Comments at Boardgame News

Boardgame News posted a notice/link about my "What's Important" post a few days ago, that elicited a few comments (one an ad hominem attack, my thanks to Christopher Dearlove for answering that better than I could have).

I do not have a $25 per year membership to BGN, so cannot post any response there to the following:

"And I’ll disagree with one of his statements. DO design for yourself. Not only do you have to take enjoyment in testing the thing to death, but you have to beleive in your own product if you are going to attempt to sell it."

Posted by Jeff Allers

I understand Jeff's point of view. However, to respond to it I'll resort to a designer more well-known than anyone in boardgames: Sid Meier (Civilization, Pirates, etc.) in Gameinformer 182, June 2008, he is quoted:

"...there's a danger with some of the newer designers, a tendency to design the game you like to play. That game has already been designed--we need new games. There's a loss of a little bit of that "sky's the limit, anything's possible" approach we had in the early days. We have these genres--we have first-person shooters, we have real-time strategy. If you've played games all your life you've gotten these certain styles really beaten into you. To get people to think out of
the box is a little harder these days."

Granted he's talking about videogame designers, and it certainly applies strongly to video game design students, but the point applies to non-electronic game designers as well, I think.