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.
EPT
