I’m not sure if I totally get this article in the Escapist on How to Become a Game Designer.
Parsing the article, the idea is, as best as I can tell, in two parts:
1) Study and read a lot of things about game design and/or take classes.
2) Put your nose to the grindstone and one day your talent will be recognized.
While it’s good advice for moving up in the industry, I think there’s an important step which is once you understand what design is, actually make sure design is what you want to do. I’d hazard a guess and say that ninety percent of people who think they want to do the job don’t really understand what the job is. Of the remaining ten percent only one percent of those people really have the talent to do the job well.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t get into the industry, but I’ve seen many people who couldn’t design their way out of a box* desperately cling to the idea that a designer is what they want to be. Or worse yet, get the job and the proceed to do it poorly for years.
* Did you remember to add the box cutter specs into the design document?
If there was a name for the game that game designers are playing these days when they’re talking to each other about the craft of design it would have to be “deconstruction”. The way you win this game is to continually parse down a successful play pattern until you’ve supposedly torn it into such tiny pieces that you can identify the core understandings found in the confetti.
But just because you can successfully identify a concept and give it a name doesn’t mean that it’s something that’s actually going to be useful. As anyone who likes to cook can tell you, it takes more than just fire and ingredients to make a great meal.
While the deconstructionist approach can be useful in the heat of production, I find it pays to temper it with a “design with your gut” approach . At the core of that is a need to try and simplify complicated ideas down into concepts that can be easily communicated to others. It’s human nature to want to complicate things as you go along, especially as you start to get a better understanding of an idea. There’s people out there making money telling people that there 400 character archetypes, or 300 emotions of gaming. While that might be a great way to sell a book, no one has convinced me that it’s a useful way to make a game.
My guideline on all this is much simpler; can you break it down to three ideas or less? Anyone who has s been in the software business for more than few weeks has probably heard the saying “Fast, Cheap, Good: Pick any two.” It’s a common way to a respond to a publisher who’s looking for a AAA title with no budget and a tight schedule. And when it comes right down to it everything in the software development world is either the good, the bad, or the ugly.
When I was in college the cutting edge thinking about artificial intelligence was what they called “scripting”. Although it seems kind of silly now, the idea was if you could map out everything a computer would ever have to do in any social situation, and give it a corresponding set of actions and reactions based on the structure of the event the machine could essentially be indistinguishable from a living being.
But as archaic as that may seem, I’m finding it disturbingly similar to a lot of the writing and discussion that’s currently going on around game design.
Much like the search for the smallest particle of reality ultimately leads you to a quantum reality where energy and matter are indistinguishable, I think we’re quickly coming to the end point of the usefulness of continued reductionism in game design. While it may be very useful for filling up text books and giving teachers in college courses something to hang their hats on, I’m not sure that it’s really going to help us create more talented interactive designers.
Certainly there are useful techniques we can learn from understanding the hows and whys of player interaction. And if you do have some talent then it’s likely that they’ll be able to use that information in a way that will simplify the process and possibly (but not definitely) increase the chance of the game connecting with an audience.
At the same time I think there’s a huge gap between the basic skills needed to design games and the point at which this kind of theory is useful. The gap is wider than the average player’s ability to jump across it, so they end up falling into the abyss. Reload, retry…
Ultimately the trick to being a great designer is thinking like a great designer. Is it possible to learn that kind of skill? Not for everyone. Which is a good thing, since a world full of game designers would be a scary place to be. But for the motivated student of design it means developing the kinds of instincts and thought processes that are going to give you the ability to quickly and effectively parse games and gameplay ideas.
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