On Business Madness
This is a nice article, but I don't really like the ending. "Everything is really complicated, so don't try to predict it or think about it too hard" isn't a particularly uplifting message, and there's not even much reason to think that it's true. Perhaps it's a mistake to generalise too much from the success of a few companies, but if we're not trying to generalise at all, what hope do we have of improvement?I'd like to quote from a really fantastic book, The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell, a section called "Waiting for Mendeleev":Unfortunately, at present, there is no “unified theory of game design,” no simple formula that shows us how to make good games. So what can we do?We are in a position something like the ancient alchemists. In the time before Mendeleev discovered the periodic table, showing how all the fundamental elements were interrelated, alchemists relied on a patchwork quilt of rules of thumb about how different chemicals could combine. These were necessarily incomplete, sometimes incorrect, and often semi-mystical, but by using these rules, the alchemists were able to accomplish surprising things, and their pursuit of the truth eventually led to modern chemistry. [...]I wish we had one all-seeing lens. We don’t. So, instead of discarding the many imperfect ones we do have, it is wisest to collect and use as wide a variety of them as possible, for as we will see, game design is more art than science, more like cooking than chemistry, and we must admit the possibility that our Mendeleev will never come.