whats so wrong with skill trees

Pleasure derived from seeing ridiculously horrible game design is inferior to pleasure derived from playing great games.

Start with the smallest design possible and then slowly expand it.

I don't use to-do lists, design docs and I don't care about the scope.
I just let it grow.

I've tried the "waterfall" approach before. Didn't like it at all. Made me feel like I wasted a lot of time doing nothing.

Note that I still guide my design process. It's not like it's totally random. I carefully choose the limits of my game in advance and I put a lot of time into thinking about what would be the cool next feature to implement.

Jody Wisternoff - Red Stripes

So the game tries to mind-read you so that other NPC's can see what you, as a player, not as an avatar, feel?

I think it was Tic Tac Toe.

I don't think about procedural generation because it's merely a way to create content (the other way being by hand). It says very little about games.

I am, however, very interested in believable, open-ended and complex worlds with believable role for players to fill in. Any such world would necessarily result in playthroughs that would be interesting to retell, the so-called "emergent narrative".

I wonder what kinds of actions would players use to communicate with NPC's? And what are they going to be talking about? Like, is it going to be proper communication, or just a puzzle masquerading as communication?

Who or what are these modern generations?

New generations, people who are younger than us, those who didn't grow up with the same games 'we' did etc.

Complaints are fine.

The way one figures out what is a good game is by playing many games and then figuring out why you like what you like. In my opinion, you shouldn't bother trying to understand why some games are successful and others aren't. Just trust your instincts (and if you can't trust them, play more games, analyze more etc so you can start trusting them).

It is important to note that trusting your gamer instincts can severely limit the kinds of games you want to make, but that's a good thing IMO. Still, you may have to make bigger games, the kind of games you have to invest a lot more time into, since coming up with what would be a good small game might be hard. It is for me at least.

If however you don't want to be guided by your gamer instincts and instead want to look at other people then I'm afraid I have no advice.

I mean, why is it so hard to be a player yourself? Is it that we're afraid that the modern generations are so different from us that we cannot relate to them or something?

He uses "essential elements" though. It's pretty much the same thing.

Basically, if you want to put a real life experience into a video game, you have to simplify it, and before you can simplify it you have to decide what's essential to that real life experience.

So, essential experience is that part of real life experience which is important to you.

Goran Bregovic - Wedding Cocek

come to think of it, for anyone who has played the Legend of Zelda games, how does one man carry an entire artillery on him? I'm sure that the games are extremely popular and no one has ever asked about the realism of this, because there is yet to be a game that explains or fixes this.

Have no idea really. It might have something to do with the fact that infinite storage capacity is an idealistic feature? We all want that sort of thing in real life, so we accept it blindly in games.

But I'm not sure.

Problem solving on rules is essentially why people video game RPGs. You have a set of rules; you want to make the most powerful character based on those set of rules.

Also why realism is fun too. I like wargames because you can pick up a standard RL war manual and apply real theory to win a game. Or similar with grand strategy games. Or why I play browser games, so that I could apply statistics and interpersonal communication theory to online games. You're applying real problem solving methods to a simulation, and that's fun.

I'm not sure you're disagreeing with me.

The point I'm making is that abstract games are less fun than non-abstract games.

It hides the fact it's a giant wall of text. That's the key I think.

Games that have strong resemblance to real life (which does not necessarily mean games in the vein of Gran Turismo, and which does not eliminate fantasy games) are always more fun than the abstract ones.

At least, when I play games, I want to feel like I'm playing a believable role within a believable world. By focusing merely on rules and by ignoring how these rules relate to real life, you're essentially reducing games down to problem-solving, which is boring on its own.

(I can see board game lovers disagreeing with me; that's fine -- board games are boring compared to video games)