Game Design Perspectives

I have several motivations to write this blog post. I knew I wanted to call it game design perspectives because it is about game design and perspectives about it but I didn’t really know how to put it. So I decided to put up an image and made a search on my favorite free image plugin. I searched for “perspective” and found this one: perfect.

When I coded my first game I had no idea what game design was. Some years ago, right before starting up Vortix with Marco and Diogo I had no coding knowledge whatsoever so I focused on game design. Problem with game design back then was that everyone wanted to be a game designer… it was the game designer wanabe boom period.

Back then (and it wasn’t that long ago) every guy that played games and wrote two paragraphs of a Tolkien ripoff considered himself a game designer, me included. Many of them didn’t make it up to the professional stage. Looking back, the only ones I know that got into the game development industry are either artists or engineers. The only game design wanabe that managed to pull it was me… and I’m more a programmer than a designer nowadays.

The perspective back then, the passion, was about the game. We all steped our of the dream and learnt that game design is about decision making, getting feedback and more decision making. All game designers, wanabe or not, had only one goal: the game! Like the two crossed railway lines, game design is all about crossing left and right sides of the brain. See the whole while addressing the details. Be able to analyse data and crunch numbers while being able to… well… feel…

It is sad to observe that on a market such as the flash game space the perspective is that a designer’s objective is to make a game that is sponsorable. I find this not only sad, but wrong.

Squize commented on a blog post of his that:

(…) it’s all about the creative process now, so I’d rather push myself and fall short than work to someone else’s design. (…)

Julian from LongAnimalGames mentioned today in the FGL Chat that he considered more interesting the psychology of players than game development itself.

It is a trend I find in many high profile developers. They care about business and particulary money when hiring, when selling, when paying, when discussing deals. Money doesn’t get in the way of design and they have other interests… the creativity, the psychology, the technical expertise and others. It is interesting that these are the ones that make the great, memorable and amazingly sponsorable games. I know one exception… that simply confirms the rule.

Like them we are not against the commercial or business side of all this and we take it very seriously, but game design is about the decisions, the rules, the player, the big shiny paradigms. Production, marketing, whatever, that’s the business part, our job as designers is to reach as many players as possible. We might argue that the bottom-line, that’s what will make the game sponsorable, but it is not the motivation when making game design decisions. Money is a unnecessary distraction while designing.