Would A Wiki Help Effective Game Design?

"We discussed the fact that most of the failures in the online space have failed for reasons that were all well-known 10 years ago," says Mike Steele, vp at Calabasas, Ca.-based Emergent Game Technologies which makes tools for game design. "You can read all the game postmortems and see that the developers all repeated the mistakes others made simply because they weren't aware of them and what the solutions are."

Steele's work group decided that there was a need to build a body of knowledge to contain game design best practices.

"We're talking about information on everything from cryptology to real-time photorealistic rendering to artificial intelligence to databases -- all the big, hard problems addressed in one small space."

The solution is expected to be a "wiki," a Web site that allows developers to add their best practices and then make them available to all other developers. "This became a Project Horseshoe action item," says Steele, "and, in fact, the wiki is scheduled to be posted very shortly -- perhaps as early as January 1." The Web address will be announced on the "Project Horseshoe" Web site.

-- What's Stopping Effective Game Design?

I love wikis (even those that spurn holiday cheer) ... I just started one to help write the new hyperfiction I'm working on. We've tossed the idea around work sometimes, but it always devolves into a kind of issue management rather than articles on concepts or ideas.

So yeah, I'd think a universal game dev wiki would be interesting. Chaotic, I'm sure, but that's part of what makes wikis great.


tagged: game, gaming