Design Components and Processes - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 32

You can adapt the first obligation, the dut y to entertain, somewhat if you're design-
ing the game for education, research, advertising, political, or other purposes, but
for recreational video games it is imperative. If a player is going to spend time and
money on your game, your first concern must be to see that he enjoys himself. This
means that entertaining the player takes priority over your own desire to express
yourself creatively. You must have a creative vision for your game, but if some
aspect of your vision is incompatible with entertaining the player, you should mod-
ify or eliminate it.
The second obligation, the duty to empathize, requires you to place yourself in the
position of a representative player and imagine what it is like to play your game.
You must mentally become the player and stand in his shoes. For ever y design deci-
sion that you make—and there will be thousands—you must ask yourself how it
meets the player's desires and preferences about interactive entertainment. Note
the mention of a representative player. It is up to you to decide what that means, but
this hypothetical being must bear some resemblance to the customers whom you
want to actually buy the game. Smart game designers conduct audience research if
they're planning to make a game for an audience that they don't know much about.
When you employ player-centric game design, you need to think about how the
player will react to everything in your game: its artwork, its user interface, its game-
play, and so on. But that is only the surface. At a deeper level, you must understand
what the player wants from the entire experience you are offering—what motivates
her to play your game at all? To design a game around the player, you must have a
clear answer to the following questions: Who is your player, anyway? What does
she like and dislike? Why did she buy your game? The answer is also influenced by
the game concept that you choose for your game. Chapter 3, “Game Concepts,” dis-
cusses both player-centric design and game concepts in more detail.
This process of empathizing with your player is one of the aspects that differenti-
ates games from presentational forms of entertainment. With books, paintings,
music, and movies, it is considered artistically virtuous to create your work without
worrying about how it is received, and it's thought to be rather mercenary to mod-
ify the content based on sales considerations. But with a video game—whether you
think of it as a work of art or not—you must think about the player's feelings about
the game, because the player participates in the game with both thought and action.
There are two common misconceptions about player-centric design that you
must avoid.
MISCONCEPTION 1: I AM MY OWN TYPICAL PLAYER.
For years, designers built video games, in effect, for themselves. They assumed that
whatever they liked, their customers would also like. Because most designers were
young males, they took it for granted that their customer base was also made up of
young males. That was indeed true for a long time, but now it is a dangerous fal-
lacy. As the market for games expands beyond the traditional gamer, you must be