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![[image loading]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v485/thereisnosaurus/makeagamelogo.jpg)
Welcome, lady and gentlemen, to the very first edition of my blawg. Actually, it's my second foray into blogging, my first was a little bit arcane and prone to rambling. In this blog I'm going to try and stay on topic, informative and entertaining. Aha. Ha. Haha.
The purpose of this blog is to explore and spread ideas about games design. This community (and any others who happen to read this blog) are very likely interested in games as consumers, and like to think of themselves as informed consumers. The idea here is to foster that information, provide some interesting considerations and hopefully give you some new perspectives into games.
A tiny bit about me- I'm 22, and Australian student studying games design. Unlike most courses my subject load and direction of study has focused around very low-level theory and practice in games design. Many people equate games design with computer game programming and production, but these pursuits are often only tangentially related to the creation and design of the game which all the programming, bit-mapping and graphic design realise.
I began study in 2007 and in my very first lecture, we were posed a fantastic question, one that really formed the core of my interests since. The lecturer started up with a pretty standard introduction, chatting about video games and what they've done and just how fun they are.
Then he asked us what fun was.
What a dick.
It took the lecture about fifteen minutes to quiet down and reach the conclusion that we really didn't have any idea what fun was- I mean, we could all identify it- hanging with friends is fun, playing games is fun, washing up is not fun (for most, anyway). But I grew up around science and scientists. That's not a definition, you can't use it to make stuff happen or to predict it. For days the question haunted me, I couldn't get it out of my head, I started looking around and nobody seemed to have given the question much thought. It seemed our entire society knew exactly what fun was, what it wasn't and yet just as conclusively didn't.
You can kind of see why, it's not the easiest question to answer. A lot of different things are fun, and it's hard to identify common factors and even harder to figure out whether these are causal (make the thing fun) or correlatory (a byproduct of the fun-ness, if you will). Experiences described as 'fun' for some could be described as being scared shitless, (skydiving or rollercoasters), intense and stressful (RTS games or MMO raids) or simply overwhelming (sex, cinema, raving) for others. The first question then is whether there is truly a similarity, a factor that is the same across all these experiences? Or is fun simply a blanket term for so diverse a set of conditions and outcomes that it really can't be defined.
Most people are happy to leave it at that second resolution, but in tutorial discussions we noticed an interesting thing. Being games design students, we were obviously interested in fun and games and we found the two are as close to inextricably linked as it is possible to be. Games are fun, we play games because they are fun. There isn't that split that happens with some other 'fun' activities (raving or skydiving for instance) with games. People find types of games more or less fun, of course, but ultimately games are games not because they are exhilarating or emotive or socially fulfilling but because they are this nebulous thing that is fun.
And so, as a potential designer of games, I began to find it even more important to explore this notion of fun. Again, the typical view is simply that fun within games represents any number of things that each person finds attractive, but I dug deeper. Is there a common factor? Is there one thing underlying all these myriad different reasons people find games attractive? That became my quest for the best part of a year, reading and watching, listening to experts and analysing a hundred different attempts to explain why people found various games fun. The results were intriguing and I'll be going into them later on, but I want to keep the blog posts reasonably short. This is just a sort of taster of the questions I'll be asking and the things I'll be exploring.
I think that, on the whole, the world is starved of what I would call games 'designers'. We have a load of amazing talent for producing great looking and great sounding games, rich with symbolism and excitement. However, if I can make a comparison to the cinema, The industry suffers from what might be termed hollywood syndrome. Because of the roots in the programming and hacking culture that was the core of the IT revolution, videogame construction in particular is primarily approached from a production mentality. Spectacular effects, good acting, polish and professionalism become so important that they occupy so much of the mind and culture of the industry that they lose the original intent of cinema- to convey a story with something you can take away or learn. In similar fashion, the actual notion of constructing a game in pure theoretical terms takes second place to aesthetic and technical considerations. Not that this is truly a bad thing, the videogames industry has been pushing the envelope and developing technologies that are absolutely astounding as far as their potential goes. I'm just afraid that that potential is being underused. I'll go over my reasons in more detail in subsequent posts, but again, this is simply an introduction as to the theme and content of this blog.
I'll try and put up a new post every few days, mixing in more casual stuff with indepth looks at games, their design and the industry that produces them. I hope I've piqued your interest and that you'll be back
Cheers, Thereisnosaurus
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I agree the games industry is starved of good games designers. Miyamoto is the most obvious genius. Kojima is fairly clever too but not quite on the same level.
I read a really good interview with Miyamoto once and he said the problem a lot of games designers and developers have is they say to themselves "I want to make an RTS" so they make one and polish the hell out of it but it's still missing that "something". He said the key to making great games was to think of something fun (!) and try to recreate that experience so other people could enjoy and share it.
Zelda is one of his classic examples. It was a game he based on caves that he used to explore as a child and how he used to imagine monsters living in them.
Starfox is another. He came up with the idea while visiting a temple one time. There was a fox statue of a god or something. There were arches leading up to the temple and one day he thought it would be fun if the fox started flying through the arches.
![[image loading]](http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h4/Millennium_Falsehood/Paper%20Models/Arwingdiorama.jpg)
He never said "I'm going to make an RPG" or "I'm going to make a shoot em up". Think of how many random RPGs and Shoot em ups you've played that have just been boring as hell because they aren't fun. I think the key to making a game fun is basing it on a semi real life experience because people can relate to it better.
Portal is a great example of a game where I'm sure they just went "wouldn't it be cool if you had this gun and you could make holes in walls that take you to another place" that slowly evolved into what you could call a first person shooter/puzzle game. If they had just set out to make an FPS/Puzzle it wouldn't have been anywhere near as good.
Game design has always interested me a lot so I'll be interested to hear your opinion on what makes games fun.
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Belgium6774 Posts
Interesting, I'll be following this blog 
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I had the same epiphany once when I was playing starcraft. I realized I had no idea why I enjoyed it so much, I mean it was just stuff moving on a screen etc and I got all depressed and philosophical. The answer is not to question it.
And Portal was always intended to be a shoot em up platformer since it's basically a HL2 mod.
Edit: what makes it awesome is really the atmosphere and the dark humor.
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isnt it a wow meta achievement for completing all seasonal achievements?
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isnt it a wow meta achievement for completing all seasonal achievements?
That is indeed the reference ^^
I read a really good interview with Miyamoto once and he said the problem a lot of games designers and developers have is they say to themselves "I want to make an RTS" so they make one and polish the hell out of it but it's still missing that "something". He said the key to making great games was to think of something fun (!) and try to recreate that experience so other people could enjoy and share it.
It's interesting, I somewhat agree with you that miyamoto is a genius, but it's not for that reason. I do think that structuring games around types (RTS) is solid behavior, though I prefer it at a bit lower level (centering a game around reflex, resource management or some such). Miyamoto's genius lies in the fact that he somehow grasps very small but important concepts of design flawlessly and intuitively that many other designers overlook, but I don't think his actual practice is entirely solid. You'll probably get where I'm coming from as I write more.
I had the same epiphany once when I was playing starcraft. I realized I had no idea why I enjoyed it so much, I mean it was just stuff moving on a screen etc and I got all depressed and philosophical. The answer is not to question it.
Oh no no no, the answer is verily to question it. Question it HARD. As I said, the results of those questions have proved startling to me but ultimately they are very exciting. I've found that games are just like stories in that regard. on the surface they're about fantasy and foolishness, none of it real, but deep down they have a massive influence and effect on our mental health, our intelligence and our ability to be what we consider human.
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Haha that StarWing pic brings back fond memories of SNES in my childhood.
That said the sad part is, [unless you are working for valve] your credibility as a game designer these days will never be determined by how good you are at designing games. You either need to be a business man who knows how to milk an industry, or do a John Carmack. There are also way too many "game designers" without a portfolio, who believe they can make it with 0 programming knowledge, accounting knowledge, and business knowledge for that matter. A lot of companies are so sick of them, that they just shut them out.
I've talked to really high ups (creator of Eidos, or lead programmer of the Hitman series, 3d modeller for the Final Fantasy series) before on a one to one level about games. The Eidos guy told me my idea had a 0.1% chance of succeeding, primarily because of graphics, only for me to make a remark about Runescape.  Nice guy though.
Basically game design is not about fun anymore, its about money and efficiency. And that SUCKS, because games were never about that. Game companies originally, were never founded upon the assumption that they would make much money, particularly in the golden age of gaming, most companies still had that old philosophy, but had enough money to actually make decent games.
Recently however things have worked differently, publishers now are just giant development companies that assimilate smaller ones and force them to direct their focus on making money. Creativity is thrown out the window, because it is too risky.
The reason this hollywood syndrome exists is not because of the nature of IT programming, there are very simple ways of dealing with that. Its that graphics and marketing sells, its much easier to advertise with good graphics than with good gameplay. And gameplay advertising is usually just a hashed up list of features including good graphics.
This is what I mean by companies with money making philosophies ruining it for everybody else. They end up getting the money that other companies lose from making good games, and using that money to destroy those companies.
Nice write up though. I enjoyed it.
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EPT
