Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
In my experience as a designer and creator of games, I've had only a precious few experiences
where a critic really impressed me with her insight into and attention to one of my creations.
Those experiences remind me why I create—to have someone connect with and understand
the thing I have designed.
They were also experiences that gave me a better understanding of my own work. What a critic
does is articulate an idea that's at work in a game, puts it in a context with other games, with
other schools. They help explain the work to others; they start a discussion.
That's what we do when we talk about design and our design decisions: we start a discussion.
And we allow others to join in that discussion, to participate in the dialogue, to contribute. Why
is this subject important enough to warrant a topic? It's not just so that a handful of industry
developers can consider themselves a little more savvy. It's because shattering the silence
around game design creates a conversation that everyone can learn from, whether they want
to become game creators, whether they didn't realize they wanted to make games until they
learned that developers are just as human as they are, whether they want to be informed critics,
or whether they're content just to be better-educated players. An open conversation about
game design demystifies this form that we care about and empowers us with the means to bet-
ter understand, think about, and, if we wish, to make digital games.
What is this topic? It's my attempt at furthering the discussion of design that we need so badly.
We need more topics that can kick off this conversation and give it places to start. For a while I
was attending a game school called The Guildhall at Southern Methodist University, majoring in
level design (I got kicked out after a few months), and it was pretty clear to me that my instruc-
tors didn't know where to begin teaching design. We watched videos about parallax scrolling in
Disney movies, and we took a test on
The Hero's Journey
.
Now, I'd be the first to admit that game design is “interdisciplinary”—that game designers ben-
efit from having a lot of different skills, from understanding things like how to animate depth to
what kind of stories players expect—but I still saw this wild grasping for subjects as a symptom
of the lack of a foundation from which to teach game and level design.
I also vaguely remember the level design textbook we had to read, which was biased toward
a single kind of game. Remember what I said about games discourse reproducing the same
kinds of games over and over? The topic was clearly written with first-person shooters in mind;
I remember a whole chapter on lighting. And while the principles of using lighting to create a
mood are interesting and definitely of use to a level designer, we should save the specifics for
after we have a grasp of the basics.
