Traction Heroes Ep. 41: Craft

How can craft help you gain traction? That was the question Harry and I explored in episode 41 of Traction Heroes. I brought to the conversation a short reading from a book that had a big impact on my career, Chris Crawford’s The Art of Computer Game Design: Games must be designed, but computers must be programmed. Both skills are rare and difficult to acquire, and their combination in one person is even more rare. For this reason many people have attempted to form design teams consisting of a nontechnical game designer and a non-artistic programmer. This system would work if either programming or game design were a straightforward process requiring little in the way of judicious trade-offs. The fact of the matter is that both programming and game design are desperately difficult activities demanding many painful choices. Teaming the two experts together is rather like handcuffing a pole vaulter to a high jumper; their resultant disastrous performance is the inevitable result of their…