Links: Steve Jackson Games Looks Back to 2014 & Game Designers Complain About Things

If we are indeed "game authors", and if a game is a cultural creation (we also say in French "œuvre de l'esprit", which is untranslatable because it's based on the ambiguity of the meaning of "esprit", which means both "spirit" and "brain"), then our games must be reviewed and not tested. The world "test" is disparaging for designers but also, and more importantly, for the games themselves, which are considered as mere technical items.

People who say things like that are conflating "designing a game" with "conceiving a game". If you tell me you had a game idea last week, fine. If you tell me you started designing a game last week, we're good. If you tell me you wrote a preliminary rule set for a game last week, I'm with you. But when you talk about designing a game (in the past tense), it becomes much too easy to confuse "I started designing a game" with "I finished designing a game, and anyone who knows anything about designing things will tell you that those two are very, very different.