I’ve been thinking recently about the kinds of things I’d like to work on most during the break from teaching, and I’ve decided that I really want to take a deep look at game design from a theoretical and practical standpoint. It seems to me that there could be some need for a more formal and methodological approach to the design of games than currently exists. In my experience, game designers (the ones that put the fun into the game) are hard to find and extremely hard to train. Smallish tasks like level design can be learned, but even these are typically only learned by spending a large amount of time practicing and depend on the intuition of the individuals to be successful. Coming from my background in computer architecture, and in particular thinking about the standard text, “Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach” by Hennessey and Patterson, it occurred to me that there could exist a game design text with a similar approach and title. Quantitative design would not necessarily solve everything that needs to be done in game design given that so much of the design is itself artistic expression, but the existence of such a text could greatly assist in training game designers initially. My quick search on google for research and writing on this subject has not turned up much, but there is this Recent PhD Thesis that I think is probably the most recent related work in this area, though it is written by a sociologist (not necessarily a bad thing).
I’m going to use my blog posts in the category of “game design” to brainstorm a bit about how this theoretical book might be organized. The biggest challenge will be finding a way to quantify the clearly artistic and qualitative experience that the player enjoys when playing a game. The question I need to ask is how to quantify each of the following essential (or at least helpful) game design features:
- fun
- happiness
- time
- human experience
- social interaction
- addiction
- monetary impact (both to the player and the developer)
- others?
Really understanding a lot of these concepts requires a huge amount of cross-disciplinary work and depends on a better understanding of social sciences than I currently have. The question of monetary impact is directly related to business and economic concerns. Perhaps the easiest thing to quantify is the amount of time spent on a particular activity. However, answering the question of how much time is spent on something is not entirely useful unless you are aware of the impact that activity has on the player in terms of most of the other concepts. If you only take into account time and money when you design a game, you can easily create a game that will use as much time as a player has available and deliver the maximum amount of money to the pockets of the developer, but I do not believe that should be the goal in designing a game. A game should be designed to enhance the life experience of the individual playing that game. Sure money is necessary to cover the costs of developing, distributing and marketing a game, but money can also be used as an incentive to the player. For instance, I have found that games with a paid barrier to entry tend to invite a higher caliber of social interaction among players than those that are free to play. Higher quality social interaction is certainly beneficial to the life experience of each participant in that interaction.
I’m out of time for today, but I will be returning to these thoughts again soon. The next entry should be more focussed than these rambling thoughts.