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Had a weird realization today that the biggest overlap between my interest in Game Design and in Agile can be best explained with RIFTS.
You have been warned.
You have been warned.
RIFTS may be the single greatest *promise*of a game in all of RPGdom. The art is amazing and evocative. The setting is sweeping in scope without becoming bland. The idea of RIFTS is amazing and hard not to get excited about.
The actual game delivers none of these things.
The actual game delivers none of these things.
This is not to say the game can’t be fun, or even saying that the game is not good. There’s a ton of nuance in actual play.
But I feel comfortable saying that the rules as written are not the game promised.
But I feel comfortable saying that the rules as written are not the game promised.
But the game promised is REALLY COOL, and in my mind the real reason to design a game is to bring these promises more closely into alignment with the actual game.
And the thing is? That, right there, is agile. Or at least the part of agile that matters to me.
And the thing is? That, right there, is agile. Or at least the part of agile that matters to me.
See, to me the core principle of agile that the work you are doing is the work you *say* you are doing. You cannot talk about valuing customers but actually work on delivering to business metrics and be agile.
Agile demands the honesty and clarity to own what you’re doing and watch it with clear eyes to get better and also to keep yourself honest.
There are MANY ways to NOT do this and succeed.
There are MANY ways to NOT do this and succeed.
You can still have fun with a game whose promise and play disagree. You can even drag play back to the promise by brute force.
You can still please customers and deliver value without those being your focus.
But in both cases, it’s *harder*.
You can still please customers and deliver value without those being your focus.
But in both cases, it’s *harder*.
Keeping actions in line with intents, and staying honest about intentions are the hard tasks of principled life. Ideally, they’d be what we all do everywhere, but life is more complicated than that. But it’s curious to me how those things overlap for me between games & business
So, thank you RIFTS. I will never stop loving you for Ley Line Walkers and Glitter Boys, but even more, I will never stop loving you as one of my favorite cautionary examples of what I don’t want to do.
