I got a laugh out of bbraithwaite's post at Applied Game Design on the parallels between a Lead Game Designer and a college's Department Chair:
One ships games, the other ships students and a designs a sandbox game (termed "a curriculum") in which players (termed "students") can build the right collection of assets and resources (termed "courses" and "a portfolio") to take them toward their goals of entering the game industry.
The funny part to me is that you could say the same thing for a Lead Software Engineer. Or an Artist. Or a Director. Or a Construction Worker. Or a CEO. It's all the same.
Everything in our human world is a system that follows one very basic pattern of all systems: input-process-output.
In the quote above, the patterns are players-build-goals and students-courses-industry. Consider functions: parameters-implementation-return value. Silly, but it works.
One of the "tricks" I've learned in any problem solving situation is that when I come across a difficult problem, or I'm having a hard time coming up with a solution, I always refer back to the input-process-output pattern. Doing so helps frame the problem into manageable chunks, or at least gives me a few manageable chunks to break down further.
Besides, going back to the original quote, I enjoy finding parallels between two seemingly different topics. The neat thing is that if you follow the basic system pattern, then you can usually find those parallels quickly.
So, anyone want to take a stab at tying together two completely different topics through the basic system pattern? If so, put it in the comments. I'll start.
Baseball: hit-run-score
Basketball: dribble-shoot-score
Okay, not completely different. :)
