29.11.05 food for thought

He’s talking about game level-design tools, but it applies to so much more:

“The dark side of tool use is that, in your eagerness to make the tool cost-effective, you start to distort your approach to design problems to make them fit the special capabilities of the tool. The old saw that beautifully expresses this idea is, ‘When you’ve got a big enough hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.’ … We must always be vigilant against the subtle influence that a tool exerts on our thinking”.

- Chris Crawford on Game Design, 2003. (Emphasis mine)

I don’t know how many times I’ve said this about the usability of this website or that software package: “By now it’s trained me to use it the way it wants to be used, and I can no longer ascertain whether it’s actually well designed”.