Remember when games were designed by designers?

Dylan Moran has a section in his stand-up about releasing your potential - his suggestion is that it's a very bad idea. As long as your potential remains untapped you can imagine it to be tremendous. However when you unlock it and it turns out not to be the soaring vast colossus you imagined it to be there's no putting it back in it's box.


There's a lot of talk about sandbox games at the moment - Little Big Planet for one. It's gorgeous to look at, seems genuinely innovative and when I first heard about it I thought WOW that's great! completely flexible toolset! Make your own trees! Wow!But there's a small voice in my head that says 'So I have to design the levels myself? Can't someone else do that? that sounds like a bit of an effort.. There have been level designer add ons to games for ages of course, but they were optional extras for people with too much time on their hands. In LBP the designed levels seem added on to the central game which you have to make yourself before you can play it.

Then there's Spore - again I had the same initial reaction - WOW! That sounds great! A whole civilisation all for me! I can be a GOD! buuut...you mean I have to design them all? do all this creating? This God lark seems a bit of a faff...

All those possibilities are exciting - but in the end I'm afraid the sheer variety and scale of what can be achieved is going to dwarf what little I actually do achieve. All this limitless potential is just going to expose my own extremely limited creativity. So I'm limited only by my own imagination? Er what if my imagination is a bit crap? That means the game will be a bit crap right? But I can't complain it's a bad game, because it's my own fault for being rubbish. I have to go on the internets and write rabid blog posts about my own shortcomings, give myself -1000/10 and publish hilarious videos on youtube mocking my own crapness.

Hmm actually maybe that's another explanation for the almost universal love for spore and LBP - it's a case of emporer's new imagination, no one dares say they made a tree like on the demo then ran out of things to do. Spore isn't boring - *you* are boring!

And this is why I loved Mario Galaxy. No creativity required. No user-created content. Distinctly limited possibilities. You're locked onto a path and all you do is follow it to the end. Your gaming experience is pretty much the same as everyone else's gaming experience. All you need to do is press buttons and let someone else do all the work. Someone else has skillfully crafted (and crafted is the word) a beautiful, wonderful experience and your only responsibility is to enjoy it. I'm not saying Spore et al will be bad games - however the way they're being covered it's like they're better because you have to make them yourself. Call me old-fashioned but I prefer my games designed by designers.