[...] people have other strengths, and this is the point that Raph and Sara are talking at each other about. Someone like Sara, with a background and keen interest in [...]

[...] merely coming up with a cool idea and selling it to someone else – it’s about systems, as designer Raph Koster points out in a recent blog entry. Games are active and the design must manage the flow of the players and the non-players through [...]

[...] Raph’s Website » Using scripting languages (tags: metaplace) [...]

[...] starts with a blog post about data driven design, Damian Schubert continues it and Raph Koster piles in.  Very intersting reading.Now none of these people have even heard of RML.  I wonder what [...]

[...] often show them how it is possible.) Other people have other strengths, and this is the point that Raph and Sara are talking at each other about. Someone like Sara, with a background and keen interest in [...]

[...] Raph’s Website » Using scripting languages A discussion of the role of scripting in game development. [...]

Of course, after putting up with this for a while, people decided that it would be better to invent some sort of compromise between this and natural languages, so that the data could be generated in a quicker and more intuitive way. And thus, programming languages were born.

I am being a little facetious there, but ultimately I feel that any purely data driven system of any degree of complexity will eventually evolve to a point where you’re either continually asking coders to give you new building blocks to work around limitations of the old ones, or your blocks become so generic that you require new tools – new languages, essentially – to attach them together in an effective manner.

Languages are both powerful and user friendly at the same time, tools that we know are almost infinitely scalable from the youngest child to the most literate author. It’s a shame that this isn’t more widely recognised. (But then, look at how rare it is for developers to have something like The Sunday Poem on their blogs… I think that says it all, really.)

The RAD is a very good tool for cat herding. It means better maintenance, easier to follow structure, in a word, consistency.

Now the question is, is the value of a game five years past its release the same as for an IT system of equal cost to develop?

The difference between a virtual world and a database is enormous except for the wandering given a bad UI. Creatively, I agree with you, Raph. From a management perspective, I’d hate to be signing the time sheets.

a purely data driven system feels like wandering through a database.

For the record, I love wandering through databases.