Suppose you go to see a movie and find yourself sitting next to Stephen Spielberg. Two hours later, when the movie has finished, what could you possibly say to him about it? His knowledge of movie-making is so much deeper than yours that he'll have seen things you haven't seen, picked up on nuances that passed you by, understood symbols you didn't even know were symbols: it's almost as if you've watched two different movies.
Yet you may have had the better experience. For you, the magic is still real.
Designers of virtual worlds know so much about their subject that they, like movie directors, don't see them in quite the same way as players. When they enjoy a virtual world, they enjoy it for the beauty of its design, not of its artwork; for the imagination of its gameplay, not of its guilds; for its expression of ideas, not of action.
In Designing Virtual Worlds, I say that I can't play a virtual world as a regular player for fun. I do have fun, but not the same kind of fun that non-designer players have. I'm not alone in this; in A Theory of Fun, Raph Koster calls it "designeritis".
Yet some designers disagree. Others agree that as designers they do see things differently, but they have the ability to take off their designer hat every once in a while and play as regular players (Brian Green described this to me last month: he can relax and play M59 just like anyone else despite spending most of his waking hours up to his elbows in its code and design notes).
As players play, they come to understand more about themselves and the virtual worlds they visit. In time, what they once found to be fun no longer holds the same attraction; it's been supplanted by other, more refined interests. Why shouldn't the same apply to designers?
Is designeritis therefore inevitable? Does (or should) it lead to better virtual worlds or worse ones? And what proportion of regular moviegoers who sat next to Stephen Spielberg would feel that they knew more about what constitutes a good movie than he does?
Richard
