1. Game ideas are the Story I know already what's coming when people start to tell me "you should make a game about...", that short phrase already encapsulate the most common mistake about games.
Games may contains a story, some simply don't. A story can make a game better, or worse. But a story is not a game, a game is never only a story.
The story behind Tetris
What is a game idea then? How do you go to a game designer and tell him your great vision? Let's go through more mistakes first. Maybe the answer will be more clear once we get the "don't" out of our way.
2. Game ideas are balance The next common mistake is people writing pages and pages on how their game would work. You see this often on gaming forums like here, we are all serious gamers and know so much about games. So we start to explain how we would make a game around this and this mechanics and then comes the 3 pages long explanation how and why the game would be perfectly balanced and so on.
Yes! Brood War was almost perfectly balanced. No, you don't start designing your game and pitching it to people on how it will be good like brood war because it will be as balanced as BW.
3. Game ideas are systems This one is made usually by the game programmers. Hey if I can build the game, I sure can design it. The programmer will start to explain the whole hierarchy of how entities interact and how the pathing will be so smart and so one, but in the end you just ask "Ok and what is the player trying to do?" and you'll hear something like "anything he wants, that the beauty of it" and they'll go back playing Minecraft.
There is more but long is boring If you are talking to a game designer: Talk about goals, goal structure, player actions, difficulty progression... If you are talking to a random person, then pitch the cool thing about it. "You go around dungeons finding treasures" instead of "This is the story of john the explorer who ends up in a peruvean forest after a plane crash where his little dog go lost and now he is trying...." boring... Talking to investors is much trickier, my tip is to not waste time, move away. If you believe your idea is gold and know how to get the team to do it. Then do it after your day job and take a bank lawn 3 month before publication and collect all the money. If you need investors, you should know a lot more than I do about your stuff and it is useless for me to give tips.
"You start with three pawn that you have to keep alive, you can lose them by walking in traps, by starving them, or by them getting corrupted by another player. You have to be the first the traverse the map but you may collect resources along the way"
This is sufficiently abstract to fit any theme, you left many doors open to improve the design but you have a strong guideline to continue your game. Explore how the game changes totally by small changes. You will get a very different game if you make it about a turtle family or if you make it about three soldiers lost in a french forest during world war 2. If you had chosen the theme first, you'd have a harder time to come with original ideas. Now you can take ideas you have for the turtle version and bring them in the World War version.
On December 05 2012 23:11 sluggaslamoo wrote: Haha, I agree with a lot of those points. Especially the programmer one, being a programmer.
Honestly I dunno what makes a good game anymore.
Every good game out there has broken the boundaries of the accepted norms of good game design.
I don't think game design courses help at all either, its just a circle jerk.
I really think good game design is about throwing a dart at a dart board with a blind-fold on and seeing what you score.
Exactly, the problem is not coming with new game ideas, for which courses can help. It is with coming with good games. Games have been focused on evolutions for so long than we know very well what makes the perfect shooter or the perfect shoot'em'up. At the same time engines like Unity allows you to do so much in so little time. You have 1 millions person to compete with . The field is large and the crowd is tough. But at the same time, one man team can create game with 400 000 daily download on Android, check out Hill Climb Racing. Game design is the last open door to reach the mass without the AAA budget.
I'm sorry... did you really just basically say that story can't drive the sales of a game?
I honestly hate 99% of all games for this very reason, there are so few good storytellers left in the game industry it isn't even funny. The last game I bought was To The Moon, a game that is story driven, perhaps a bit to a fault but still amazing.
The lack of great story design has lead to the stagnation of the game industry.
On December 05 2012 23:47 KillerSOS wrote: I'm sorry... did you really just basically say that story can't drive the sales of a game?
I honestly hate 99% of all games for this very reason, there are so few good storytellers left in the game industry it isn't even funny. The last game I bought was To The Moon, a game that is story driven, perhaps a bit to a fault but still amazing.
The lack of great story design has lead to the stagnation of the game industry.
I don't think that is what he is saying at all. I think he's saying to not get hung up on story as if it is a fundamental component. And its not, plenty of popular titles have no story at all. I've seen way too many unoriginal "game ideas" that some guy came up with, by coming up with an elaborate story to justify why its a good game.
The first games ever made became popular without the use of stories. What is the story in pong or pacman? and gaming is as popular as ever now, especially indie games. In what way is it stagnating?
We should be careful not to put on our elitist niche monacles and judge games like someone would critique the finer points of amateur films. In the end "true gamers" are always going be stuck in their little niche subcultures who think they know what a good game is.
The biggest problem is we don't have metrics to good game design. It is clear that the currently accepted norms of good game design are probably incorrect for the most part. If it wasn't, we would see top companies making a hell of a lot more profit making games like angrybirds, minecraft and farmville (note I say profit, not revenue). The only times "good game design" appears in most top titles is if they are franchises, and they are milking out the big risks they took earlier in employing a new game design philosophy when they were a small company and had little to lose.
I disagree with all those points, or at least I can't relate to them at all They may be mistakes that beginners (or even veterans) can make, but I don't know whether they are that common or not.
On December 06 2012 00:36 imPermanenCe wrote: I disagree with all those points, or at least I can't relate to them at all They may be mistakes that beginners (or even veterans) can make, but I don't know whether they are that common or not.
Its funny that I'm the only one that is in agreement with the OP.
You guys should visit gamedev or any game engine forum. Its choc full of this crap.
"The game will be good because it will have an awesome story"
"My game will be good because it is going to be balanced"
"My game will be good because it will have dual joystick controls"
"I am planning on making a MMO better than WoW" (seen this about one hundred thousand times)
On December 06 2012 00:36 imPermanenCe wrote: I disagree with all those points, or at least I can't relate to them at all They may be mistakes that beginners (or even veterans) can make, but I don't know whether they are that common or not.
Its funny that I'm the only one that is in agreement with the OP.
You guys should visit gamedev or any game engine forum. Its choc full of this crap.
"The game will be good because it will have an awesome story"
"My game will be good because it is going to be balanced"
"My game will be good because it will have dual joystick controls"
"I am planning on making a MMO better than WoW" (seen this about one hundred thousand times)
Well, I'm a programmer and when I'm making a game (so also designing) I don't think about the points mentioned by OP. So they may be common mistakes, I can't relate to them.
But I do believe that these are common mistakes, yes.
On December 05 2012 23:47 KillerSOS wrote: I'm sorry... did you really just basically say that story can't drive the sales of a game?
I honestly hate 99% of all games for this very reason, there are so few good storytellers left in the game industry it isn't even funny. The last game I bought was To The Moon, a game that is story driven, perhaps a bit to a fault but still amazing.
The lack of great story design has lead to the stagnation of the game industry.
Oh, I was missing a phrase in my intro. Like pointed out by slugg, I don't speak of game design as game design of release game. Game design in the early stage of a project just shouldn't focus only on the story. Now a days, we need a mix, a perfect balance. Masterpiece are created when the story meets the game design.
Games like Syberia can carry the player with the story alone, their is not much of a game to it. Grim Fandango creates this illusion of a great story: When you finish the game, "wow this could make a movie" and then you start to think about the absurdity of puzzles in a movie. Game and movie stories are driven very differently. Prince of Persia: Sand of time is a great storytelling game. The story is minimalistic, but the player feels he is making the story.
The lack of story has not lead to a stagnation. The industry has never been so creative as it is now. We are drowning into games. We are probably the last generation that has even a chance to complete a good % of great games. Movies, you can watch 5 classics a day and you will catch up very fast. Books... Good luck reading out all the interesting stuff.
I think there are vidya games of many genres, and different games rely on different strengths to be fun. It's hard to really say what makes a good video game without just saying what you look for in a game. I also think designers start with different aspects of the game they find most important, and build the rest from that foundation.
This kind of reads like Shady Sand's horrible 'how to write a good story' blog lol.
While I realize that there are some common mistakes someone can make upon initiating a proto-manifesto of a game design, those mentioned in the OP are - just as is said in the post above me - too generic and do not apply to every game genre.
For example: Many people would argue that The Walking Dead is a bad game because it is mainly story driven. You could even call it an interactive movie. Regardless of what you call it, it is highly sought after and succesful in sales. The Walking Dead relies solely on the story, the mechanics behind the game are rather simple and besides being consistent, the art-style isn't top-notch or high-end either.
There is some great literature out there for people who want to start their own game design company that I have read (also through my own game design study) - but the stuff said in the OP doesn't appear in that literature in this generic way.
Games are a very unique and intresting medium, and people have jet to figure it out. I could list many other mistakes people make all the time....
a) You are not represantive for humanity. Never argue with "I exclusively like monkeys so all games should be about monkeys". This is exactly how it sounds when one says he only buys games that are focused on only the kinds of story he personaly likes.
b) There are not many different genres out there with different strenghts. Genres are artificialy created by players for players to find games, not for designers to design games. Thats one of the reasons game designers should be able to program, because if they they don't orient themselves on technical limitations, they will often times use other artificial limitations, such as genres.
c) game design is not throwing a dart on a board blindfolded. The thing you think about is not game design. Its not game design to decide stuff like setting. Its creating and polishing mechanics, rules and dynamics. Its about interface and interaction. Not about orcs or elfes. There is as much to learn about game design as there is about programming, maybe even more. Unlike in programming your game wont crash if you make a mistake in game design, and in 99% of the cases no one will be able to tell you the mistakes you made, unless you have an awesome community like Blizzard. If you are a programmer, you can imagine a bad game design a little bit like a sneaky memory leak. That makes it very hard to learn and very important to closely study other games.
d) game design is often misunderstood, because many people associate with design something like fashion design, making things look good. But in in the game industry this is called art, and art and design have nothing to do with one another. There are hybrid professions. A character designer often times is also a concept artist. But the term design doesnt mean you make things look good at all, in fact aestetic is not part of design at all. Story, Visuals, Music, are all forms of aestetics, and if you think about them you dont think about game design.
edit: reading my own post I realize it sounds like im a total dickhead. But its hard to state something about game design without sounding like a dickhead, thats why i mostly prefer to let other do the talking. If you are realy intrested in this topic I would much rather recomend you to follow people like Jonathan Blow, Terry Cavanagh, Edmund Mc Millen, Tommy Refenes, Derek Yu, Zach and Tarn Adams, just to name a few. I post some talks that i personaly find incredibly inspirative:
There are more but they are kinda hard to find, especialy talks from the gdc. But if someone is intrested I will try to get more links.
Yep take it with a grain of salt but don't come crying after you get your game idea rejected by someone, just because the format of your game idea was wrong.
There are no limits for games, each time you put limits on what makes a good game, someone proves you wrong. This is generic advice, because the patterns I see everyday are very strong.
You can't bring a best-selling game as an argument on why a person who has never made a game shouldn't talk about his story idea as a game idea. (Point 1 is especially aimed at those who come talk to me, "hey you have a game company, why don't you make a game about"
Point 2 is aimed at gamers. So many time I hear gamers going "I've played so many games, I know everything". They know much, but knowledge without wisdom is seldom enough.
Point 3. is aimed at programmers. This is trickier since I have a programming background and I enjoy programming stuff that are now included by default in game engine, just because programming is fun. Game design implementation can be rather boring compared to tweaking some AI behavior. Anyway, programmers tend to make the game idea clear much too late thinking that "they'll have it soon", this result in average game that might be interesting looking.
There are no limits for games, each time you put limits on what makes a good game, someone proves you wrong. This is generic advice, because the patterns I see everyday are very strong.
I think is very true, and we are just about to explore the possiblitys of the medium. We are far from having seen and made everything. This is especialy important for
So many time I hear gamers going "I've played so many games, I know everything". They know much, but knowledge without wisdom is seldom enough.
just because seeing what already exists is very important, but realizing that its just a very tiny fraction of whats is possible, is also very important in my opinion. It sounds rather trivial, but many people seem to struggle with it. I said its important to closely study existing games, because many little solutions already exists, you can build upon that knowledge or you might end up with something worse then existing and 20 years from now your game will be reviewed by angry video game nerd
Here is an intresting example of the camera logic of super mario, to give people unfamiliar with game design a better feeling of what the profession is about:
Thankyou, I enjoyed the videos although they did come off as a bit amateurish. Johnathan.B made some good points although it sounded like he struggled to translate what he had in mind into words, I feel like I learned something new. I feel like he tacked the current paradigm of hand-holding in games very well.
I know what game design "is". I put that in quotation marks because I am merely talking about what game designers consider their role is, rather than what game design actually is.
Game design is believe it or not, actually about designing games. In the end game designers intend to come up with original ideas in order to, you said it, make a game. They then try to "design" their ideas using research and game design patterns so that their idea works better. One of the main focus's being to instil conduits that links the player to the game and makes the game feel natural and adds immersion to the game.
The problem is that the game design community is for lack of a better word, a circle jerk. It is still a group of self-entitled amateurs that seem to believe that their observation of good and bad game mechanics will have a big impact on the success of a game.
The biggest reason for this is lack of alignment between game design and game value. Game designers spend a lot of times looking at previous games and seeing what they did right and what they did wrong, however they don't spend any time aligning the game mechanics with value.
Game designers always get confused by why such well designed games fall flat on their faces, and "terrible games" end up being really popular, and are quickly to judge it on luck or marketing. Well, on a low budget, its mostly luck and part marketing, but its also more often than not about alignment of game design to value (with low budget games, this is also often by chance, but Facebook made this 100x easier).
When design is aligned to value, that's when we will more consistently see top titles from an indie developer, instead of a huge mass of one hit wonders. Alignment of design and value, is the reason WoW was so successful. Whether or not you think its a good game, it is extremely popular. Value are things like friends, investment (money or time), progression, skill level, etc. Its interesting that Blizzard afterwards went in the opposite direction, by making BNet 2 feel like a barren wasteland, hiding stats from the players, and locking people into divisions.
Other good examples of this are Maplestory (community and fashion/gear), Mafiawars (see Schelle video), Minecraft (what you build) and Diablo (loot, gear and battlenet), off the top of my head.
There are still no metrics for good or bad game design. Instead you have professional game designers making presentations about their observations and why they think something is good or bad and explain to the best of their knowledge, why the mechanic made the game popular. A game designer will happily give their opinion on what is right and wrong with your game, and the potential future of it. The fact of the matter is, he has no clue. I'd love to see a game designers analysis on farmville before it was released.
Game designers spend way too much time looking at game mechanics, instead of the whole picture. They spend the least of their time talking about value, which is why we see so many arcade style indie games which don't contain elements of community, personal and competitive progression (gear, leveling, etc), story, etc. They think its dumb, and unfortunately many game designers are too intelligent too see the value in these kinds of components. Of course when they do pull it off e.g Portal, its amazing, but just look at how many games failed trying to do the same thing.
Its interesting that after 30 years or so, we still have no clue what makes a good game. Game designers can only say what made a game good, but they cannot come up with a system for consistently creating top games unless they are leeching off a franchise.
Every year a new game will come up that boggles our minds on why so many people play it. Farmville, XBox Achievements, Mafiawars, Webkins. There's not a lot of evidence that shows that any of these games/systems were ever professionally designed to the extend that JB did with his game, if they were, they probably would be much better.
As I said earlier, making a good game is like putting a blindfold on and throwing darts at a dartboard. The one hit wonders pumped out by one man teams that completely overshadow "well designed" games by people JB makes this obvious. It is not to say that game design is important, I just think that its silly to say good game design has any importance on a game (with the state of the profession that it is now).
On December 06 2012 03:34 Winchestro wrote: Here is an intresting example of the camera logic of super mario, to give people unfamiliar with game design a better feeling of what the profession is about:
Here's a good example of what I'm talking about. Super mario could have had different camera logic and the game might have been even more popular.
The main problem I have with game design talks about games is circular reasoning. They pick popular games and analyse the components they think were good. The game designer cannot be wrong because, the game was popular right?
I know in this particular case he talks about it as objectively as he possibly can. I think using Super Mario as the topic of a design research task, and using that to justify the validity of game design does not convince me, well, the validity of "game design" as the profession it is seen now.
When they put the principles to practice their game isn't popular because they weren't looking at the whole picture. I'd really like to see game designers talk about games that haven't been released yet and put their theories to the test.
On December 05 2012 22:57 0x64 wrote: 3. Game ideas are systems This one is made usually by the game programmers. Hey if I can build the game, I sure can design it. The programmer will start to explain the whole hierarchy of how entities interact and how the pathing will be so smart and so one, but in the end you just ask "Ok and what is the player trying to do?" and you'll hear something like "anything he wants, that the beauty of it" and they'll go back playing Minecraft.
Can you please tell my brother this? He has been trying to tell me that "good games are a result of good programming." No, polished games are a result of good programming - the game itself must be designed to be good. It has nothing to do with the code, the setting, the story, or even the fucking characters. It has to do with the base system feeling good.
I like Final Fantasy 7 because the game system was entertaining. Materia was a genius idea made by some japanese dude who though to him self "How my character can't just use any skill?" Then bam! He did it. But what a lot of people focus on is the story... which is really generic. Yeah + Show Spoiler +
It's sad that Aeris dies, and that Cloud isn't the ex-soldier he thought he was,
, but you would have never figured that out if the game wasn't fun to play. It's common sense, really.
EDIT: I meant Materia as in the Materia system, and how it works with the game. Not Materia in itself. I know that's only a part of game design, but it played a pretty big factor for me in continuing to play.
The rest of what you said was also right, but I have personal experience with trying to explain to my brother that good code =/= a good game.
EDIT: Also, I want to thank you for posting this. I was beginning to think I had no idea what I was talking about when it came to game design. But now I see I'm on the right track. I'm not exactly correct, but I feel like I have a way better idea of what I'm doing than I did before.
I agree with the people in this thread who are right.
"My game will be good because it is fun" is about the only acceptable answer, and in reality, it comes second to "my game will be good because people will buy it."
Im glad you liked the videos of Jonathan Blow! Jesse Schell is also a name absolutely worth mentioning. I didnt see the talk live, but I watched it on youtube 2 years ago. I remember it beeing totaly mindblowing
I could not agree with you more, on all points. Especialy on
The main problem I have with game design talks about games is circular reasoning. They pick popular games and analyse the components they think were good. The game designer cannot be wrong because, the game was popular right?
Thats actualy what tried to avoid, but I didn't make it clear. Super Mario could definetly have had different camera logic, and even a much better one. But when you start learning game design, you need to learn what has already been done and why its done the way it was done. Once you understand it, you can build upon it and make your own, better camera logic.
One statement of a tutor of mine is sticking to my mind, because it changed the way I think about innovation "You need to understand a rule, before you can break it". Its a great philosophy and it took me relatively long to realy understand it and when i first heared it I refused to believe it
But circular reasoning is kinda the opposite of what you want to have happen, and its very dominant in game design. Its tempting to just blindly copy existing concepts, instead of learning from them and building upon them to create new, better or completely different concepts with the same and better quality. The reason why I posted the camera logic video was to give a feeling of how much thought is put into details people normaly don't see if its done correctly, like the way the camera moves. You only realize it when its done badly. Examples for that you can get watching any episode of the Angry Video Game Nerd^^
Im curious what you mean with "value". From what i've learned about evaluation of game design descisions, its a good practice to find and define the core gameplay of a game, and then value each descision by asking yourself "How well does this support my core gameplay?". For example the core gameplay of star craft 2 could be defined as something like "Fighting with units". Then you can watch some aspect about the game, like base building or economy and ask yourself "how well the way i build my base and my buildings support fighting with units?"
Pylons can be used to warp units in, creep gives your army a movement boost, buildings block movement, etc. You end up wich a very basic form of economy in sc2, because blizzard asked that question and removed most elements that didnt support "Fighting with units" or didnt add unique new elements. If your core gameplay on the other hand is "building an economy" you need to evaluate all your fighting units (if there are any) in terms of how well they support "building an economy". Just a basic example, i don't know if "fighting with units" is actualy the best definition of the sc2 core gameplay.
If you mean with value something more of a ethnic value, like morality, then Jon Blow actualy covered it with good talks you might also be intrested in. He talks a lot about the moral values of game design desicisions and both of these talks go deep into details of what what kinda summarized in the first video i posted above. I don't know if many other people here would have the patience to watch 1-2 hour talks about the topic tho
Wow, It's so nice to wake up and have such a great conversation to debrief. Thanks guys. I really love that Camera example for Super Mario World. It's part of a too often underestimated aspect of game design, which is the delivery of the game. Ernest Adams' basic book on game design tackles this very well, he goes through genres and explain some core rules, which are the key aspect to focus on. These are stances that we take quite late in the game design process. In new genres, it becomes much trickier as you have to figure out how the player will understand your world... And that comes from his history. This is very close to the field of usability. JB videos are also great, what he says and what he does meet. That's very important, because even if I could say and think the same way as he does, my design probably won't come to that. He's design philosophy is very close to mine, I really enjoy how much he gets out of a small amount of assets. That is because he knew what the game would be even before starting the implementation. He managed to deliver. Things started to emerge from his designs, suddenly his world seems without limits on what could happen.
Here is a little self-critics to illustrate my points.
The original design followed through the whole development, but everything didn't turn out how I though it would. I wanted chain mechanics to create puzzles, that the player would have to connect various things to chains and pull it the right way, or have a monster pull the stuff for you. The problem came that when you have more than 2-3 chains, thing just got very confusing, things started to rely on few pixels precise solutions. This game also had this "good programming does good game" problem. We spend so much time working on the chain physics to get it right and to create "realistic multidirectional chains" was so awesome for use, but the reality from the player's side is different. He takes it for granted that chains pulling propagate without elasticity or that if you take a light, it will cast a shadow.
In 2003, I was working in the research team of Jussi Holopainen who wrote a book on game design patterns, after this, I almost stopped playing video games for 5 years, as it all seemed to fall in a small amount of pattern, everything felt flat and derivative. Almost had to force myself to learn again to pickup a game and enjoy it as a game, not as an analyze of goal structure and resource collection patterns. And little things like the Camera design in Mario are bringing me immense joy!
The important thing is to understand the combinatorial power of few hundred patterns can create, how they work together and which new connection you can make.
David Perry has an awesome example on how to activate your creativity. First he asks students to come up in 2 minutes with as many new FPS weapons they can. Then he gives them a list of 100 different ways to die and give the same exercise with much better results. Patterns works the same way, if you don't think first about why the pattern is in your game, your implementation of the pattern will feel easily cheesy.
Winchestro: When it comes to large game like starcraft, it can be confusing to try to think of Core mechanics without bringing in the game flow. If you first divide the gameplay in three, opening, middle and end play, things become much clearer why starcraft is such a magic game. The opening, you will mostly compete to get an economical advantage, the middle game start when the combat units come to play, you have a trade off for you investment. The beauty is that 2 player dueling can try to change when this transition happen. So even the core mechanics are the same, the balance between them changes each game.
hoby2000: A friend of mine wanted to make a detective game. So he programmed such a well design detective game engine, without even knowing how the game would work. The AI would move people, the engine would keep track of who saw what, if it was rainy, foot step could be seen. He even made some great hierarchical windowing system. It wasn't easy to come up with an interesting game idea after all that work because this only created limitation on the game that could be made. Actually in a game design and programming trainingship for highschool students, the best results in game design and even in prototypes where not from the best programmers, but from the others, and because their game idea were better, they had more motivation implementing them, even if the implementation was somewhat less good that what it could have been. They ended with very rewarding prototypes.
Oh and one last typical thing I hear often when someone wants to quick fix a game design is "lets add minigames", it's not necersarly bad, but most of the time, a warning bell should ring. Minigames -> the game itself is probably missing.
On December 05 2012 23:47 KillerSOS wrote: I'm sorry... did you really just basically say that story can't drive the sales of a game?
I honestly hate 99% of all games for this very reason, there are so few good storytellers left in the game industry it isn't even funny. The last game I bought was To The Moon, a game that is story driven, perhaps a bit to a fault but still amazing.
The lack of great story design has lead to the stagnation of the game industry.
Sleeping Dogs arguably has a more coherent story than GTA, but it's...essentially GTA. I don't see Sleeping Dogs getting higher sales than GTA.
In 2003, I was working in the research team of Jussi Holopainen
wow that so cool, Jussi Holopainen was my tutor on game design patterns! The world is so small
The important thing is to understand the combinatorial power of few hundred patterns can create, how they work together and which new connection you can make.
I think its pretty hard to find a practical application to use game design patterns, just by learning them from paper. Playing Spelunky was a huge help for me on that topic. If you didn't play it jet, its free. http://spelunkyworld.com/original.html
Patterns works the same way, if you don't think first about why the pattern is in your game, your implementation of the pattern will feel easily cheesy.
Oh and one last typical thing I hear often when someone wants to quick fix a game design is "lets add minigames", it's not necersarly bad, but most of the time, a warning bell should ring. Minigames -> the game itself is probably missing.
You are right that it's not that my example with sc2 was not very good, it doesn't fully reflect my thoughts on the game. I kinda wanted to make an example about why focusing on core mechanics helps to avoid this cheesy implementation of new mechanics that won't work well with the core mechanics.
Your minigame-example is a much better one. Many games add minigames when they feel the core gameplay is to boring and repetative, but rather then enhancing the core gameplay by doing so they pull it down even further. This is of course not true in all cases and it depends on many factors, but I still think its a great "rule of thumb" to always ask the question "does this new thing i want to add enhance my core gameplay?".
Actually in a game design and programming trainingship for highschool students, the best results in game design and even in prototypes where not from the best programmers, but from the others, and because their game idea were better, they had more motivation implementing them, even if the implementation was somewhat less good that what it could have been.
Getting into programming as a game designer is such a big boost to creativity. I started to rely more and more on digital prototypes because its a great way to get "fresh" ideas and its in my opinion a very elegant method. Its kinda a chaos theory'ish approach, where you play around with simple mechanics and dynamics and let complexity arise from simplicity rather then trying to brute force design of a complex system from scratch.
By the way now that I think about it, chaos theory has been actualy realy changed my thoughts as i first heard about it. I don't know how you guys think about it and how useful you think it is, but I personaly would recommend every designer to as least check it out, even if it may seem a little bit off topic at first.
Yes, this is why I dislike attending game design meetings.
If two programmers are in disagreement, they will bring up the pros and cons of each approach. One will be right and the other wrong. Worse come to worst, they hash together a quick proof-of-concept and let the code do the talking.
If two artists are in disagreement, they will go over the technical points of the composition, produce several different variations and eventually agree on which one(s) are most suitable.
If two designers are in disagreement, he who shouts loudest wins. There's no quantitative way to measure good game design. Even the monetary success of the game usually hinges on more factors than just the plain design. In fact, chances are that the designers themselves are not in full control of the design anyway.
The sad thing is, it's not even that hard. Ideas are a dime a dozen, and anybody who has been making games for any significant amount of time will have thousands of ideas swimming in their head, just waiting to be tapped on. What to pick and how to fit them together is mere architecture, and architecture can be mastered by either being a good artist or programmer before you try designing a whole game system.
It tickled me when I found out that senior artists think and tackle problems in pretty much the same way senior programmers do. Block it out, establish a skeleton, flesh out the details, maintain coherency, iterate as required. This differs wildly from the way a junior whatever would tackle the same problem. In a sense, both seniors have learned how to put things together by virtue of always having quantitative yardsticks to measure themselves against as they progressed through their careers, and both would trade knowing sighs amidst the aforementioned design meeting.
Back when I first entered the industry, they always said that design is not an entry-level position. I do not know why that has been seemingly forgotten. But if you want to be a "good designer", my advice would be to be a good programmer or artist first. It may feel harder, but it builds character!
It's all about gameplay, which is why it's called a game. Doesn't matter how good the story is, how good the graphics are or how well made the basic systems like GUI etc are if the gameplay is boring. It might be a great slightly interactive movie, but it won't be a game.
Designing a digital game is actually really similar to designing a boardgame. You need basic ideas on goals, challenges etc, ways to make players want to keep playing. If you can then proceed to wrap this in a sweet story and good graphics, that's awesome, but whether or not the game is enjoyable depends on the gameplay.
On December 07 2012 18:04 e-Goh wrote: If two designers are in disagreement, he who shouts loudest wins. [...] The sad thing is, it's not even that hard.
I know quite a few other people who share your opinion. Most of them speak from very much experience but they tend to forget that once upon a time not long ago...
*puts history book reading glasses on* ...where thy target audience was just a small group of nerdy kids like us who were willing to play thy frustrating games, because there wasn't that much to choose from and some of them just wanted to see the thy new amazing graphics. Back in these days thy game design was often made by thy lead programmer. As games got more and more complex and demanded someone to purely focus on game design, thy lead programmer often gave up programming in order to do so. *takes history book reading glasses off*
One can just speculate if at some point there were no more people left who are developing games for a significant amount of time who were willing to give up their former profession or someone decided to skip the whole process of making someone extremely good in a real profession just to let him do the just shouting at each other until somebody wins that sadly isnt even that hard.
Or maybe the people who designed games way before videogames were even invented started asking awkward questions.
Wrong. The truth is: all game designers in the world are employed and payed by james rolfe's health insurance company
Miyamoto in his 1999 GDC talk, tell us an awesome story how they train technically artists so they'd understand well the technology they are working for. This seems to be still a problem as artist now are used to think memory is unlimited.
Anyway, small world indeed, Jussi is a good tutor to have indeed.
I think the role of the designer is one of a listener. He creates a skeleton where the rest of the team builds their ideas. It's not about the "genius" vision as we are lead to believe by creating icons like Will Wright, Peter Molyneux, Sid Meyers... But it is the hard work they do that makes the difference. The team members should not need to argue about their ideas, the game designer should. It's all about coherence.
Tobberoth: I used to think as strongly as you do, but I have come to think more as a balance between gameplay and interactivity (but after rereading, you probably count interactivity in the gameplay). Anyway board game thinking is a very good start, but very fast you should prototype the basic digital interaction of the game loop. How you control the game should be as enjoyable as the game itself and it is a combination of usability and UI design. Screen candy is important. Watch this video about the subject: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/178938/Video_Is_your_game_juicy_enough.php The only problem is that screen candy, like you said will never replace gameplay. Strong Core is always were you start from to be cost efficient. A strong core is easy to paper prototype (and why not even a quick digital prototype).
Gameplay is a dangerous term, as noone ever agrees on its definition (and I'm sick of articles starting with a half page long definition).
I honestly think people are going about it the wrong way here. Saying it's all about gameplay is a complete misnomer. We've seen games with great gameplay and engaging mechanics get universally panned because of horribly put together stories. I think where people are going wrong here is grouping all games into one giant overarching category of 'video games'. Games are not the same, the aspects that each game values are different. To think otherwise is ridiculous.
Let's compare it to movies for example. You can't look at each genre and say, "Well the stunts are obviously the most important part of this rom-com," or "Since the story in this Action movie was a weak this movie obviously sucks". Each genre is governed by aspects of the movie that determine the success of a movie. Action movies are dominated by cool stunts and good choreography, Dramas by acting, story and theme, Romance by character, Comedies by their humour.
Taking the same concept and applying it video games we can draw similar guidelines for evaluating the success of a specific video game. We're not going to look at CS:GO and say, "Wow that story really sucked, this game is a complete joke," because that's not the crux of that game. It's defining values are in it's game play and graphics. If we look at a game like Mass Effect 3 however the opposite is true. This was a game that was almost universally maligned, not because of it's poor gameplay mechanics, those stayed mostly true to it's successors' example. Where it fell flat on it's face was it's story and characters, two things that were the linchpin of the aforementioned prequels popularity.
As the video game industry evolves and broadens I think we'll begin to see more variance in what people see as success in a game and that success is defined by. Not all games are made the same and as such shouldn't be evaluated on the same stringent set of guidelines. Some games will revolve around themes they want to communicate, and will sacrifice other parts of the game to drive their point home. Some will just have amazing stories they want to tell, and that will be enough to make it a successful game. I think the industry is past that point of, "is the game fun?" Not all games have to be fun, fun might be contrary to the point of the game or take away from what the game is trying to communicate.
I understand the mentality that all games have to be fun. It's where games started after all. We came from an age where the point of a game was to entertain, so we had games where there were no stories, or the stories just really sucked, because honestly with the technology we had how well could we really illustrate a story. There wasn't an avenue to do anything else but to make a game a fun way to entertain ourselves. We've evolved to the point where we don't need to be bound by laws saying a video has to be fun to be a video game.
If I go back to my movie example it's the same thing. Early movies were just captures of moving images. They showed a horse moving his head slightly or some object moving with the camera mounted in a single spot. As the media evolved so did what people could do with it. They began telling stories, simple ones at first, but slowly they became more and more intricate. Then they started incorporating things not from real life into the movies, fantasy, science fiction, music, dialogue, drama suspense, romance. None of this was part of the original movies. Movies became diverse, and their purposes diversified along side them. They weren't all for entertainment anymore, some were educational, some depressing, others had themes they wanted to express, some were fun, some were difficult to watch, and each type could produce success or failures.
The same potential exists for video games. They don't all have to be fun, or feature amazing mechanics. They just have to do a good job succeeding in achieving their purpose. To be successful they just have to elicit the emotions and reactions they were designed to bring forth.
i mostly lost interest in gaming because nobody makes good stories anymore. Certainly some games are not supposed to be about narrative (starcraft e.g.), but narrative is imo the weakest link in the gaming "industry" (that word should tip you off to the source of the problem) these days. I'd like to see more games that started out with the story.
Of course, I guess more games now are getting fun-sized (cellphones) so those are just meant to be disposable, you're not trying to make a good game just a game for impulse buy.
But like
Sure as hell when those guys made Planescape: Torment, they started off with the story
I agree with most of what you guys said about the story and it may have been not clear, that it story is not something game designers normaly produce, because has a lot aestetic value to it and can be seen more as a kind of art. I as least never meant to disvalue story, because it would be like disvaluing visuals or music. There are as I said often people with hybrid professions like narrative designers, and story is important enough to justify people purely focus on the storytelling as writers.
Maybe you would like to check out Jason Rohrer, he is especialy famous amongst writers and narrative designers. http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/ (especialy the passage and gravitation)
But if you think about old storytelling games like Planescape: Torment or Baldurs Gate or Monkey Island, you realy fast get into the circular reasoning and you may end up blindly copying some very bad game design descisions these games made because you confuse game design with storytelling. Thats why I have a lot of respect for good narrative designers. I think out of all game design-hybrids getting good at both storytelling and game design is by far the hardest, because its so easy to confuse one with the other.
On December 08 2012 02:18 sam!zdat wrote: Sure as hell when those guys made Planescape: Torment, they started off with the story
Nope, they started with a really well tested non-digital role playing game on which they implemented a story. This is actually the perfect example of game mechanics working very nicely with the story.
On December 08 2012 02:18 sam!zdat wrote: Sure as hell when those guys made Planescape: Torment, they started off with the story
Nope, they started with a really well tested non-digital role playing game on which they implemented a story. This is actually the perfect example of game mechanics working very nicely with the story.
A story will never be a game idea by itself.
no, sorry, I don't buy that at all. Planescape is not simply an implementation of AD&D with a story put on it (that would be icewind dale, which is consequently a terrible game). The system is much less complicated than tabletop AD&D for one thing, and you spend more time talking to people in that game than fighting things. You can't even wear armor! Planescape is not a fun game with a story on it, it's a good story with a game on it.
edit; there's a difference between appropriating something which already exists (infinity engine, ad&d) and using it to make your game, and starting with a mechanic. Planescape may appropriate these, but it does not start with them.
On December 08 2012 02:18 sam!zdat wrote: Sure as hell when those guys made Planescape: Torment, they started off with the story
Nope, they started with a really well tested non-digital role playing game on which they implemented a story. This is actually the perfect example of game mechanics working very nicely with the story.
A story will never be a game idea by itself.
no, sorry, I don't buy that at all. Planescape is not simply an implementation of AD&D with a story put on it (that would be icewind dale, which is consequently a terrible game). The system is much less complicated than tabletop AD&D for one thing, and you spend more time talking to people in that game than fighting things. You can't even wear armor! Planescape is not a fun game with a story on it, it's a good story with a game on it.
edit; there's a difference between appropriating something which already exists (infinity engine, ad&d) and using it to make your game, and starting with a mechanic. Planescape may appropriate these, but it does not start with them.
Exactly my point. It doesn't start with mechanics because it doesn't need to (as they chose mechanics that were already tested and good). Like Diablo 3, could have been an awesome game if they'd made a masterful story.
hmm, but that's a little different than your tetris example then, right? Because tetris is a game ABOUT the mechanics, while planscape is game ABOUT a story that uses some already well-developed mechanics.
I guess what I'm saying is that icewind dale is the tetris of rpgs.
I can't agree on that. I think Diablo 3 is an awesome game. It just has a huge problem that its target audience is for the most part also the target audience of WoW and it doen't live up to the very high expectations of the people for many reasons. I think a great story is not an expectation many people had buying D3.
I played through D3 and beat inferno. And without writing a 5 page long review on it, I can just say that the biggest problem of the game was that it had this massive 3 act long tutorial for inferno, that just didn't cover what I think is one of the most important aspects of diablo 3 - economy simulation - at all. Most players never learned how to buy and sell items, what items and what stat combinations are worth how much to other classes or what etc. So most people just assumed that the game is forcing you to buy good items for real money in order to make progress and everyone who has good items and makes progress bought them for real money.
Let me rephrase, Diablo 3 could have been even better if they made a decent story. Of course, if you play through inferno, you won't care much about the story anymore. What shocked me was probably the contrast between the awesome atmosphere and the poorest writing possible. The thing is that you already had much of the good side in D1 and D2, so you expect other detailed to be perfect after 10 years. I played last summer, has the auction house changed since then?
I played until the patch, where they introduced the paragon levels and this was already a while ago, but I didn't stop playing because of it. In fact they fixed supprisingly many issues I had with the game, so I remember this patch beeing only positive. The filtering options in the auction house got improved a lot. I can't realy judge the long term influence of the patch on the economy, because before and after a patch the prices go up and down a little bit unpredictable depending on what most people think will be worth more or less after the patch and start hoarding or dumping it.
The story is hard to judge, because i don't feel like i represent a wide audience. I didn't watch a single cutscene and didnt read a single dialogue until I reached inferno, because I kinda just wanted to get to inferno as fast as possible and I knew it would be anyway much more satisfying to watch the cutscenes later when making the progress that allowed me to watch that cutscene realy meant something to me.
One concept of interactive storytelling I always liked about diablo, that was also done very well in baldurs gate was storytelling through items. Its a great example of identifying a part of the core gameplay that will be meaningful and valuable for the player, and enhancing it by making it coherrent with the narrative.
And it realy is done a lot now that I think about it. From magic - the gathering to dungeons & dragons. (i mean not just items, it can be applied on a lot of stuff)
I wonder why it's not done a lot more. Why do modern day rpgs(i mean the story-focused ones, not diablo 3) for example have seperate achievement-menues but relatively generic and untresting npcs with dialogues that mostly are just good-neutral-evil answering. For me its rather obvious that the purpose of achievements and the purpose of npcs is basicly the same. Reflection upon the choices and actions of the player.
Im still waiting for the rpg that incepts achievements as the only interaction between the player and npcs, without any flowbreaking dialogue screens and meaningless "How is the wheather today nameless farmer?". Where npcs have a certain "taste" of achievements, defining their character, reacing more and more friendly and even finaly falling in love with the player character, or reacting more and more hostile if the actions of the player violate the "taste" of the npc.
But im not a narrative designer, so it may very well be that this would only work in a game for kids, because adults have much higher expectations in terms of social interactions then kids.
Hehe my first memory of Baldur's gate was when one of the first monster drops a unidentified belt and you put it on, it is cursed, changes your characters sex, couldn't be removed. Right away, they made you feel that each of your action may have a consequence.
Interactive narrative design is something that is only starting to be studied scientifically. Chris Crawford has some stuff on the subject, he is a great person but somewhat stubborn and I find myself strongly disagreeing with many of his recent opinions.
(just a preface, I write incredibly sardonically and with a great deal of inflection. Please take this as me raising eyebrows, winking and grinning a lot rather than snarling like a beast unchained. I like to deal with game design playfully, and nothing makes me want to do it more than other people having a full on intellectualesque discussion.)
If you are talking to a game designer: Talk about goals, goal structure, player actions, difficulty progression... If you are talking to a random person, then pitch the cool thing about it. "You go around dungeons finding treasures" instead of "This is the story of john the explorer who ends up in a peruvean forest after a plane crash where his little dog go lost and now he is trying...." boring...
This is the sort of advice they give to first year uni students in meatgrinder games development courses. Not only does it arrogantly assume that other game designers actually know enough about designing experience that they'll get what you're talking about (which is generally not true, since the average 'game designer' knows less about the theory than a uni student after their first lecture), it also arrogantly assumes the random person is a fucking retard who just wants shiny things, an attitude that has resulted in every single fucked up pavlovian reward mechanic the industry has dropped on us in the past five years or so. So don't do this. Please.
Talking to investors is much trickier
Because it requires you to actually know what you're talking about, in a frame of reference that one other human being on the planet can understand. Fuck that, do it yourself, amirite? XD
Genres are artificialy created by players for players to find games, not for designers to design games. Thats one of the reasons game designers should be able to program, because if they they don't orient themselves on technical limitations, they will often times use other artificial limitations, such as genres.
I appreciate the sentiment here, but programmers are possibly the most guilty party in the evolution of the commercial videogame industry when it comes to genre, because they turn technical limitations into genres: first person shooters, isometric roleplay etc. I absolutely agree that designers must be aware of the technical limitations of their medium, but not that they should be so involved in it that they cut themselves away from potential stuff because they, not being veteran, talented programmers, see it as a limitation rather than an opportunity to innovate.
game design is not throwing a dart on a board blindfolded
The cynic in me wants to point out that this is exactly what modern game design is.
Its creating and polishing mechanics, rules and dynamics. Its about interface and interaction. Not about orcs or elfes.
It's kind of amusing you say this straight after saying you shouldn't argue for humanity on something. Game design can absolutely include aesthetic design. Videogames are absolutely not just systems, their aesthetic framework is crucial to their function. A designer who fails to incorporate this into their design is thus, absolutely, a fucking terrible designer. Straight talk, yo.
If you are realy intrested in this topic I would much rather recomend you to follow people like Jonathan Blow, Terry Cavanagh, Edmund Mc Millen, Tommy Refenes, Derek Yu, Zach and Tarn Adams, just to name a few.
This is like saying 'if you're interested in what art really is, I recommend you follow people like [list of mid 19th century french painters from the cubist school]'. Why not the people who developed lego? The guy who designed Settlers of Catan? The inventor of parkour? For that matter, why not some people who have studied videogames critically like Gonzalo Frasca and Jesper Juul? Or even people who have studied games critically like Thomas Henricks or Brian Sutton-Smith. I'm not saying that the people you mention aren't worth listening to, they certainly are, but they are a microscopic, rhetorically focused fraction of the scope of critical discussion around the topic of what it might mean to design a game.
Game design is believe it or not, actually about designing games
Oh great Slugga! You must have come up with a definition of 'game' that is deep and functional to use it like that. Why didn't you tell me.
They spend the least of their time talking about value, which is why we see so many arcade style indie games which don't contain elements of community, personal and competitive progression (gear, leveling, etc), story, etc. They think its dumb, and unfortunately many game designers are too intelligent too see the value in these kinds of components
Or maybe they see that it has value, but a kind of value they do not want in their game. Because as we've discussed here, value is not universal.
Its interesting that after 30 years or so, we still have no clue what makes a good game
I think it's safer to say we still have no clue what makes a game. Period. Funnily enough, we do have a clue as to what makes a good 'x kind of media product termed videogame' since trial and error plus endless iteration has given us a decent body of evidence. We can say things like a well implemented learning curve that lets all players progress at a comfortable pace, or well designed feedback structure that draws the player along make a good traditional videogame. But we can't say these make a good game, because, as noted, we don't know what a game is.
I agree with the people in this thread who are right.
Fan-tastic.
I understand the mentality that all games have to be fun. It's where games started after all.
This is incorrect. Videogames started as technical challenges for electronic hardware junkies to show off what they could do. The dominant goal of 'fun' in videogames is something of an aberrant rhetoric in the grand scheme of things too, so be careful about saying 'games started' being about fun. Mainline commercial videogames were about fun (which, critically speaking, is about as useful as saying 'marriage is about happiness'). That's not the same as games. The mentality you speak of is one that is exclusive to said mainstream games industry, which goes a long way to explain why it has so many problems given that I don't think if you put miyamoto, wright, molyneux and schaeffer in a room together for a week they'd be able to come up with a clear and useful definition of 'fun'. I realise this is more or less what you're trying to say as well, but it's an important point to realise that videogames have never been as shoehorned into one goal as you make out
Because tetris is a game ABOUT the mechanics
I don't think you can say any game is about the mechanics. ALL videogames are about dynamics, the behaviours that occur when mechanics and aesthetics are interacted with. You could say that the main dynamic generators in tetris are mechanical and the main dynamic generators in planescape are aesthetic, but that's a very shallow view of mechanics and aesthetics. Even if it had 0 traditional storytelling, tetris had an incredibly powerful and addictive narrative aesthetic, there's a reason why the tetris theme is so widely recognised. What people who play games with a lot of shallowly applied story forget is that narrative and aesthetics frequently arise FROM mechanics, as games like mirror's edge, sanity's requiem or system shock will attest (really, all games attest, these are just cases where it's very clear and obvious), this is presumably what Winchestro is talking about differentiating 'writer' and 'narrative designer'
Interactive narrative design is something that is only starting to be studied scientifically.
You mean studied systematically, don't annoy the scientists, they are scary people. And it's been studied by guys like Crawford for decades. Also 'interactive narrative design' describes much 20th century modern theatre and event design, which has a history of study and analysis dating back a century or more. Another thing videogame design flunkies seem to forget is that there is a world outside videogames where other games exist. This isn't a jab at anyone in this thread, more at the world of 'game design' in general, because it is absolutely and inexcusably arrogant to say that is what we're doing instead of 'videogame design'. Even then it's a broad brush that is hopelessly overgeneralising. You don't get architects saying 'well, there's this general problem in architecture that people use slanted roofs way too much'. They say 'there's a general problem in suburban residential architecture in the southern USA where people use slanted roofs way too much'. What we are talking about is mainstream commercial console/pc videogame design. Not game design.
I'd just like to conclude with something I want to call to your attention. It is absolutely critical when discussing 'game design' that you be clear up front what you mean by this since, as we have discovered, it is an incredibly ambiguous term. Now if your reaction is 'yes, yes, that is a problem', I'll say 'tell me something I don't know'.
The thing that surprises me is that people are not so utterly aware of this they don't trip over themselves to account for it. It amazes me when I talk to an actual, employed game designer who thinks that what they do is what game design is all about, and when I point out an online poker developer or something to them and say 'well, this guy is also designing a game, is he a game designer?', they look at me like I said something surprising and insightful. Like they have somehow forgotten that there is a whole fucking world of digital interactivity that doesn't use quicktime events. AND THEN there is a bigger world of non-digital or semi-digital interactivity which your parents called games which has a history dating back BEFORE WRITTEN LANGUAGE. Wouldn't it be nice if videogame developers noticed it was there at some point.
In the meantime, be smart, critical and be clear about what you mean, because chances are every single person in here defines game design differently. Don't bother trying to clarify what it should or should not mean in absolute terms, because believe me people have been trying to figure out just 'design' alone for the better part of two centuries, and they're still having trouble. Don't even get me started on 'game'. Seriously. There be dragons.
It's all well and good to point out some guy you agree with and say 'see, this man gets it '. You're right, he certainly gets something, and that is not to be underestimated. But he does not get game design, because, well, if he did, he'd be the richest man on earth. What he gets is one little truth, one highly contextual pattern of meaning that applies under a very narrow set of preconditions. These are good things to have, since if you can match your preconditions to his, you can apply his logic successfully. What you cannot do, as the videogame industry demonstrates on a daily basis, is apply this to any game anywhere and expect anything other than abysmal failure. That is important. It may save your career one day.
That was a insightful and hillarious post. Thanks for pointing out the variety of game design fields. There are in fact plenty of specializations out there.
I personaly don't see game designers as just video game designers, because most game designers I know also make board and card games, some even design pretty cool physical games. I actualy don't even like to put a lot of weight in the word "game" in "game design", because there are some techniques that work well outside of the games. So I'm totaly with you on that point, even though I personaly don't have much experience in polishing my board and card game prototypes to a professional level... maybe because I always got sidetracked by having more fun with the digital prototypes I created for balancing purposes.
As you pointed out correctly most of what was said here before isn't even getting close to truely representing game design as a whole, maybe because the theme of the thread was more "common mistakes of beginning game designers" and general oversimplified wisdoms one could give them, that will be benificial for them in most cases.
How would you prefer to break down the immense complexity of game design in order for people who don't have your experience to orient themselves and maybe find the right specialization they can become extremely good in?
On December 06 2012 05:04 Winchestro wrote: Im curious what you mean with "value". From what i've learned about evaluation of game design descisions, its a good practice to find and define the core gameplay of a game, and then value each descision by asking yourself "How well does this support my core gameplay?". For example the core gameplay of star craft 2 could be defined as something like "Fighting with units". Then you can watch some aspect about the game, like base building or economy and ask yourself "how well the way i build my base and my buildings support fighting with units?"
I was gonna do a bigger post but I don't have the time . I will just answer this question here.
This is really my own theory, so feel free to disagree.
Customer value is what adds money to your game, and keeps people playing it.
Examples - Good packaging adds value, when you buy a game in a box you play it more because of sentimental value - The amount of time spent in a game is valuable to the user, its what gives online games that feeling of "weight" - Progression adds value, you are probably less likely to quit when you have a well geared character - Cash items add value, when a player buys a cash item he is less likely to quit the game - Community adds value, the more friends you have, the less likely you are gonna quit - You get the idea
Indie games often neglect many of these, which is why most of them never get customer reattainment or make much money. They are always entirely concerned with the game mechanics on a pure level. Value is often what makes the game fun, the gear, the friends, the time you spent.
Many game designers long miss the idea of arcade games, where it was all about the game your score and nothing else. However they do not realise that other forms of value that we see in online games came into play, the money you put into the coin slot, the feeling of a big arcade machine, to the friends you make at the arcade.
sluggaslamoo wrote: Alignment of design and value, is the reason WoW was so successful. Whether or not you think its a good game, it is extremely popular. Value are things like friends, investment (money or time), progression, skill level, etc. Its interesting that Blizzard afterwards went in the opposite direction, by making BNet 2 feel like a barren wasteland, hiding stats from the players, and locking people into divisions.
EDIT: Just reworded some of my statements to sound a little less dichotomous.
How would you prefer to break down the immense complexity of game design in order for people who don't have your experience to orient themselves and maybe find the right specialization they can become extremely good in?
I think there are really three core issues new games designers have to address (and I stress game designer. You can be a perfectly fine game developer without doing this hardcore shit, just as you can be a perfectly good plumber, brickie or carpenter without learning architecture. So long as you don't actually try and build the blueprints of the final product, this is helpful but unnecessary. If you ever want to actually design a genuinely great game though, it's absolutely fucking mandatory.)
1) scope/rhetoric: the first is that games are bigger than big. There is so much that can be used to inform game design it's just silly and it's rooted in disciplines from every field of creative practice and academia. The best text I have encountered for demonstrating this scope is Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play which examines various interpretations of what play and games are comprised of and what they mean, using 'rhetorics' to categorise them- for example the rhetoric that games are a civilising tool that abrogate all out conflict into abstracted contests, or the rhetoric that games arise from the brain learning about its environment and recombining it in a variously random or directed fashion and so on. The work is impressive not just in its scope, which is vast, but in that it presents such a variety of different opinions and ideologies around games and play that you can't help but be shocked out of your own way of thinking, if it is at all naive (which it inevitably is). Once this shock has occured, I would hope that the designer would be more open to examing theory, methodology and practice from other disciplines and rhetorics, plus be more aware that they have their own and that it is not the only one.
2) Authorship/stewardship: A dichotomy in all game design is you are designing something (a toy, a set of rules, a scenario) which is ultimately to be experienced by another through action and interaction. This places the game designer in an interesting space. Is one conveying meaning in the traditional authorial sense, where the author wishes to communicate certain patterns of narrative through their text, or is one merely a custodian of a structure which encourages the user to create their own narrative patterns and meaning. The analogy can be made to lego bricks: does one present them as a kit that is to be assembled a certain way to be considered successful, or as a system through which the user can invent and create their own structures within the constraints of the bricks.
It is a crucial point for all potential game designers to understand this dichotomy, their status as authors on the one hand, and their role in encouraging their players to, well, play, always a creative and individual activity. The interactions between these two roles are subtle, complex and diverse. When I say they must be understood I mean not that they must be mastered and their interactions perfectly grasped. Merely that the implications and a basic understanding of the issues must be had in order to make mature and intelligently designed games. There are few if any texts that address this deeply, so to engage with the literature one must combine videogame design texts that take the authorial appraoch (guys like adams, crawford and so on) with theory of games texts (caillois, bartle etc) that emphasise the player's experience and position.
3) Internal/external: The dichotomy between physical and magic (or external/internal) constraints. I use magic in the sense of the Huizingian magic circle (not the Salen&Zimmerman magic circle), the individually defined, internally maintained rules that limit the space of play in most games. The sorts of rules that say the paint lines on the edge of a soccer field are as good as a wall, that the card with a 2 on it is worth less than the card with a 4 on it and so on. These contrast with the rules of videogames which are physical, externally imposed by someone other than the player. Of course, magic rules arise in videogames, but they are rarely anticipated or intended by the designer.
This is the burden of the modern videogame designer. Historically games self-mediate and self-adjust, ironing out problems, adding features and becoming more and more polished through a process of memetic natural selection. (memetics derives from memes, the information equivalent of the gene, which serves the same purpose in the evolution of information as the gene does in biology). Designed games, particularly the heavily regulated modern videogame with its IP controls, antimodification encryption and incredibly complex code, lack much of this capability for adaptive development in the hands of their players. Players can only consensually limit the space further (eg, no sniper rifles allowed), not adjust (sniper rifles deal 10 less damage) or expand (new weapon to balance out sniper rifles) it. In a traditional game this would typically be as easy as a few words between bouts. In videogames it is often impossible, which places incredible responsibility on a designer to get it absolutely perfect.
You don't make things perfect by throwing darts at a board, nor by failing to understand context and theory, so being a game designer is a heavy, heavy burden of responsibility to learn a lot about a lot.
Once these three concepts are understood, games design appears to be a far, far more intimidating prospect, but also a far, far more rewarding and interesting one. There are a lot more things to explore, examine, theorise upon, test and ultimately discover, and these have far greater importance than just getting the next my little pony game's metascore up a few points.
Indie games often neglect many of these, which is why most of them never get customer reattainment or make much money. They are always entirely concerned with the game mechanics on a pure level. Value is often what makes the game fun, the gear, the friends, the time you spent.
Many game designers long miss the idea of arcade games, where it was all about the game your score and nothing else. However they do not realise that other forms of value that we see in online games came into play, the money you put into the coin slot, the feeling of a big arcade machine, to the friends you make at the arcade.
This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. To design the game you must also understand the social context of the game, its position in space and in player's life. Though I think this would be better phrased as 'engagement' or 'positioning' rather than 'value', Slugga shows he's thinking not just about the mechanics of the game in a systems sense, but in a social sense, a kinaesthetic sense and a contextual sense. A mechanic may work better on a home computer than an arcade machine, even if the interface is identical simply because of the different contexts. A player may value a game that has a large community around it more than an identical game with no community, even if that community plays no part within the game itself. A good designer works this sort of thing into their design.
EPT![[image loading]](http://yababoon.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/how-tetris-works.jpg)
. The field is large and the crowd is tough.
. I will just answer this question here.
