where are the Game Designer's Journals now?

[Paul Czege]

Hey,

This morning I found myself browsing some old threads on Gaming Outpost and had a strange thought: the heyday of the Game Designer's Journal has come and gone. And I'm left wondering why that is? Has the Internet RPG culture changed in some way since Wick wrote an online journal about the creation of Orkworld? Have we collectively learned something that undermined the significance of the Game Designer's Journal? Is Sergio's Mendes Pinto column the last of the species? Weren't there at least six of these columns running across Gaming Outpost and RPG.net back in early 2001?

Personally, when I realized that Sean Jaffe's Last Exodus GDJ was a shell game, not an ongoing two-way communication with the game community during a fluid design effort but actually just incremental marketing of a fairly well finalized design, I lost interest. You can't trust an author to tell you how he does what he does. If the design wasn't fluid, there wasn't anything for me to learn from reading the columns.

But it's ridiculous to conjecture that the lack of GDJ columns today arises from everyone having had the same reaction to them as I did. Are they just too much work for the payoff? If the goal was to create buzz about a game in anticipation of reporting such fan interest to secure a contract with a distributor, doesn't that need still exist? Were the columns just so non-representative of the actual design process that they failed to hold the interest of the audience? I can't figure out why no one is doing these columns anymore.

Paul

[Jack Spencer Jr]

This type of article stopped because the novelty of such a beast has worn off. It was a cute marketing ploy for a little while, but then it got overused and then it wasn't cute or unique anymore. Besides, it's tougher than it looks. Every word you write About designing your game is a word not going into the game itself. It takes discipline to stick with either project.

[GreatWolf]

As someone who wrote a GDJ, I'd basically agree with Jack.

Do I regret writing a GDJ?  No.  If nothing else, it helped me sharpen my thoughts on my design, and I garnered the support of Scarlet Jester through the GDJ.  As I wrote, I worked through issues that are now beginning to settle into the actual manuscript of Alyria.  (Or at least my attack on the manuscript.  It's slow going right now.)

However, if you're trying to squeeze your game design and writing efforts around a real-world job, every word that goes into a GDJ doesn't go into your game.  That's a rough trade-off to make.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf