{"id":989,"date":"2008-07-07T14:55:53","date_gmt":"2008-07-07T18:55:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/07\/07\/quote-misquote-cite\/"},"modified":"2008-07-07T14:55:53","modified_gmt":"2008-07-07T18:55:53","slug":"quote-misquote-cite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/07\/07\/quote-misquote-cite\/","title":{"rendered":"Quote? Misquote? Cite?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The best thing about the internet is that hyperlinking lets you direct readers to your sources.<\/p>\n

The worst thing about the internet is that nobody bothers pointing out their print sources.<\/p>\n

This came to mind when I finally got around to reading Chris Bateman’s critique of the Sid Meier bromide<\/a> that a game is “a series of interesting choices.”<\/p>\n

Bateman’s essay itself is fine. Many games we play involve few choices or decisions, but we still call them games. I doubt that Meier’s little epigram has had that much of an impact on game developers, or else we would have not seen the explosion of casual games that use time as the primary mechanic, and not decision trees. Bateman is certainly not the first to point out that the Meier quote is inadequate, so he won’t be the last, and people will keep using the Meier quotation for decades to come because:<\/p>\n

a) It is short.
\nb) It is to the point.
\nc) It means something to the reader.<\/p>\n

But the post sparks the researcher in me, because he refers to the quotation as a “misquote”. Then, in the comments, one reader<\/a> says that Bateman gets it wrong because the phrase is “meaningful choices”; still inadequate for describing Snake and Ladders, but better for other games.<\/p>\n

Bateman never says what his version is a misquote of, though he suspects that the original had “good game” in it as a qualifier. To his credit, he wants a proper attribution. And the commenter never gives a source for his version. Both versions, by the way are listed in the Google.<\/p>\n

So, I decided to do my own detective work to track down this quotation. Where does it come from?<\/p>\n

Most sources cite Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris’s Game Architecture and Design<\/a>\"\"<\/em>. And they accept the “interesting choices” version.<\/p>\n

It’s likely older than that, since in July 1997, Usenet poster Darren Reid prints the full quotation as: “A good game is a series of interesting decisions. The decisions must be both frequent and meaningful.”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Another version has the quotation as a “great game”<\/strong><\/em> being “a series of interesting and meaningful choices made by the player in pursuit of a clear and compelling goal”. <\/strong><\/em> This version is tracked back to a Serious Game listserv post made by Noah Falstein in 2006, once again with no clear citation.<\/p>\n

Even if this is the proper version, without a proper source it’s not clear when, where or in what context Meier made this statement.<\/p>\n

There is always the possibility of multiple versions of the saying. Meier has been interviewed over and over again so the same thought has probably been expressed in many different ways. Given how long this quotation has been around, the observation is either original to a print interview or to an audience at a developers’ conference.<\/p>\n

So let’s crack this nut. First person to track down, and post in the comments, the original quotation, with the correct context and source will win my gratitude and save gaming researchers a lot of time citing other secondary source guesses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The best thing about the internet is that hyperlinking lets you direct readers to your sources. The worst thing about the internet is that nobody bothers pointing out their print sources. This came to mind when I finally got around to reading Chris Bateman’s critique of the Sid Meier bromide that a game is “a […]<\/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":[14,9,78],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-fX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989"}],"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=989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}