Creating Passionate Users: what is the meta-level for a game? Oh yes, fun. Purple Moon got the individual implementation details right, and applied all that they’d learned from the research, but forgot the forest. Fun.

Not often that I quote Kathy, but I’ve been reading the site for a long while… it’s just that this particular nugget has been rattling around in my head all morning because it’s an extremely core tenent to my job. I mean, I work in the gaming industry, right? True, I don’t work on any one one specific title. And true, I don’t work with the content of the games themselves – which is good cuz I can’t draw worth a shit! No, I work with the “non-game” aspects of the game: common technology [read: plumbing] that a typical gaming programmer won’t want to deal with and I do that across multiple titles. Even so, this notion of “the meta-level” is something that haunted my thoughts when I contemplated taking this job: Do I want to base my success at a job on something as subjective as “fun”?

Nice to know I’m not the only one that sees such a problem…