How To Play Like a Game Designer

jillduffy writes "The GameCareerGuide site has up an article on playing to learn. Folks who make games play them differently than you or I; they're looking at the mechanics from a first-hand perspective. James Portnow's article attempts to relay some of the essence of that experience, to allow us to play with a more critical eye: 'Playing games in order to study them is not what most people would consider "fun." This doesn't mean it isn't fun at all; it just means you have to think a different way. You have to find joy in discovering mechanics and watching their emergent properties unfold. You have to be willing to endure a certain amount of tedium in order to glean clues about the inner workings of a game. Most of all, you have to be able to enjoy playing bad games as well as good.'"

Comments

This is fucking stupid.

[The Living Fractal]

So you can discover the mechanics... Well congrats to you. Likely you'll find that from game to game in the same genre, like from MMO to MMO or FPS to FPS, the mechanics are generally THE SAME ACROSS THE GENRE. In FPS games you get armor, you get damage, you get running, jumping, crouching, rolling, you get modifiers to the damage or mitigation you have. You get modifiers to your aim through calming down your natural sway from breathing. Great, now you know the 'inner workings'. Congratufuckinglations.

What makes a game good, a game well designed, is that the mechanics are used and interchanged in interesting ways that create depth and the ability for a person to feel unique in the game and yet still powerful or useful. And also how the art direction melds with those mechanics. And how polished they are. And the story.

Using the mechanics that way is a creative art. You can go play other games and see the mechanics, but if you aren't creative yourself the best you can do is copy them. And how is that going to get you ahead of the game? You're going to regurgitate and retexture something that is already out there, and the likely case is that yours will quite quickly fall behind that which you copied because, to put it bluntly, you are a copying, plagiarisng, asshole.