Game studies revisited: Laramée

Game Design Perspectives

This book, edited by François Laramée, compiles insight from around 25 different game designers to explore the practice of game design.

It takes a very pragmatic approach, starting with the industrial necessity of producing game design documents (GDD), making a number of important points:

• Detailed design plans are a necessity in any constructive process; this even even more true for experienced designers, who recognise the importance of specific details.
• Start by producing a treatment.  If you can't outline the idea then there's no point in trying to add detail.  It needs to catch the reader's attention quickly.
• Lock the idea down.  Major changes are OK in early stages, but not in later ones.  Try not to run before you walk: "[...] if the new feature would merely be 'cool' [...] then it should be saved for the sequel -- when the team will be better able to analyze its impact."

John Dennis (designer on mid-period Worms games) states that the two most important assets to a designer are modularity and structure. This is definitely very sound advice.

He also talks about the pitfalls that occur at design stage.  Amongst these is overambitious projects.  I've experienced this a number of times personally, when starting what appears to be a simple project ... only to find that the range of options available starts to expand; if I try to use the more interesting ones, I end up with a project ten times the size of the original plan.  Dennis suggests that the solution is to identify the risk associated with trying to implement a feature (e.g. cost in man-hours, or dilution of theme) -- this quickly brings things into perspective.

Sim Dietrich continues this theme, listing a number of useful warning signs of "faulty game design":

• New players can't play the game without assistance.
• Lack of skill makes the game "not much fun".
• Too much time spent loading & saving game state.  This is an interesting one: I've witnessed my own family suffer constant frustration at the large gaps between save points, yet annoyance at the time it takes to carry out the save action.  It's apparent that the longer gaps have been chosen to reduce breaks caused by saving state, but the compromise is not a success either.
• Unpopular characters.  If players avoid certain characters or options then there is clearly a problem with them.  This can be balanced by giving these characters special powers as an incentive; other times the character needs to be removed.  As a personal observation, I believe that this can sometimes be down to a love-it-or-loathe-it reaction (e.g. Rainbow Road racetrack in Mario Kart) -- in such cases, it's worth keeping the 'loathe' to allow the 'love'.
• Players frequently reconfigure controls.  Time to change the default controls!

What is interesting about this book is that it takes a more targeted approach to designing specific types of game, rather than the abstract generalistion favoured by Jesse Schell.  This also makes it a very tough book to read from cover-to-cover.  With this in mind, I have selected only key areas of interest in this post; I may return to this book at some point in the future to examine other aspects raised by its authors.