Designeritis

Interesting Terra Nova discussion on “designeritis.”

Update 8/18/2008: I’m on a completist kick, so I’m posting my comment from this thread.

—–

I’m responding (late) to Greg’s call for a humanities take on all this. This may be incredibly dull… take it as you will.

Literary criticism lost most concern for the artist’s emotional experience after Romanticism: you have T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where he says the poet has in poetry only that “which is only a medium and not a personality.” Eliot compares poetry to a science, insists that it be approached somewhat dispassionately, and places on the poet the responsibility for understanding the ins and outs of this science to the best of his (or her, though I doubt Eliot would be gender-neutral here) ability.

So, from this point of view, designeritis is not only inevitable but a requirement for good art. The poet is fundamentally different from an ordinary reader — has to be, if the poetry’s to be any good.

Some time after Eliot, we get into the vicinity of Barthes’ “Death of the Author,” and the question of the writer/artist/designer’s inner experience is decreed irrelevant. From this point of view, text doesn’t mean anything when it’s created, only when it’s interpreted.

Which is, I think, a good place to bring games back in, because the idea that designeritis is even a concern, that a designer might need to experience the fun of play, is predicated on the idea that being a player — and not only a player, but a player experiencing a “magic” outside of self-consciousness — is creatively important. It’s a perspective that places weight on emotion, and it places importance on play as necessary to make the game “real.”

I think it’s entirely debatable whether designeritis is desirable or not; if it shapes up like the debate Eliot was responding to, then questions of populism and sophistication will inevitably pop up. Avoiding designeritis, from a populist POV, is a sacrifice that needs to be made for the good of the players; from a sophisticate’s point of view, it’s a dumbing-down of the art.

Regardless of whether you think Spielberg is a good director or not, his work is for the most part aggressively populist: he wants his symbology and his mechanics to be recognizable and emotionally resonant to Joe Non-critic. His work is, for better or for worse, fundamentally directed against portraying “designeritis.” In other words, we can take Spielberg’s, or the designer’s, own experience out of the equation to some extent, and place the question on the games: as others have asked, does designeritis affect games, and how?

Or, to maybe put it in a more entertaining way: would you rather play “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or “8 1/2″? And, given the current economics of virtual worlds, what are the odds of “8 1/2″ getting produced?