In part 3.2 I tried to explain the role the game designer. But it is also true that while some of us are always game designers, while some of us are occasionally game designers, all of us are just designers at all times (in game development). If the sense of design is just the ability to recognize and create a pattern (my interpretation) then this is a common human trait and even more so in people who are artists. By the way, all of you in the game industry, you are artists. Face it. How does that work then?
Imagine the world like DnD where magic is a common occurrence. And let’s take the population and split it into groups of different level of magic usage. Naturally, there will be those are talented at magic and spend their lives dedicated to just magic. They will reach the heights of level 7-10 spells in their life. These would be our real-life game designers – people who keep track of hundreds of patterns in their head at once. Then we have the people who are proficient at magic but deal with other things rather than just magic. They will reach in their life spells of level 3-6. These I will consider designers, people who are confident when they need to deal with individual patterns. But because they focus a lot of their time in other areas of life, they can only occasionally compete with the level of game designers. Then we have the general population, people who can probably master spells of level 1-2. This is our universal ability for pattern recognition. The majority has it, it’s only a question of how far people want to take this. Should they choose to become designers or even game designers, they will have little issue in this. And then we have a type of people who have no affinity to magic (barbarians and fighters, I guess?). They don’t have the affinity for magic and that’s the end of it. No matter how hard they wave those wands and how loud they read out those scrolls, nothing will come of it. Same thing in real life – there are those, who simply have no sense of patterns. It’s not a crime, it just the way it is. These individuals most likely have some other sort of expertise.
What do you do with those are bad at design then? To be honest, I don’t know. I feel that people within game development and artists, in general, are the ones who have a high sense of design. If the sense of design is not there, I am not sure if they can be a part of this branch at all… Perhaps if a coder or an artist can follow instructions to the letter they will create just what you ask of them? But if left with creative freedom they won’t be able to deliver much, since the ability to generate patterns is not there. I am not sure at this point what to say about the subject of bad designers…
And so, when I speak of design now, I mean the general ability to recognize and create patterns. And in game development, most of us are proficient at this, while game designers are supposed to be experts. Also note, that an expert could mean not the ability to create an exquisite pattern, but the ability to identify any given pattern in a minimum amount of time, the ability to retain information of hundreds of patterns and the ability to interconnect a large number of patterns. Okay, now that I have explained what this is about, here are some of my observations that are about the design in general.
Start exposing yourself to new ideas if you want to become a better designer. They have told us this in our class so I’m simply repeating here. Watch movie genres you don’t like, force yourself to play games you would usually not play, go to a museum you would not step into before, attend talks about subjects that you don’t understand or aren’t interested in, visit antiquity and curiosity shops, read books. Approach these from a perspective of someone who is generally interested in how they work. Make this about the structure rather than the message (the message is also important though). You might find that suddenly everything is interesting to you. All this knowledge will make you a better designer. I can say that this summer I’m super hyped to go to the Museum of Modern Art and I loathe that place…
Deconstruction of a concept as a solution to a bad design. This is partly a copy of something I wrote in part 1.2 where I was discussing ideas and how to handle them. Since this has also to do with the design, I will partly repeat it. There are no bad ideas, rather there are bad deliveries. But it should not be hard for a good game designer to pick apart a concept document since a good game designer will be able to identify a base pattern or a foundation for a pattern in any type of mess. Even 5 pages of text that are boiled down to a single word, is still something that a good game designer should be able to accomplish without too much effort.
A show of small potential for a great design goes long way too. Another something I talked about back in 1.2. Some people are not good at articulating their ideas and designs. Other ideas seem like silly bullshit. But even the worst of these can be iterated by talented people into something amazing. A tweak to the design here, a clarification there and voila! Which leaves the question: was the original idea or design bad then? Perhaps it was simply not communicated well by the original creator. Part of being a great designer, in general, is to identify these patterns or holes in the patterns that can be filled.
Liberal arts or the conversion of heretics to the true faith. After I wrote this line of thoughts to myself something curious occurred. Ernest Adams, one of our teachers in this education, who also happened to hold the award ceremony’s opening speech at Gotland Game Conference 2017 made a comment about how GAME was settled with Liberal Arts by Uppsala University when GAME became the part of the university. And then Ernest chuckled to himself. But, I think that this might not a have been a coincidence. I had a pleasure of socializing with a bunch of “liberals” (that’s how I call Liberal Arts students) and most of them were gamers themselves who also showed a high level of comprehension of design in general. Perhaps it is because Liberal Arts expose the minds to an influx of different ideas and phenomena. At first inspection, Liberal Arts to me seemed a complete chaos. But what if the base of it is just a high variety of different patterns in different contexts? You should also look up what people study in Liberal Arts because I personally had no idea until I happened to become a roommate with a student from that education. By the end of the year, I successfully swayed that person to join the Game Design education, ha! So, if you are thinking about what to study to fill in those free academic credits then Liberal Arts is a safe bet!
Extra Credits also has an episode (man, those guys are so spot on!) where they support this opinion. They generally talk about what makes a good game designer. I guess I could have already linked this video in part 3.2 but that part of my blog was directed at explaining who game designers are to other members of a development team, rather than giving a general explanation of who they are. Anyway, this episode is also great at explaining who game designers are supposed to be:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNscZCrke4k
The ability to interpret and compare designs. Comparing two good designs is like comparing apples to pears. They are simply two different items that have no proper way to be compared to one another because good or bad is subjective. But what you can do is run both designs through a list of requirements and see which of them succeeds more at delivering certain criteria. Check each of designs for properties they possess and choose the ones that are needed for the assignment. Establish what is it you are going for and which design delivers more points instead of asking which design is better.
In my first project, I had a case situation which is a great example of this. The artists got an assignment in their class to create a GUI menu for the game they were producing. And here is the picture of the two results we got (both of these never made it into the game, unfortunately):
Now, I don’t know what exactly the assignment was but I do remember that (in the words of the artists) the teacher preferred left design. Now, what the teacher opinion was is beside the point here. And remember that I had no pre-requisite at all for this delivery. When I, as the game designer was presented with this, I deemed them both excellent. But excellent in different ways.
The left one to me was: traditional, professional, on point. The left one was: individual, quirky, but also something which at that moment in time I called “accidentally great design”. Look at how the tree, which has been made earlier without any consideration of GUI became the perfect nesting place for the button. Note how the buttons involving the game are clustered on one side, while the Exit button is off to the side? This way you can hopefully see that both of these GUI are great in their own way. Since we couldn’t decide on which one to use I asked a guild of mine to help. And, (surprise-surprise!) people split almost in half between those who preferred the clean design and those who liked the quirky design. Which proves my point of how it is hard to claim something is better than another thing. People just have different perceptions. What you can claim is that something delivers better for the given task. A good designer needs to understand that we are looking for specific criteria in the design. And if you end up in a situation of a tie, then you should trust your gut feeling. But remember to explain your opinion to your team and the people whose design isn’t going to be picked to avoid any hurt feelings.
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