A really old game design essay

Cory Doctorow’s next book has all sorts of interesting editions, including one with endpapers made from ephemera from friends of his. I went looking for papers to send him. Flipping through old notebooks and scratch pads, I found a 2000 word essay-cum-manifesto-cum-tirade that I do not recall writing. It’s fiery and jejune and I can tell I was in my early twenties.

So I am sending the five pages of legal pad, scribbled frantically and passionately on both sides. I barely remember being the guy who wrote it, at a time before the World of Warcraft mentions on TV and the casual games on the web, at a time when it seemed like the corporations were already plenty big, back when “designer” was not even a title you saw, or if it was seen it was not accorded much respect. I don’t even know if it was written for an audience or not. At times it seems to speak to listeners, and at times it sounds like I was talking to myself.

I’m also posting it here, not because I agree with everything that I thought all those years ago, and not because it’s deathless insight deserving of being brought into the light. No, I post it because I just turned 38 on Monday, and it seemed worth remembering that passion; because even though many of the problems the essay discussed have changed, and times have moved on, there are always plenty of folks who are in their early twenties themselves and are railing away, and maybe they could use the fiery jejune kindred spirit of the past to keep them company.

“The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games.”

— Eugene Jarvis

Game design is an art and a craft. From the craft aspect of it we know that it involves predictable patterns, specific elements and tools that are common; in a word, we learn that it is to an extent quantifiable. It is not alchemical and mysterious. It obeys principles which may or may not be articulated or understood by its practitioners.

It is also an art – and there are no arts that are not also crafts. That means that it also strives to bottle lightning, to capture Lorca’s duende; it strives to shatter barriers and to communicate, provide venues of discussion and new contexts, enlighten, or even merely entertain. It must innovate (even if only in the creators’ eyes) or it is not worthy of the name.

There is no area of human endeavor which lacks antecedents. There is no art or craft which successfully ignores its tradition and context. Game design has a long history – longer in fact than actual written history – and while it has never been studied as well as it might, there are those who look back, those who have studied it, and those who have applied the lessons learned in their own work.

Computer game design is also an art and a craft. It has a short history. It has much of traditional game design in it, but it is a different medium. It has the relationship to it that writing a screenplay does to writing a novel. It would be foolhardy to tackle a screenplay without knowing of writing, yet it would also be foolhardy to tackle a screenplay knowing only of writing novels.

There is no real criticism of computer game design. It is in its infancy. We do not know what the implicit rules in it are. We, as a community of artists and craftsmen, do not self-evaluate. And without that self-evaluation and self-criticism, the genre will develop only in fits and starts.

It took film decades to learn this lesson. Television is just catching on to it. We can learn from that: it behooves us to learn from what we do, to analyze how we do things, to learn to quantify and measure and define what we do, and how we do it.

It makes financial sense, if we are businessmen seeking to make money from a craft.

It is all that can propel us to the realm of art, if we are craftsmen.

We are driven to do it, if we are artists, for this impulse to ask ?”how did he do that?” is the quintessential tool of learning art.

*

Game design is an art and a craft. It is not a business. The games that result may however be a highly profitable business. The fact that monetary factors constrain what can be done with an art and a craft is nothing new; artists have been operating with these constraints for years. Every poem is constrained by its language, every painting by its canvas. And both are constrained by the artists’ need to make his rent.

Art is always done within the constraints of a box. The same goes for designing games. None right now bother codifying the rules of zero-g 4d chess, because it lies outside the box. We ignore monetary, budgetary, and scheduling boxes at our peril, for if the painter cannot afford a canvas, there won’t be a painting at all.

However, while being an artist may involve living in a box, it does not mean that one compromises artistic vision or craftsmanship for the sake of the money. Not only is it poor art, but it is also poor business practice, for it results in a loss of consumer confidence. An artist’s name, or brand name, or company’s name, are only as good as their product.

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Game design, and particularly computer game design, is learned by proxy or casual apprenticeship. It is absorbed by the intuition, not by the mind, and it is learned by doing. It is not taught. It is too expensive in materials, hours, and people to allow casual experiments. We see staffs made up of gamers, because it is better to have development teams made up of fans who might have a glimmering than one made up folks who have no idea what they are doing.

Yet anyone can tell you that they can be a reader but not a writer. Enjoy poetry and not be a poet. Love art without being a painter. Explain why they disliked a film without being in the slightest capable of making one.

A gamer is not a game designer. Nor must a game designer be an avid gamer.

From the standpoint of the computer game developer, this makes every process of development a total crapshoot. From a strategic business perspective, it is eminently desirable to reduce this risk factor, which surely contributes to the traditionally high turnover at computer game developers.

It makes hardnosed fiscal sense for studios to train their development teams in game design. And if they do not know what training consists of (and right now, nobody does) then they should develop it, in order to pinpoint needed skills, to reduce the risk factor in development schedules, curtail costly R&D time in developing new projects, and better assess the value of their employees.

Whatever one may feel about the executives and businesspeople at the large corporations that dominate the game industry today; whatever one thinks of the those pioneers of a decade ago that now head up studios and are deskbound executives who juggle budgets, headcounts, and interviews; whatever the rank and file thinks of these people, their commitment to quality, their devotion to the process, or their loyalty to the great god Mammon – they are in this business largely because of their desires to make great games. Some of them couldn’t define tic-tac-toe even if a 10-point stock price drop were held to their head, but that doesn’t matter. They are still here out of some sort of love – the same love the rank and file has – for what they do. If they came to make a quick buck, they’ll soon be gone. The entertainment industry is a risky place to make a quick buck, and it will either chew them up, or they will move on to more lucrative pastures after making back their nut. Or they stick because they are thrill seekers – and might as well be gamers!

There will always be conflict between the money people and the artists. And the managers will always be caught in the middle. But we are on the same team, and share the same goals. Every once in a while everyone needs reminded of the broader range of those goals, and how they go beyond one’s immediate job.

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Warning, heresy forthcoming. Don’t stop reading until you get past the hard part.

Programmers are irrelevant to computer game design.

This insane overstatement conceals an important truth. Technology in a computer game is akin to paint and canvas for a painting. It does not define the art. And while as I write this the market is flooding with Quake engines and Unreal engines and blah blah blah,

AN ENGINE IS NOT A GAME.

They are the box in which design is done. They are constraints, they are tools, they are canvases and media.

It is no sin to design a game around anengine. But from that instant, the engine is at the service of the game, and never vice-versa. Otherwise your game is almost certainly going to be crap.

Programming and art are tools that the designer employs. The game is at the center and therefore the designer is at the center. This does not mean that programmers are actually irrelevant as the shock-value statement above has it; it means that at best they can execute portions of the design in better or worse ways, but they cannot alter the core of what the game is.

There is a prevailing wisdom that most companies in the computergame industry do not employ game designers.

The prevailing wisdom is bullshit.

There are people out there who define the inner nature of a game, its logic, what variables and methods it uses to operate. There are people who hold the vision of what the game is like. These people are game designers. Many of them are also programmers, but that just means that they may be better able to ensure that their vision translates into actual code.

A company which relies on programmers as game designers will fail. A company that places the burden on programmers will produce engines, not games, unless the programmers are also game designers. That is because programmers are irrelevant to computer game design to the extent that given a solid design, it merely requires a competent programmer to make it reality. The more ambitious the design, the more likely it is to require higher quality execution, but programming is execution, not design.

Execution is tremendously important. Upon it rely our craft and our fiscal success. Thus programmers, and artists (and marketers!) are tremendously important. Yet the equation is obvious.

With no design, those things that are incredibly important don’t matter at all.

*

So what is a designer?

They define systems. They have enough knowledge and understanding of their medium to be able to converse with both programmers and artists, with marketers and managers, on their own ground. They integrate the work of others. On the small scale, they make the puzzle. On the large scale, they fit all the puzzle pieces together. They specify what a system does and they make sure that game flow is fun. They are therefore a bit of a visual artist, a bit of a programmer, a bit of a logician and a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a psychologist and a bit of a manipulator. Maybe even a bit of a jerk.

If a designer at the center of a project cannot grasp all the aspects of the process of development, then the end result will suffer drastically.

It is not necessary that a designer be able to do all the jobs on the team well. Just that he be able to do most of them in a pinch.

This is so he understands the materials with which he works and can treat these materials and their creators with respect and understanding.

Some places call this the “director” and others the “lead designer” and others the “producer” and others just “the boss.” The title is irrelevant. Vision is not generally held by committees, and it has to be someone’s job to hold the vision.

They ought to get paid lots, but that’s another story, another day, another tirade.

*

It’s an old argument in academic circles. It is phrased usually in the wrong terms: “can you train a poet?” or “can you teach acting?” The question itself is ducking the question. Of course you can teach the techniques, and this activity I am undertaking is a discovery of what those techniques are, which I undertake as much for my own edification as yours. And even if all that comes of it is better craftsmen, it will have been worthwhile.

But the ducked question is, can you train a visionary?

Who the hell knows. What does it matter? This is a field pregnant with possibility. In its short history it has altered the discipline of city planning, revised treatment of psychological disorders and disabled children, changed the nature of military training, advanced the science of cognitive analysis, created the theories behind artificial life, is making its first moves towards the virtual realities and societies of the future.

Computer game design is the art form of the next century.

So let us not denigrate the designer or minimize his importance. Let us not say it is merely entertainment.

“Merely?” Merely fun?

How dare we say “merely” a game? When joy is what makes life bearable?

Playing games may not be the computer’s only real purpose, as Jarvis put it, but it is a noble one. Let’s live up to it.