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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.'"
1. Find neat mimic-able game
2. Copy game design
3. ???
4. PROFIT!
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
That sounds more like reverse engineering to me. I used to write games, but I don't play games in order to go, "hmmm, how can I do this in my game?" Usually I think, "why does this game suck and how can I make games that don't suck in the ways that this game sucks?"
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I find it a little like watching movies. I enjoy the movie, and for the most part I am immersed in the movie's story, yet at the same time there is a part of my brain that is viewing the movie itself with detachment, as an example of *craft*, and admiring the lighting and cinematography, etc.
It is the same with games. Most of myself engages fully in playing and enjoying the game, but there is this parallel track in my brain that is examining the mechanics and the decisions made by the designer. After 20 years of playing video games, I unconsciously seek out the boundaries of the state space. I will usually recognize the techniques the designers are using the shape my gameplay experience, even at the same time as I willingly suspend disbelief and enjoy said experience.
People with "Explorer" tendencies according to Bartle's Four might already play like this, too. And even game designers sometimes like to turn off their brain and just shoot stuff. But even when not consciously studying the game's mechanics, there is a part of my brain that is continually teasing them apart while I play.
You need to fiddle with the controller intently, then tell your mom you're going to tighten up the graphics on level 3.
Personally, I think this would be the right way, not the other way around. I don't care how a designer "wants" me to play a game. I'd prefer him to design a game I want to play. Maybe then we won't get the millionth sequel of a game nobody wanted to play in the first place, with fewer tedious missions that do increase play time but at the expense of everyone wanting to get it past him so he can get to more interesting ones.
Why is it that in every damn RTS game you have this stupid mission where you have to take a bunch of your critters through a lenghty, winding corridor? Is there anyone who really enjoys those missions? Nobody I talked to does. Everyone wanted to play RTS games to harvest resources, spend them on an army and drown the enemy in a mass battle. Does anyone really like those "I have only 10 infantery men and need to bring them home safe" missions?
Why is it that in every damn FPS game you have this mission where you need to find something hidden inside a twisted maze with corridors, all looking alike? No enemies to speak of, just running for an hour or two. Anyone here really liking that?
It's like it was in MUD times. Every MUD I know contained at the very least one maze. Wizards just loved to make them. Players just hated to play them. Every "new wizard guide" I read contained at the very least the "do not create mazes, for people loathe them" clause. And yet, we still get them. With graphics. And blackjack and hookers. Ok, no blackjack or hookers, that would maybe make them interesting.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Some players don't care about this stuff too much. They get a feel for the actions and just go with it. Others spend quite a bit of time reverse engineering these mechanics and working out the best way to manipulate these. I'm often one of the later.
I spent a couple of hours building spreadsheets that let me compare various bits of WoW gear and graphing the optimal moment to switch from +Int to mana/5 seconds to +Spirit gear. Why? Because a) I'm a massive fucking nerd, and b) because learning and using the math behind it was fun. A large part of the fun of WoW for me was working out the best systems to exploit the mathematics behind the game. Once I'd hit endgame and I'd unraveled the game systems, it held a lot less appeal, and I quit while my guild was still making good progress through MC.
I think this is part of the reason that Nethack remains so much fun for so many people. The math and systems behind the game are phenomenally complex and, while obfuscated, there is little else in the game to distract from them. Each game plays out in a slightly different way depending on how the various systems interact. (Although, for me that slightly different way seems to be Nethack finding a new way to have me kill myself.)
This does not compute.
Just because I've played computer games since they were words on a green CRT doesn't mean any game designer or company wants my opinion of how a game should be designed or executed. I voice my opinion by purchasing and playing what they do well, and beta-testing and ignoring what they do poorly.
Besides I'm not an all-around gamer, so I have a limited scope. I'm sure many fit into this category as well. I only have a limited amount of time for gaming, so I pick and choose carefully how I spend that time playing. No time/money/interest in consoles, no interest in FPS and no desire for any game that involves head-to-head against a person (PvP).
If they want my opinion on the evolution (and saturation) of the fantasy RPG since 1980, I'll gladly share it.
It's analysis, not exploring. The goal isn't to figure out the entire map, or find every little Easter Egg, or even to do funky things at the edge of the game. Analyzing a game means looking at the final product and trying to reconstruct A. what it is trying to do, B. how effective it is at doing it, and C. how it got to the state it is at. Then you can spin off the little mechanical issues, and art design choices.
As for making a game suck less, well the problem has always been that developers started out because they really like games. Most of them end up doing stuff they may enjoy, but it's not making the games they really wanted to make. And those who end up making the games they really wanted to make, well, they get developer conceit, where their idea is so sacred, and so cool, that they will fight for it, even when evidence mounts to show that it doesn't work.
The most eye-opening experience can be watching how someone else uses your software. 20 years ago, we would send videotapes of testing back to the development house, and they'd be shocked by the kinds of things we did. Now, playtesting is standard practice in most places, and some houses (Valve, for one) have turned it into an art.