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

Actually, it's what Bartle called "explorers"

[Moraelin]

Actually, it seems to me like it's simply about what Bartle used to call "explorers". Just to summarize it (badly) for whoever didn't read the paper, basically he looked at what players are doing in a MUD and came up with 4 categories, by what a player's main activity and drive seems to be. (Bear in mind that all people do more than one thing, though not always to the same extent.)

- socializers: their primary goal is to interact with people, make friends, chat, etc

- achievers: the folks who play it for the high score and bragging rights, basically. They work dilligently at achieving the highest level, having the top tier equipment set, having the biggest castle if the game allows that, etc.

- explorers: the folks who like to discover where everything is, and how everything works. These folks, yes, get their jollies by reverse-engineering your game.

- killers: the folks who like to harass, annoy, and hopefully drive someone completely off your game. (I.e., perma-kill them off the game, hence the name.)

That's, of course, just one way to split players into categories. You also have crafters vs adventurers, twitch gamers vs strategists, roleplayers vs munchkins, etc, etc, etc. The fun part is that most are orthogonal too, so it's really a very multi-dimensional universe.

I guess, I can see how someone could end up a game designer if they're in the explorer category.

But personally, I'd have an even bigger... well, not "advice", but "request" really, to game designers: don't assume that everyone else is a clone of yourself. E.g., if you play to reverse-engineer a game, don't assume that every single player out there is wired _exactly_ the same as you are. It may seem obvious, but smarter people have built whole theories -- or rather, hypotheses -- on the assumption that everyone else is ticking exactly the same. (Plus, it's the stuff fanboy flamewars are made of.)

Aiming to not have your game suck is a noble goal, and you have my thanks and respect for that already. But, really, "sucking" is a very subjective thing. It just means that in that multidimensional space of player goals, aspirations, personalities, play-styles, etc, your personality falls far enough from the volume covered by the game. E.g., if the game caters mostly to achievers with twitch-reflexes, and you're an explorer/strategist type, you'll think it sucks.

So one way to make it suck less -- or rather, suck for less people -- is to make sure that more than one type of players can pursue their own path and goals through it. It'll never be possible, nor often desirable, to make _everyone_ happy, but it's often possible to enlarge the space covered quite a bit.

Also, please try to avoid intersections where you should be doing unions. A game where it's possible to play as, say, a diplomat _or_ a gunner, tends to cover the tastes of more people than a game where you have to be a diplomat _and_ a gunner. The first is a union of people sets, the latter is an intersection, and much smaller than either set at that. A lot of games ended up sucking for more people because they failed to understand that: when trying to cater to more than one audience, they ended up catering to the intersection instead of the union.