{"id":754,"date":"2007-09-03T15:25:54","date_gmt":"2007-09-03T19:25:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/09\/03\/the-seven-starting-questions\/"},"modified":"2007-12-06T15:02:33","modified_gmt":"2007-12-06T19:02:33","slug":"the-seven-starting-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/09\/03\/the-seven-starting-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"The Seven Starting Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From <a href=\"http:\/\/gamesetwatch.com\">Game, Set, Watch<\/a> I see that Warren Spector has a <a href=\"http:\/\/junctionpoint.wordpress.com\">design blog now.<\/a> His latest post has the Seven Questions that, in his mind, can help a designer decide whether or not to even bother with the next step.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>1. What are we trying to do? What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the core idea?<br \/>\n2. What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the potential? Why do this game over all the others we could do?<br \/>\n3. What are the development challenges? Really hard stuff is fine \u00e2\u20ac\u201d impossible or unfundable? Not so good\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<br \/>\n4. Has anyone done this before? If so, what can we learn from them? If not, what does that tell us?<br \/>\n5. How well-suited to games is the idea? There are some things we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re just not good at and shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even attempt. A love story, for example!<br \/>\n6. What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the player fantasy and does that lead to good player goals? If the fantasy and the goals aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t there, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a bad idea.<br \/>\n7. What does the player do? What are the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153verbs\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of the game?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The first and seventh questions are, to my mind, the real starting points of game design. Most &#8220;game ideas&#8221; that you encounter on the worldwide idea factory of the Internet are barely answers to number 1. They almost never answer number 7. But these are what games are &#8211; core concepts and actions.<\/p>\n<p>Are games bad at love stories? Wasn&#8217;t <em>Shadow of the Colossus<\/em> a love story in which you spent all your time jumping around?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Game, Set, Watch I see that Warren Spector has a design blog now. His latest post has the Seven Questions that, in his mind, can help a designer decide whether or not to even bother with the next step. 1. What are we trying to do? What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the core idea? 2. What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the potential? [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-ca","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}