I am a game designer. And I have a glaring weakness: math. I am also a trained musician.
Every time I balance games, I try to balance off of feeling alone. And of course, it does not always work. When I get stuck, I usually take a look at games with similar systems (resources, in-game economy, etc.) and retrofit their system into my game. Now, I know this is not the most elegant approach, but it has served me well so far.
Why am I telling you this? To me, a good game designer should have a deep understanding of systems (whether it is designing or reading them) and all forms of interaction concerning those systems (whether it is system-system or user-system interaction). So, if we are talking about tried and true game formulae, I do believe that any reasonably good game designer can design them.
If, on the other hand, we are talking about new, innovative game concepts, I doubt any good game designer can pull them off. Let’s take me as an example again. If I were to design a new, innovative in-game economy, I would miserably fail, since I lack basic and profound understanding of math.
Now, what I do have, is a deeper understanding of music. So I think I could pull off a new rhythm-based game concept that is innovative and truely unique more easily than an innovative in-game economy. It would take me some time to figure out how to get music working in a game context, but the ideas are already flowing, just because i mentioned it.
Most games today are no witchcraft and – from a game design standpoint – are nothing more than systems that react to one another and to interaction. Mainstream games often use tried and true mechanics, which makes it easy to find a reference, when in need of one. Even indiegames have reached a level where there are many examples for off-key mechanics that are not necessarily mainstream but still commercially viable. So, if you are a good game designer, you’ll extract what you need from others. But to truely innovate, you need to be more than just a good game designer. You need to be a game designer that is inspired by other things than game design.
Arcade
Arshak Ardeshir
Gustav Ziolkowski
Severin Brettmeister
Andre Beccu
“You need to be a game designer that is inspired by other things than game design.”
In addition to the inspiration, I think it’s important that you as a person has the ability to make something of it. For example, I might get inspired by music but I still don’t know sh*t about it and I can’t play a single instrument, (Wait, does the triangle count?) or sing a melody right.
agreed. i tried to get the point across by stating that i am a trained musician. of course you need more than inspiration – you need knowledge and a deep understanding of things. maybe i should’ve added that in the last paragraph.
Quote: If, on the other hand, we are talking about new, innovative game concepts, I doubt any good game designer can pull them off.
Hmm, ok, let’s get back to that shortly.
Quote: If I were to design a new, innovative in-game economy, I would miserably fail, since I lack basic and profound understanding of math.
This doesn’t say that game desigerns can’t pull off new, innovative game concepts.
Quote: Now, what I do have, is a deeper understanding of music. So I think I could pull off a new rhythm-based game concept that is innovative and truely unique more easily than an innovative in-game economy.
This contradicts your first quote. Surely, you say you can pull it off more easily, but does it state that you can pull it off, or does the first quote hold true?
I think there was a misunderstanding. what i was trying to convey is that a game designer can’t pull off a new, innovative mechanic and/or concept of something, if he does not have a clear understanding of the underlying structures of what he tries to design.
let’s take will wright for example. he could not design a game like the sims, if he did not have an understanding of how modern life works and how social interactions play a part in it (at least on a basic level). if you design something for a game, it is merely a representation of an existing system. most of the time, it is an oversimplification of real world things. if you lack the understanding of what you try to simplify, it will go wrong.
what you were missing is that I said that i doubt that ANY good game designer can design ANYTHING. he can’t as long as can’t rely on existing games.
Antyhing as in everything and not anything as in “whatever, doesn’t matter what” I assume?
right.
=) Again, as in the first piece, there is confusion between the words ‘any’ and ‘every’..
BTW, I like your thieving approach, often it is enough to innovate in just a few key areas.
The structure behind music is close to the math of games. In several aspects closer but any experienced gamer has internalized enough of the needed math to be able to understand the principles.
In my perspective the a good game designer is more like an instrument craftsman than a musician. Your job is to make it pleasurable to play with the thing you create.
oh noez… no edit button. That’s what I get for getting used to continuous deployment. ^^
I also appreciated the “reference” type of designing a game. This is something I use often. There are very broad skills needed of a designer, using you key skills and referencing from other games is a very viable technique. For Terminator I looked at Gears of wars a lot. If the next project asks me to do balance car physics I’ll start studying car-games and real car the first thing I do.
How about studying people, that will be useful regardless of genre. While writing a post about the subject on my blog some time ago I came up with this phrase which aim in the direction every designer should be a master of: “matching sensory requirements of the user”.
This depends more on the user than the designer. If you get are as a designer which find it problematic to generalize the rules for how to improve the state of the matchup through the design process you will in all cases except for one be producing waste.
Alright, I’m a draconian type of dude and it might sound harsh but getting successful with a business is increasingly getting harder by the day and we have to get smarter to stay competitive.
The original post I wrote is over here: http://gamesartdesign.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-sub-atomic-structure.html its quite a horrible read but I wrote it for myself rather than for an audience, you might not make it through if you try.
I really like this approach. I’ve been told that Miyamoto draws his inspiration for design by watching people having fun. I know that this is not necessarily a study of people but still it is a viable source of inspiration for your designs.
If you follow interaction design and specifically humane design (as put forward by Jef Raskin), you will soon realize that all interaction is about the human and not about the system he/she is interacting with. Looking at basic psychology, cognitive psychology, pedagogy (Piaget for example), evolution theory, etc. will also open up the designers perception of the human condition. To make fully enjoyable products you have to understand the market you are developing for. the human.
Interaction design is a discipline which has gotten a bit along the way and seems to have come to agreement about how to interface with our humans on some of the fundamental dimensions. As game designers we have two new problems that the interaction designers usually don’t worry about too much.
After deploying all the tricks in the interaction designer rulebook we still have these two problems:
1: Making the interaction fun to many enough of the users.
2: Creating layers of abstraction which also are fun.
Also here we have one angle of attack against the problem by looking at what kinds of things humans generally find to be fun interaction and what kinds of abstract systems humans enjoy plying with. ^^
I do not necessarily agree with what you said. interaction design every now and then has to think about fun, simply because fun is part of the human condition and in some cases elevates the product. think about the iphone for example. the interaction is fun, and i do believe that it has been designed specifically with that in mind. the feeling of exploration the user gets the first time he interacts with it (what happens if i tap it? what happens if i turn it upside down? what happens if i swipe the screen?) is really close to that of games.
what i find to be unique in games is the rewardloop. the player wants to be constantly rewarded and this is something that is only demanded of games. it is also the only thing in the world were reward is guaranteed (correct me if i’m wrong, but nothing else comes to mind).
There is a reason why I put “usually” in there.
Where productions have a healthy enough budget to iterate fun into fundamental interaction, together with an interaction designer that knows fundamental theory for making things fun you are likely to have a better result than if you lack either of those two.
If you look at the resulting products that have a good interaction design very few of them actually end up serving many of the needs a user has to categorize the emotional state produced by the thing as “fun”. (ATM machines, google apps, mozilla, microsoft office etc)
I would believe that the emotional state you are talking about when it comes to Apple products rather would be described as “delightful” or perhaps “nice and smooth” if you look inside the brain of the user. That Apple successfully adds some elements of exploratory learning into the basic workings of the interface is clever, but to get to the real fun you need to measure a skill, provide variable feedback, tools, stimuli, rules and all that “black box” jazz game designers are talking about.
The whole hubbub about the “rolighetstorin” going on right now is kind of flirting with this territory.
i don’t think that fun is exclusive to what you described (measure a skill, provide variable feedback, tools, stimuli, rules and all that “black box” jazz). fun emerges from different things, like from “delight” or “nice and smooth”. i think what you are refering to is the state of “play”, which is tightly knit to fun but not necessarily interwoven.
Interesting, a typical problem for game designers is the lack of a common set of definitions. I personally try to stick to the ones I understand the best which in the case of “fun” is associated with the release of dopamine within a negotiable context. (Dopamine triggered in non-negotiable contexts such as when getting shot at in a war is not “fun” but something else.)
The best and most efficient definition for me is the one Raph Koster cooked up as “fun = learning in a safe environment”.
This article is nice for an updated and somewhat more biomechanical perspective on the same thing: http://blog.ihobo.com/2009/02/why-you-play-games.html
You have defined fun differently in your previous post.
“to get to the real fun you need to measure a skill, provide variable feedback, tools, stimuli, rules and all that “black box” jazz game designers are talking about.”
if you stick with the “dopamine triggered in non-negotiable contexts” definition, we can definitely agree that even owning an iphone can trigger fun an thus the interaction can be fun as well.
Yes, I often find myself looking at the meaning of fun through many different lenses. From my perspective the two ways of describing it are not excluding each other, the former describes a few of the commonly needed structures to achieve the other. While the Raph Koster definition aims more directly at the effect within the mind of the user.
An iphone is certainly a tool which can deliver fun through its interaction with the user. As are many other things. But just as with how a young child will consider it fun to play with a dishbrush the fun itself comes from the deeper understanding of the meaning of the dishbrush, or the iphone. To make fun into something we can rely on as game designers we quite often end up going down the route I first described. The brain really triggers on achieving deeper understanding, and for us to reliably reach a deeper understanding we have to build a mentorship type of responsibility into the game. The mentor works by providing goals to meet or challenges to overcome and then giving the person who is seeking meaning effective feedback which accelerates the learning.
To keep the fun coming we want to nest the meaning of the construction within interesting patterns. But that is not really relevant to the problem of fun in itself.
I hope I’m not boring you with my somewhat wonky comments. ^^