Confessions of a Quirky Christian Artist

“ Perhaps, in the nature of things, analytical understanding must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing. ” C.S. Lewis ~ The Abolition of Man ____________ I’ve been interested by a pattern that I’ve noticed on Gamasutra and a few other game design related sites. Almost every time an article or blog is posted that gets into the psychology of gaming and game design there will be a comment or two along the lines of: “You can’t turn art into a system of numbers and metrics! You are killing the FUN in games when you analyze them like this! Don’t deconstruct the magic that makes games what they are!” Personally, these right-brained knee-jerk responses don’t really appeal to me. They usually strike me as sad, inarticulate slippery-slope arguments. But I’m also philosophically opposed to dismissing ideas out-of-hand. I prefer the Hegelian method of searching out the thesis/antithesis and hashing out a synthesis whenever possible. That’s why I love boun...

My dad thinks I'm being influenced by the liberal slant of the college courses I've been imbibing over the past couple years. Of course everything we encounter affects us in SOME way. Here is what I do to avoid being unduly influenced by any new idea, argument, or world-view… I remind myself that no matter how good this new thing sounds, there are equally intelligent people making equally compelling cases for a competing thing. In other words, I don't listen to a course on Voltaire or Nietzsche and say, "Goly, I've never heard that argument before, and it sounds perfect, therefore it must be True!". I think this is the reason kids in college end up going through all sorts of phases and are usually turned into raging liberals. The new ideas they hear are so powerful because they don't have a lot of exposure to the broader world of ideas, or the life experience of being disillusioned by those who follow those new ideas. But I really don't suffer un...