The Great Beginning

Without going into too much detail (you can see the detail at my Wikipedia page), I like games. A lot. I've been playing games most of my life, and have been designing them for tabletop and electronic media for nearly 20 years now. I've even won a couple of awards.  While it has always been fun (if you don't have fun with games, you're probably in the wrong line of work), it is not precisely easy.

Even when you know what you're doing (and frequently in game design, you're making, at best, an educated guess), you still have a significant chance of watching the whole thing blow up in your face. The more complicated and complex your game, the more likely that you'll introduce a variable that causes the whole thing to explode in an entirely unintended way. Sometimes, these consequences are beneficial and lead you into new paths of play that you never suspected but turn out to be incredibly rewarding. More often, they spell disaster. Every variable and mechanic you introduce becomes another potential problem.

This is especially true in electronic media. In tabletop games, we can always fall back on house rules or expect our players to find a way around the inconsistencies in the rules (though I should note that this is frequently a hallmark of bad design as well), but if we don't consider all the ways in which the software can break, we will see the games disappear into loopholes or, worse still, outright crashes.

It takes a talented team to produce games that hold up to multiple users playing in any number of ways... and even talented teams can fall short of their goals. Witness, for instance, any number of professional, large-studio games that fail to delight or even entertain; worse, witness those that are released well before they're done, riddled with bugs. While these games might provide quick hits for their studios' bottom lines, in the end the damage done to the studios' reputation is hardly worth the price.

From the user's end, it's easy to point out flaws in a game. From a developer's perspective, it's much, much harder.