Everybody s a Game Designer

Everybody's a Game Designer

Games are for kids, right? They're simple, easygoing fun, right? Ergo, anybody should be able to design them, right? WRONG! It takes lots of training and years of practice to become a good game designer. Surprise, surprise. Game design, like any other serious activity, requires expertise. Yet this simple lesson is lost on just about everybody. I don't know how many times I have seen executives butt into the game-design process, imposing their personal opinions on game designers who have had years of experience. I've seen QA testers try to pass off their own opinions on game design as bug reports. Beginning game designers at their first Game Developers Conference have waylaid me in the halls to lecture me on my purported design mistakes.

Such problems are usually little more than irritations, but when practiced by executives, they can have serious consequences. For example, in January of 2002, four executives launched an online games company with a novel revenue model. They offered substantial cash prizes to players who won their game. In truth, it was really a puzzle, not a game, but that's not relevant to this tale. What was striking about their company is that they didn't include an experienced game designer in their executive staff. They had a CEO, a marketing person, a CFO, and a CTO but no game designer. Obviously, they figured that they could design the game themselves. The result was predictable: Their product was boring, very few customers signed up, and they pulled the plug after just two months on the market.

We can laugh at these clods because they wasted only their own money, but it's a different story when some sophomoric executive ruins a product by trying to play game designer. One of these jokers even boasted to me once that his ignorance of game design was a strength: Untainted by conventional thinking, he could think outside the box better than experienced game designers. Can you guess how his company came out?

On this point I will offer a word of praise to the larger games companies. The executives of established games companies seem content to leave the game design to, well, game designers. Perhaps they're just too busy cutting big deals, or counting their stock options, but one way or the other, they've got the right idea.

A variation on this is the programmer who thinks he can design a game because he can write a program. The most celebrated exponent of this view is John Carmack, creator of Doom, Quake, and other bloodthirsty exercises in nihilism. John is reported to have declared that "game creation is 99% programming and 1% game design." His declaration is certainly consistent with his design philosophy, because he has no design philosophy. He simply implements other peoples' game designs better than they do. The ploy has made John rich, famous, and widely respected among games programmers, so I cannot dispute its efficacy. Indeed, if you're as good a programmer as John Carmack (and as bad a designer), then you should do the same thing.

Be advised, however, that the super-duper graphics algorithms that made John's fame have now been supplanted by superior algorithms implemented directly in silicon. Nowadays, any clumsy slob of a programmer can simply use a few hardware calls to perform amazing graphics tricks far beyond anything John built his reputation on. No dummy he, we can be certain that John Carmack has stayed ahead of the game, developing even more brilliant algorithms always better than what the hardware can do. Someday soon, however, video display hardware will become so powerful that John and his acolytes will find themselves clawing for marginal performance gains that nobody cares about. ("Brand X models only 10,000 hairs on a person's head, but our technology offers 20,000!") Meanwhile, the real game designers will still have plenty of exciting challenges on their plates.