To become a good game designer, one has to design games and-- here's the important part-- get feedback from human players. That seems tautological and obvious, but it's an important insight. What seems like a great game will be broken in ways a designer might not anticipate once it meets real players. Non-designers might find the brokenness of the earliest Magic cards to be laughable-- how could they not see that Ancestral Recall was broken?-- but designers get it. Balance is hard, man.
It's hard as hell to come up with a game worth playing. I probably designed a hundred crappy ones as a teenager before I got a hang of it and, even then, I only have one real success which is a card game-- a fairly closed system, not something continually expansive like Ultima Online or Magic: the Gathering. It takes a lot of trial and error to get good at it. It's easier to go through that process when you have access to other nerdy teenagers who'll be playtesters. For adults, it's much harder to get testers. That's a huge limiting factor.
Then, combine this with the big-budget corporate setting. Few game designers get to design a whole game. They work on pieces, not having responsibility for a whole. It's the same issue that we have in software engineering: most programmers never get good because so few ever work on real stuff in their paid gigs. I haven't worked in AAA game development, but it wouldn't surprise me to see the same principle in force: mediocre designers because most corporate work is mediocre and people never get the chance to get good.
I think Garriott has a point, though, in the assessment that it's rare for a "pure idea guy" to be anything but mediocre and passive. Curiosity is an important trait in a game designer. If you've got it, you'll code. That doesn't mean that you'll do it professionally or be able to write x86 assembly by hand, but you've no excuse not to fire up Codecademy and learn the basics of programming. Most of the great designers had other interests. You can see Garfield's CS and math backgrounds in the design of Magic. You can see Paul Graham's painting experience in his approach to programming and language design. The biggest hits require crossing wires.
I'm continually impressed that Wizards manages to keep Magic as balanced and fun as they do, especially considering that they don't have the resources to really playtest formats other than standard. It always makes me angry seeing people in comment threads for previews/spoilers raging about how Wizards is "ruining the game" or some such nonsense. Making Magic is _hard_ and many players don't seem to understand this :( Of course the Magic community is anger-inducing for any number of reasons; but that's another can of worms entirely.
It's hard as hell to come up with a game worth playing.
It's really easy to come up with a game worth playing. Cloning is incredibly easy. While I admire that you went through the hard process of designing the game, what was learned?
Taste (and hence design) is completely arbitrary in videogames. There's no intuitive reason why pushing around sticks on a controller to move around guns is something people like, or that we use 52 cards instead of 60 or 40.
In other words, Richard Garriot is a bit contradictory: if there's nothing learnable about videogame design, the things that make a game good are arbitrary. If the things that make good games are arbitrary, isn't the idea of a game design guru (Lord British) absurd?
To hammer home the point that making a fun game is pretty easy, there are thirteen major MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) titles with more than one million players, and thousands of "endless running" games across all platforms. But the reason League of Legends and Temple Run reign supreme over the DoTA WarCraft 3 scenario and Canabalt is not superior design or balance.
The best games, the best in the genres really, are more like entertainment services, not just mathematical abstractions decorated with pictures and text.
Good games are about running servers; polishing user experience; providing customer support; maintaining a community; the art, the sound, the writing, etc.
While your card game looks interesting, I click on it and see a Google Document. Shouldn't the first link be a web app hosted in Facebook, complete with bots and achievements? All this engineering and craft is both hard and vital to making a game.
I'd say what makes a game different from a math problem is precisely everything outside the game design. Math problems aren't that much fun.
Game design is not about art, writing, or programming. Game design is about creating the rules that lead to emergent, interactive experiences.
There is an actual science to game design. It's not enough to just think of a story and move an avatar around on the screen. The game must create flow so the player is receptive to emotional arousal, then use game mechanics to invoke emotional arousal, and then add fiction/narrative so that the player labels the arousal as a particular emotion. A good game designer has to consider all of this and much more... strategies, equilibrium, balance, skill levels, and so on.
If you clone an existing game you basically get all of those design decisions for free, but you don't understand the background. This can lead to a case where you tweak or add something to your game which completely throws it off balance, without realizing it and without being able to fix it.
>It's really easy to come up with a game worth playing. Cloning is incredibly easy.
What a silly thing to say -- if you clone a game, you haven't "come up" with it.
Pretty much everything you say is important if you want to market a game to people, or you want people to enjoy it. But game design is something separate from that -- much like writing the script for a movie is separate from actually producing it. It just happens that scripts are protected by copyright law, while game design isn't.
>Taste (and hence design) is completely arbitrary in videogames.
Taste is definitely not completely arbitrary in video games.
What makes a video game good is however harder to operationalize - as it always is with mediums of art. Ask the average person why they like some song, an example of an answer would be something like "It's got a catchy hook", which the video game equivalent would be "It's got good controls and explosions."
I do not know what actually makes a game good, but I also have a very hard time believing that taste is completely arbitrary in video games and that video game design is useless.
>But the reason League of Legends and Temple Run reign supreme over the DoTA WarCraft 3 scenario and Canabalt is not superior design or balance.
Sure WC3 DOTA is less popular than LoL, but you'd be insane to say that people do not notice imbalanced stuff.
You seem to hold the view that the more popular a game is, the better. This is probably not true considering how popular Farmville is (or at least used to be) while not being a very good game at all.
Hm, I have a lot more to say overall but I think it's just gonna end with me ranting to a straw man, so I 'm gonna stop here.
> What makes a video game good is however harder to operationalize - as it always is with mediums of art. Ask the average person why they like some song, an example of an answer would be something like "It's got a catchy hook", which the video game equivalent would be "It's got good controls and explosions."
While an individual's taste may be particular to him or her, it is possible to group and classify visual art styles. This is applicable to other aspects of game design as well, like genre and specific game mechanics.
It seems a bit of a stretch to say that "the things that make good games are arbitrary".
I have played a lot of games in my time, good and bad.
It's not too difficult to identify reasons that some games are better than others. Design and balance is pretty important, if a game feels "unfair" in some way for example or doesn't feel responsive and leaves me feeling detached from what is going on then I'm less likely to play it for long.
It's easy enough to "clone" a game, but even building something like a simple tower defence clone involves making a ton of decisions that affect playability quite a lot.
There's a huge difference between a commercial success and a design success. The market rewards quality if and only if all other things are equal. It's extremely telling that you think of games only as computerized artifacts and thus couldn't tell me what makes, say, Cosmic Encounter or Cards Against Humanity compelling.
I've spent about a third of my life going back and forth with game designer wannabes and game designers alike, and I think you'd be surprised at how many will recognize the merits of a game where the experience was wooden but the actual mechanics were transparently high quality despite that. Math problems are quite fun, if they're actual problems, and not contrived riddles that pretend to teach math.
You want mass appeal, then yes. You do have to have a high production budget. Or you just put on Doctor Who.
His thesis seems to be that Graham isn't an expert on art history. I can't evaluate that. I know less about painting than either of them do.
How far one believes the metaphor goes is questionable. Visual art and software development have different goals and rules, but they use certain aesthetic skills that are common. That said, I think Graham is injecting some degree of personal bias. If his passion had been for music, he might have written "Hackers and Composers". Then again, I really don't know. I don't know how far-- beyond the principle (often overlooked in software) that source code is for humans and must be attractive enough to be comprehensible-- the analogy goes because I don't know enough about painting.
That essayist seems to be viewing software as a product, where source code need not be "appealing" to clients and is not read often enough to justify making it legible and attractive. That's not the world modern software lives in. Aesthetics matter.
If his passion had been for music, he might have written "Hackers and Composers". Then again, I really don't know.
Why not? As someone who has dabbled in composing music and been a musician most of my life, in different types of groups, it strikes me that many a time creating software is much like composing. There are often grand overarching themes, and all the parts must fit together just right or it's not going to feel right. You write the score in advance, then the orchestra "executes" it. Making your sheet music legible, with a keen eye to what's possible on different instruments and using the correct key instead of shoving in accidentals all over the place ("readability") can make a whole lot of difference.
The essayist is simply pointing out that the whole "hackers and painters" nonsense is just that, nonsense. There's absolutely nothing "paintery" about pg's programming, or anyone else's.
To become a good game designer, one has to design games and-- here's the important part-- get feedback from human players. That seems tautological and obvious, but it's an important insight. What seems like a great game will be broken in ways a designer might not anticipate once it meets real players. Non-designers might find the brokenness of the earliest Magic cards to be laughable-- how could they not see that Ancestral Recall was broken?-- but designers get it. Balance is hard, man.
It's hard as hell to come up with a game worth playing. I probably designed a hundred crappy ones as a teenager before I got a hang of it and, even then, I only have one real success which is a card game-- a fairly closed system, not something continually expansive like Ultima Online or Magic: the Gathering. It takes a lot of trial and error to get good at it. It's easier to go through that process when you have access to other nerdy teenagers who'll be playtesters. For adults, it's much harder to get testers. That's a huge limiting factor.
Then, combine this with the big-budget corporate setting. Few game designers get to design a whole game. They work on pieces, not having responsibility for a whole. It's the same issue that we have in software engineering: most programmers never get good because so few ever work on real stuff in their paid gigs. I haven't worked in AAA game development, but it wouldn't surprise me to see the same principle in force: mediocre designers because most corporate work is mediocre and people never get the chance to get good.
I think Garriott has a point, though, in the assessment that it's rare for a "pure idea guy" to be anything but mediocre and passive. Curiosity is an important trait in a game designer. If you've got it, you'll code. That doesn't mean that you'll do it professionally or be able to write x86 assembly by hand, but you've no excuse not to fire up Codecademy and learn the basics of programming. Most of the great designers had other interests. You can see Garfield's CS and math backgrounds in the design of Magic. You can see Paul Graham's painting experience in his approach to programming and language design. The biggest hits require crossing wires.