Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie?

Thanks to Globe News for their interview discussing game design pitfalls with Ernest Adams, columnist at industry site Gamasutra, in relation to a recent Toronto game design lecture. Adams' talk, called 'Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie', has the premise that "whenever game designers add an annoying, sloppy, illogical or cliché game design element, they are denied the junkfood they love so much", and in the interview, Adams also laments the inherent difficulties in making games: "If you imagine what it would be like if you had to invent a new projector for every movie, that's what it is for game development", as well as gaming award shows, which he says "...tend to confuse the difference between technological achievement and aesthetic achievement."

Comments

no bad games were successful?

[egomaniac]

There are lots of good games that were not terribly commercially successful. However, there are no bad games that are commercially successful.

What the hell? Is this guy actually claiming that Enter the Matrix (which was very successful commercially) was not a bad game? What about Black and White?

There has been a long, long list of games that were steaming turds and yet sold very well at retail.

Re:no bad games were successful?

[hibiki_r]

It seems to me it's all about deciding what makes a game good. I belive that trying to do something that was never done before(deer hunter, B&W), having impressive graphics (Myst, FFVII) or even just using a franchise succesfully (Enter the Matrix) makes a game better. A game doesn't have to do everything right to become a hit. Plenty of times it's enough to do one thing really, really well.

A "well educated" gamer has played more than enough good games that he can become way less forgiving with a game's flaws. Repetitive gameplay, clipping problems, or just not being an innovative game become major flaws. Does FFVII seem that impressive after playing Chrono Trigger? What about the repetitive sections of Halo? To many people, flawed games seem great, just because they've never seen what a quality, highly polished game is all about. As long as the game does one thing really well, the casual gamer will buy the game, and recommend it to all of his friends, and that's what makes a game a hit.

So yes, I belive that Enter the Matrix had some really interesting ingredients that separated it from the crowd. So did Black and White, Halo, Tomb Raider and many others. Don't ask me to play though any of them again though: I'd rather play Metroid.

Re:no bad games were successful?

[DarkZero]

What the hell? Is this guy actually claiming that Enter the Matrix (which was very successful commercially) was not a bad game? What about Black and White?

There has been a long, long list of games that were steaming turds and yet sold very well at retail.

I think that he was definitely wrong, but it's important to point out that he wasn't TOO wrong. While there are definitely a few examples of bad games selling well, for the most part they aren't "commercially successful". Black and White was probably a success, but games such as Enter the Matrix and Tomb Raider weren't because bad games such as those tend to create a money pit during production. When you see a bad game that sells well, it's usually the result of many, many millions of dollars of production, marketing, delays, special features, and numerous failed "rough drafts" of the game. They're usually released for no other reason than for its developer to cut their losses and try to make back some of the huge amount of money they spent.

None of the math I've ever seen regarding Enter the Matrix has proven it to be a commercially successful game. Its developers were very upfront about how much it cost to make because they thought it would make the game seem like a really big deal. Their revenue, last I checked, has not matched that number. The entire thing was a case study in excessive, wasteful game design, and it couldn't possibly make a substantial amount of money. Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness was the same way. After that many delays, many of which I believe came with a ton of print ads advertising the game's new release date, it couldn't have been very profitable. It was one of Eidos's flagship titles for the year and it probably cost as much as two or three flagship titles. And despite its early sales, the game was only at the top of the retail and rental charts for about a month.

So yeah, he's definitely wrong because there are exceptions to the rule, but he wasn't too far off the mark.

Bad Game features

[hackwrench]

In the .hack games the book that gives info on monsters is inaccessable when you get to said monsters. You have to exit the game environment to access the virtual e-mail, which isn't necessary in the show, you can't access your party's inventory or ask them what their stocks are, so you can restock them, and they often have equipment for sale that is better than the equipment they have on. Not to mention, the towns in the game are a faint shadow of the ones in the show.

standardize!

[m0rphin3]

Part of the problem is standardization.
Hollywood makes movies on film. The same technology, the same cameras, the same editing equipment (and probably the same actors) are going to be used on every production. So it's basically easy and (relatively) cheap to make a movie, unless you need tons of extras or some new tech.

I think gaming should go in the same direction,
and we're starting to see it happen. Many games use the same engine (Lithtech, ut2003,etc.) and that's going to lower the bar for making a game.

When you don't need to reinvent the wheel every time you want to make a game, but instead can focus on the story, the backdrop and the characters, I think gaming will be ubiquitous. Sure, you'll always have the large corporate politically-correct games, but when it becomes easier for 'indie' designers to make large-scale games, we'll see the dawning of a new era.

Re:standardize!

[ajutla]

Then again, games are fundamentally different in nature from movies, aren't they? All movies provide the same sort of experience--you watch them and they're about real people, usually, in real situations--but the reason people play games (in general) is that they're different from one another--there are a lot of different genres of games, and even games in the same genre have completely different styles. If games standardize to using, say, one engine, then we'll end up with a lot of games that are extremely similar to one another and we'll sacrifice that variety.

Re:standardize!

[Kris_J]

You've described exactly the opposite approach to how I enjoy games. I enjoy the basic concept of the games, not the eye-candy. If you push out cookie-cutter games all based around the same engine, as far as I'm concered you're releasing the same game over and over. I believe as much time should be spent developing new technology for games as is currently spent on eye-candy and marketing.

Perhaps if I enjoyed more than Doom in the FPS genre or any RTS game I might be into the n-th generation FPS engine or not mind that RTS game X is "just like" RTS games A-W. But I didn't so I'm not.

Game: Featureing a new wheel!

[AnamanFan]

As a student working on a graphic adventure game, I agree completely with the statement on lack of standards.

Right now I am faced with the issue of game engines. Since I'm doing the 'slideshow of images and video' approach, the only commercial tool out there is Director [Flash doesn't handle long videos]. The school has Director, but only educational versions which are branded as educational and legally not allowed to be seen outside of the classroom. I have been trying to find an engine that will allow me to create a game [technologically] like Riven, that's portable to MAC and PC. It's either that or make a brand new engine, which I don't have time to do with-in the scope of the project.

So far there are not any OSS/Low cost solutions that I have found. Any pointers are appreciated and welcomed!

No Way!

[Asprin]

You can have my crates when you pry them from my cold dead hands.





(Miss you, OMM!)

There should be Designer Canons

[quantax]

I posted this earlier this week during the Gaming Canon's discussion, but it is more relevant here; basically there should be a game designers canon more so than a gamers canon. If game developers do not see good gameplay for themselves, by what reference are they supposed to create it. Like painting, sculpture, one looks to the masters for inspiration. Through understanding these works, one can better understand their own work and thus be a better creator.

Such an example I would make is Morrowind; now regardless of whether or not you like Morrowind, no one can deny that it is epic in scope and succeeds in doing what RPGs have failed to do in general: a true non-linear questing system, as well as open-ended magic and open-ended character development, where the character develops naturally based on what you do, and the skills you use. Those above mentioned attributes make the gameplay in Morrowind something that should be both examined and re-implimented else where. In this example, I chose morrowind to prove my point, but you can apply this to many genre-breaking/creating games. There SHOULD be a list of games that every developer should play so that they can not only know what the 'masters' have done, but so they can improve upon it as well.

SCUMM engine rocks!

[protogoogoo69]

I think most of the original games were made in the 1990-1996 era when there were more restrictions on graphics. I think this forced some developers to deal with the content of the game instead of spending all the time in making it look good. To see my point, pit yourself on the tv show trading spaces. Ignoring the "reality" aspect, there is a lot of pressure to be creative when there is a budget ($1000). But if you set that budget higher ($100,000), you relieve a lot of the pressure of having to think or be "creative", or "innovative".

My favorite game of all time was "The secret of Monkey Island." It was made with the SCUMM engine. Sure, the graphics weren't "Enter the Matrix"- or DeusEx-style, but the humor was awesome. The puzzles weren't totally convoluted and not too easy either, while Elaine Marley was pretty hot in 16-color! ;) Now if only we can pump out some more games like that. I mean, I haven't laughed that hard since MST3K went off the air years ago (ignoring reruns). How many games can do that? If you played these games, just consider how long it took to create all that humor, the storyline, the scenes, etc.

Your average game developer these days can probably code up a storm, but can he write a good story? I think thats whats missing in many games: a good story. Sure, anyone can create short term objective (ie. pong!), but what about all the other elements that people like? Do people really want to play a repititive task over and over again? I don't think so, not unless its some cheapo game meant to kill some time while waiting for a kernel to compile. Granted, some people do not want to get stuck into a long game, either, which is why many have started to include a save-game option. Furthermore, a good game should not lose its appeal after it has been conquered/beaten. Sort of like reading your favorite book or watching your favorite movie a second time and finding more details you hadn't noticed before, the game should allow the gamer to "explore" other parts of the game they hadn't noticed before. For example, most side-scrolling games get boring after you beat it. Contra was popular because you could play god-mode (u-u-d-d-b-a-b-a-start), but this wasn't in the design, it was a cheat. How many people actually played this game without using the cheat after beating it? Now look at how many more DOOM worlds were created after the majority of gamers beat DOOM. In this case, both games had a crappy storyline, but it was the game engine that helped retain DOOM gamers. By allowing more freedoms to the gamer, the game would not become dull after beating it. However, a game company does not care about game retention, just about consumer retention. So they do not assume the popularity of a game, but rather try to shorten deadlines in order to release as many games before christmas as possible. There is a tradeoff between developers producing excellent quality games and the company producing an excellent quantity of games. The decisions made by upper management on how to handle this tradeoff will effect the developers ability to focus on a good story, good long-term objective game, a good game engine, and good graphics.

I think that anyone can be creative if they put their mind to it, but they need time. Which leads me to believe that the root of all these bad game design problems are a side effect of the phb's rush to produce more quantity. And this isn't limited to game software, just look at the problems from Win95 which came close to NOT making the 1995 deadline. Oh yeah, and then there's my favorite quote from Bill: "If you can't make it good, at least make it look good." Hmm...

There are other factors too, probably related to the limited gaming experiences of the developers and the availability of game engines. If we trained game developers by having them play e

Re:SCUMM engine rocks!

[protogoogoo69]

Well, obviously IANAGD (I Am Not A Game Developer) and suffering a little from FAS (false authority syndrome). ;) I study math mostly. This whole situation reminds me of the problem with trying to quantify worker "productivity". You can do it with machines because their associated variables are typically bounded. But, humans are completely different. Many execs do not understand this, so they propose these naive measurement schemes like [lines of code / hour] for programmers or [number of patients served / day ] for respiratory or physical therapists. Clearly, there are problems with the models based on these metrics.

Now, trying to measure game design is a similar problem. If there were a way to quantify game quality, a way to quantify game graphics quality, and a way to measure or estimate the amount of time required to produce a "good" game, then I think we would have enough to make a good model. Unfortunately, we have variables like game genre, machine architecture, controller ergonomics and button assignments, single- and group-playability, graphics, story and originality, length of objective, and re-playability. Then we have tradeoffs like if you were to base new games on popular old games, would this draw away from originality? Now, back to using junkfood as positive reinforcement for game development, this would depend on whether we can actually measure progress. But what if one programmer contributes a block of code that helps to prevent cheating, while another programmer sees it as impractical because of the obscurity of the vulnerability? Relative measurements, indeed. It seems like the best measurement (the only measurement?) we can use is popularity.

Anyway, this issue is far more complex than I had originally thought. Thanks for not totally flaming me. :)