Sorry, for the double post, but I wanted the past post to be purely informational, not opinion. Sit back, this is going to be a long one. So here's my opinion:
I liken age creation (not our age creation, but IC age creation) very much to the creation of a good video game. You cannot simply sit down one day at your computer and say, "I'm going to write a video game today!", sit down, start coding, sit back in an hour and say, "This is the greatest game ever!" A good video game is planned out, storyboarded, broken down, coded, tested, recoded - it takes a long time.
Similarly, age creation is a long process. First, an age must be envisioned. It must be outlined. The right D'ni words must be found to get the effect wanted. A regular (not special) book must be written. Contradictions must be looked for, and then, finally, a book may be written.
Why do I bring this up? To make the following point: a video game company does not hire people with the job descriptions "video game creators". It hires people to do 3D modeling, people to make the sprites, people to make the storyline, people to do the coding, people to do the testing, people to do the storyboarding, etc.
That is not to say that a 3D modeler with some coding experience could not sit down and create a video game all by himself. Au contraire, he most definitely could. However, his game would be missing the expert storyboarding, sprites, coding, testing, etc. provided by the other people in the company.
Granted, a storyboarder never physically coded something into the game that the player is going to experience, but think about great video games like Halo, The Legend of Zelda, ...Myst or Riven for goodness sakes! Would a game like Myst have been as fun if there were no storyline? If you were just wandering around on an island, collecting pieces of paper in different places, solely because the Manual told you that's how you win the game, would Myst really have been as fun? No!
A successful video game is the result of dozens of people working in their area of expertise to create a final product that everyone can be proud of. And this translates to age creation as well.
Sorry for taking so long to get into the main point, but here we go. The video game company metaphor shows what good age creation is about, and this is OOC. A good age has two elements that make it so enjoyable - Looking good, and being interesting. Case and point - Teledahn. Innovative and stunning environments combined with interesting puzzles and plenty of stuff to do.
Just because somebody on the creative end never physically puts something into the game, it doesn't mean that they are any less important than the people who do. Granted, I am not arguing that modeling and coding are more difficult by tenfold than sitting down, drawing a map, and saying, "Here's my age!" However, while anybody can sit down, and, in 10 minutes, design an age, it really takes something special to sit down and design a good age. One that will keep players interested, engaged, something innovative, something that adds to the Uru experience.
It is my firm belief that anybody who does anything involved in creating a new age should be called a writer. I know that there will be calls from others saying, "What about people that did the music? What about somebody who wrote the journals? Are we really going to say that they wrote an age?" My answer is yes; they created an age just as much as a dialogue writer, a sound designer, or a debugger helped create a video game.
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