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What They Don't Teach You At Game Design School
The Guardian Gamesblog has a piece wondering out loud at what they do and don't teach in game design courses. From the article: "Games development requires expertise, and hiring graduates fast-tracks game development. Arguably, the release from the burden of training should allow developers to create new technologies. The industry has encouraged the university games courses, sending development kits to departments and staff to seminars. Since Abertay's flagship programme launched almost nine years ago, 165 games-related degrees have sprung up across the UK, a trend equalled in other countries around the world."
I think this article is basically saying that you can't learn creativity in school, and that the games industry could benefit from fresh, outside voices.
How is this any different from any other creative industry?
Did I miss something?
Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
So you graduate school and immediately start designing games? Is that how the industry works? I thought you had to work your way up, then your opinion/experience starts to actually matter.
Despite what some people are saying here, the article is basically correct. The cross-pollination of ideas is what makes for great gaming. Original takes, fresh ideas... these are all essential. You need a broad knowledge and love of history, dance, psychology, engineering, sociology, and a lot of other fields. And all of these interact in interesting ways.
For example, say you're knocking out another wrestling game for THQ, and you're grappling with the problem of how to represent grappling. A few perspectives:
The gamer perspective: Press the A button rapidly / wag the sticks until one player achieves dominance. That player then executes an attack by pressing the A button again. This attack should be of similar magnitude to if the players had been simply smacking eachother around in the ring, though increase that if they've hardly grappled this round and decrease that if they've been grappling constantly.
The dancer perspective: Using the joysticks, the two players are trying to direct eachother's energies around eachother in a game of chicken. Commit too much to a movement, and your opponent can take advantage of your momentum and lose you. Commit too little, and you will never win.
The film criticism perspective: The player who "is on a comeback" or "is the underdog" gets a big boost to do a series of dramatic moves culminating in an amazing near-victory that is quickly shattered by a last-minute stunning turn of events, hopefully not involving yet another metal chair.
The engineering perspective Wrestling involves a series of roughly 15 positions and holds, and 19 reversals. The transitions between these states usually follows a set pattern of movements, each of which can be blocked by the opponent if they can react in time to the visual clues. The game, therefore, is a glorified back-and-forth of rock paper scissors to first manipulate your opponent into the position you want them and then release your damage move.
I often feel that my weakest trait as a designer is that I know too much about videogames. When a problem arises I know the solution, which just happens to be the same solution I've seen seven or eight other games employ. Pushing back against the easy answer during a crunch period when everyone has a 24 hours worth of stuff to do every day is difficult.
Likewise, game criticism plays a fault for a lot of the overall blandness. If you listen to Miyamoto talk about gaming, he talks about the wonderment of finding bottlecaps underneath bushes when you're outside as a kid. If you listen to the Silent Hill 4 team, they talk about the isolation of modern living in a apartmentalized, regimented society. If you listen to Game Pro, games are about polygon seams and framerates. We need deeper criticism. We need to be able to look at the ways in which games reflect the human condition. Film criticism does this pretty well, and is one reason why film crit is a valid if not necessary thing to study if you're going to become a film maker. Game criticism is, by comparison, hollow. That's one of the reasons why designers need to study everything: they each need to discover on their own how to take a critical yet humanistic eye to the finished product of gaming.
Other things they don't teach you in design school:
The team's enthusiasm is your most important resource. Sometimes it is worth throwing in a cheap but useless feature that everyone wants just to keep people happy. Sometimes you have to yank a great idea so that your programmer can see his wife.
Two to three weeks at the end of the project will be lost to nitpicky, contradictory requirements that the console manufacturers push onto everyone. Even if you've gone through it before and know that "This time it won't happen to us." it will. And ultimately it will have no bearing on the quality of your game: you're just tearing your hair out to keep the big three happy.
There is polish that developers notice, and polish that gamers notice. A develope
The ______ Agenda
The sound processor is right at the other end of the hardware next to the part that deals with the encryption and stuff like that, i.e. the stuff Sony wouldn't want everyone to get their hands on who bought an £80 dev kit. The professionals use an actual full box kit whereas we use a harddrive in the PS2 with Linux on it.