by Chris Billowsin Hobby Heedings, Mental Mischief, Playstates Theory0 commentstags: Components of Human Nature, Comprehensive Analysis, Defining Life
I’ve made a resolution to start learning how to code. I’m only a few hours into it and must say it is enjoyable. There is something magical about making things work on the screen based on your code. Learning how to code is definately a skill that will take time to develop. I’d never say that I have a natural talent to code though I find some of the concepts fascinating which creates enthusiasm and drive to learn more. This got me thinking about where talent is different from skill and where skill relates to art and engineering. With me being the kind of person who loves working with conceptual models, I’ve create a speculative Talent-to-Culture model to illustrate how skills, talent, art, and culture all are related: Talent derives from natural ability or drive, and Talent may lead to skill, and Skill requires tool usage, and Tool usage comes from engineering, and Engineering comes from knowledge or science, and Knowledge comes from concepts, and Concepts comes from culture, and Culture comes from society This model can be inverted, but because I’m focusing on skill development for myself, I started at the skill (top) end of the model. […]
by Chris Billowsin Playstates Theory0 commentstags: Change of Mind, Comprehensive Analysis, Playstates
After posting about Playstates, a commentator on Twitter said that he wanted to see more discussion about how Playstates relates to core concepts like Interactivity, Narrative, etc. I had intentionally left out those concepts because I wanted to stay away from a dead-end debate. Many game designers and developers have argued that Games and Video Games in particular have a unique monopoly with those concepts. I admit that I thought so as well but now I see it in a new way after writing this article. The problem I think is that we have assigned those concepts to Games and Video Games because that is where they are most overtly demonstrated. When we think Game, we automatically think about how to play its rules, how we interact with it, how the rules affects our agency, and the underlying mechanics that makes the Game run. The push by some Video Game designers to see Narratives as being critical to a Game is a relatively recent occurrence. But similarly to how definitions can be broad but not deep enough, I think the same limitation has occurred here. We have captured the obvious, low-hanging fruit. While an arcade game has easy to see […]
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