this. He is an engineer who spent the last six years of his spare time (together with his family) developing an ambitious board game[1]. It started as an after-school project to do with his son... then it snowballed into something big... as he started hiring sculptors, designers, illustrators... outsourced testing to board game clubs... and now he's about to face D-Day... A launc…
I could use an RNG to slam together a bunch of rules and I can pretty much guarantee novelty. There, I did it. I "beat" a professional designer. Is the game worth playing?
Professional designers can't afford failure, so they make "safe" designs that are likely to work. This isn't a result about "knowledge diversity", it's a result about incentives.