I think D-K is worth exploring a bit. It's easy for any game player to say "I could make this game better!" I remember thinking that when I played Warcraft 2. I thought, if only they had more units and more buildings, this game would be more awesome! Eventually I learned the lesson that my good buddy Antoine so cleverly encapsulated:
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove. – Antoine de Saint-ExuperyAnyway, point being, it's easy to think you, too could be a game designer. After all, you play games. I play games. I can criticize them. Therefore, I can do better. Right?
The example I've seen is often making music; playing in a band. Lots of people have tried playing a musical instrument, so I think a good number of people have experience enough with playing that they can see that you don't just pick up a guitar and be ready to hit it big after a couple weeks of practice. It takes a couple years to get good at playing an instrument, especially if you're expecting someone to pay you for it. Or drawing; I think it's common knowledge that it takes years of drawing and sketching and painting before others will give you money for your scribbles.
So, the context here is: do I know what I'm talking about, or is this the sort of stuff they teach in the first semester of Game Design School? Obviously, there's a problem in that there's not that many game design schools out there. Like, four, maybe. There's no general game design curriculum. It's very difficult for me to say whether or not other people have covered game design concepts that I see.
A few hours of surfing later: there's a lot of thought out there on game design curricula.
I see mention of things like Bartle's Types, but that's fairly rudimentary -- a lot has been added to the Types discussion since then. Nick Yee, for example, has researched player motivations in MMOs extensively. Understanding all of that data isn't the sort of thing you can put into a single blog post. He constantly writes about it. It's a deep topic. A good game designer should be familiar with it; I could see a Game Design Theory course spending a week or two covering MMO motivations.
I'm not a Raph fan. He got several "battlefield promotions" at Origin when the more senior designers on UO left; he was the last one still alive when the game shipped, and now people think that he created the game. He doesn't claim that, but he definitely profits from the design. I remember an interview I had with Sucker Punch (of Sly Cooper fame) and they basically instilled in me the idea of teach-practice-test: give the player a chance to learn a new skill in a safe environment, give them a few easy practice tests to make sure they can execute the skill, then test that skill in a challenging environment.
Raph's Theory of Fun seems to be that sentence, but stretched to book level. Looking a bit deeper, it seems the book is an apology for working in the entertainment industry, from someone that felt pressure from his family to do something "real." Maybe not. I haven't read the book, because, again, I'm not a Raph fan. The book has won tons of awards, though, so what do I know? If some other guy gives it a badge, then it must be a fact that it's brilliant, right? There's not a whole lot out there on video game design. Stop by a bookstore; count how many game design titles you find. I'm at a bookstore about once a week, and 95% of the time the number of design titles is ZERO. So if Raph has one of the top 10 books on video game design, then... um, there's only numbers one through four. I could publish this rambling rant as a book on game design and it'd be the 5th best book ever written on the subject.
Grr. Ok, so enough of that.
"Game design" also applies to board games, pen-n-paper RPGs, etc. I've seen several books on board game or war game design. The design of other games is significantly better documented than video game design.
Game design course curricula that I've seen generally cover the biggies: Raph's book, Bartle's paper, maybe related stuff like McCloud's Understanding books, Costikyan, and Sirlin. Textbooks themselves are scarce: Rules of Play, maybe not any others. That's the only one I know about. There's no series of textbooks for a bunch of different game design courses. The 'meat' of the design portion of the curricula are studios and seminars, anecdote books, post-mortems, and the like.
(Take Computer Science in contrast: you can stop by your local college bookstore and find textbooks for dozens of different comp sci classes. Plus software engineering texts, plus all the lay books on theory and practice for tons of subsets of theory within software development. My point is that there's one game design course textbook. Design courses read other books, the equivalent of lay books. Those books are not courses in game design; they cover aspects of game design, but aren't written as textbooks.)
So... where do I go for nomenclature? I can't justify spending too much time researching a given topic because there's not enough out there to find.
So I'm just going to make it up as I go along.
1 comment:
Several things to reply to here...
There are actually quite a lot of books on game design -- dozens and dozens. Most of them, however, grow very dated very quickly, because they are too tied to specifics of the game industry, and not enough to general principles. Too much tech in them, or production practices, etc. Some exceptions include "Rules of Play" and "Game Design Workshop."
Many of the more intriguing books are not published in the "game design" field at all, but instead come from folks like Jesper Juul and Ian Bogost, more on the academic side.
Finding any of these in the bookstore is hard to impossible, because the total US market for them is 10,000 people, so bookstores tend not to carry even the more canonical books in the field.
"There's no series of textbooks for a bunch of different game design courses." -- there are several books for specialized areas -- racing game design, FPS game design, etc. But as coursework, these don't tend to exist as classes -- academic training n games is still tiny, and "different game design courses" tends to be at the level of "single player" and "multiplayer" and not "narrative RPG."
Bartle's types have been elaborated a great deal, in fact. You should try out his book "Designing Virtual Worlds" which is deep and rich.
Computer science as a field is a lot more established. You're right that the nomenclature is kinda of scattered. But there's a fair amount of common language in things like th MDA framework, a lot of the stuff that has come out of the pen and paper world like the GNS framework, and so on.
Your summary of my history with UO is inaccurate, by the way; there was one previous lead designer, he left well before the game shipped (over a year prior), didn't do the design of core systems, and I was creative lead from that point forward, and lead designer later. There was no "lead designer" on the shipped game at first. That said, particularly early on, UO was a highly collaborative team, so I cannot and do not take full credit. Core systems were done by everyone. There's a reason why everyone on the programming staff is listed as "additional design" in the original credits.
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