The importance of meeting Ernest
One day last week, 
I spent several hours with Ernest Adams, the game designer. We’ve been casual friends for many years, generally bumping into one another at the Game Developer’s Conference and sharing a beer. This time, I was paying for his services.
I’ve been struggling with some of the issues I’ve had with game design on Melting Point. To put it bluntly, I hadn’t been able to convince myself yet that the game would actually be fun.
I prepared for the meeting with some trepidation. I put down a list of Stuff That’s Important to me:
- That the game be a reasonably accurate simulation, based on real science and actual statistics.
- That it be a casual game, aimed at adults who might be in a position to act (by voting or influencing policy makers) on their conclusions about global warming.
- That it would be possible to turn off the “gameplay” and run the system as a pure simulation in order to use it to experiment with policies or demonstrate a particular strategy.
I also created a list of items I was willing to budge on — the fact that it’s turn-based, for example, or that it takes place on a world map.
I didn’t know if Ernest — famous for his series of columns entitled “Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!” would take away my snack food — maybe tell me that I should just tear up everything I’ve done and start over.
But in fact, he did nothing of the sort.
Ok, well, he did point out several challenging areas in my design. But fundamentally, it appears that my sponge cakes are in no danger of .
I’m thrilled. The work I’ve done is not wasted…what he helped me to do is to come to some conclusions regarding the details of how I need to implement specific areas of the gameplay. I believe I now have a good understanding of what the game design needs, and I feel much more ready to forge ahead with implementation.