I read this Kotaku article and was immediately fuming because it seemed like the author was basically just claiming that his brilliant mind not only came up with a very basic game design concept, but also that he came up with it when really it was Sid Meier who said that “good games are series of interesting choices” (in the comments he mentioned that he didn’t know Sid Meier said it). After a bit, I cooled down later and finally decided to see this as a win. One of my biggest peeves about the gaming community is that most people who are involved don’t know anything about video games, whether it be about the industry or just some simple design theory. But, I figured that as long as people were learning about video games then I was happy.
Then I wanted to write something about interesting choices in games, but really, almost everything I write assumes that already. Interesting choices plays a large part in ideas like player-authorship. So just read the Kotaku article and replace all instances of “my theory” with “Sid Meier’s theory” and we should be fine.
