The Introduction to an Introduction
If you think of a small indie developmer team, many people imagine an Artist, a Programmer and a Game Designer. The Artists draws nice shapes with a pen, the Programmer punches his keyboard until the nice shapes show up and the Game Designer? What in the world does he do, a sacred design ritual?
It is a bit hard to grasp for anybody new to Game Development, it is also not an easy job to explain. That's why I hope to shed some light the role of the Game Designer and what he actually does and maybe even give a starting point for aspiring Game Designers. I also want to touch upon Game Design, it obviously has to do something with this role and what a good design is. So without further ado, let's get right to business.
The Role of a Game Designer
Let's make a comparison, a game Designer and Level Designer have a lot in common. As a Level Designer, you are responsible to put the assets of an Artist into a nice level for a player. But that is nearly not enough, the player has to like the level he is playing, it has to fulfill a certain goal, for example introduce a new tool to the player. This sounds like intiuitive to the max, and it is. But if you are doing this subconciously is bound to fail at some point. Your job is not to dream up nice levels, you are making levels for a specific purpose to the player. As a Level Designer, you are making a prediction, what obstacles the player has to overcome and how he or she is able to do so. Then you HAVE TO TEST your prediction, you have to playtest.
With your new experience, you can make more accurate predictions, make a better level, playtest, rinse and repeat. That is basically what a Game Designer does, but in a bigger scheme of things.
Note: As a Game Designer, you are constantly testing predictions about how a mechanic or subpart affects the player. Even an experienced designer gets surprises on a regular basis. You should analyse the results and figure out why your predictions were inaccurate and how you can fix it.
This is how you improve on your game design!
As a Game Designer, you don't design one level, you design the level progression, how difficult the level is, when to introduce new mechanics, pacing, story development, basically everything. From the attack animation of one character to the balancing of whole systems, everything is part of what the player experiences, which makes it partly your job to make it fit in the game and to ensure it has the effect on the player you thought it would.
And everything influences your design. The artstyle is part of the game design as the button layout. Unless you are doing every single job yourself, you are working with many different people with many different expertises, if you like it or not they will influence the game design in some way or another.
The Team and the Game Designer
In a nutshell, there is a good and a bad side of being a game designer in a team.The bad side of your role is that the job you are responsible for is influenced by everyone. But this is also part of the job description (see reference 1). You have to inform the team members about the game visions. Maybe the most important task of a game designer is communicate, to talk to the different experts and understand their different "languages"(it is hard to understand a programmer for a layman), make sure that all differet worlds share the same goal, the same vision of what the game should become. The good side of it is that the job you are responsible for is influenced by everyone. Because you have so many different expertises in your team, because they sometimes don't even seem to talk the same language, they bring in ideas you would never even dreamed about. They help you with some parts of your job.
It actually isn't your main task coming up with new ideas, or even deciding if a mechanic gets put into a game or not. Your job is to make the mechanics work, balance them and test their impact on the players. But when have you done a good job? Unlike computer programs, you hardly have a way to compare game designs, when is your design good?
"Good" and "Bad" Game Design
Those two terms get thrown around a lot without asking the question, what actually is "good" or "bad" design?
What is a good game?
Take your favorite game for example, if you can't play it in your head, play it again for five to ten minutes. Why do you like it? Why is it your favorite game?
I guess the most frequent answer would be: "Because it is fun!".
You probably picked a favorite game where this is partially true, but I argue it is not the reason why this game stands out. Many things are fun, many games have been fun but vanished from the face of the earth.
I would say the same thing is true about movies, many movies are entertaining, but the Batman reboot isn't that good because they have been more entertaining than the old movies(well, not counting Batman the dark knight rises, my heart is still bleeding Christopher Nolan!). I say it is because of the story that we cared about. We could see the pain Batman went through, we could see him as a human we relate to, how he overcame his inner fears, how and why he chose to do the right thing. Batman Begins is one of the few movies I really cared about the protagonist. One of the few movies where the antagonist, the evil guy, wasn't far more interesting and actually made the film stand out. I argue the same thing is true for games.
Let's take Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's favorite game and analyse what he says about it: Watch his Silent Hill 2 review I selected him because he is simply the hardest reviewer to please and does not shy away from pointing out flaws in the best game ever.
To use Yahtzee's words: "the strangest thing about Silent Hill 2 is, from a cold critical non gushy standpoint, the actual gameplay of it is kinda shitty",in other words not fun, sometimes even outright bad. The reason you play Silent Hill 2 is for the story, but why should tell it in the game and not in a movie? Because Silent Hill 2 managed to tell a deep story without using words, it did it by solely through the Level Design, Enemies and the mechanics of the game. Everything is a symbol for the Protagonist's psyche, everything comes together to tell a story in a way that hardly works in any different medium.
There seems to be this doctrine in the industry that only "fun" games are good (see reference 2) and every game needs to be fun. This is like saying every movie needs to be entertaining. How would Schindler's List have looked like if the directors said: "We need to make it more entertaining". That luckily doesn't happen for movies, but it sadly does for games. To end this section on a positive note, it seeems like times are changing. If you haven't already, look at ExtraCreditz's explanation on Spec ops: The Line and why it is so important.
Conclusion
Your job as a Game Designer is not to make an entertaining piece of software, your job is to create experiences. It can tell a story, leave a question inside the players head, provide a way to relax the mind, or scare the living hell out of people. If you have done a good job, the player dives right into a world, the gamer can walk in the shoes of somebody else. Basically, a Game Designer is a scientific communicator, observing the players. You are constantly exploring, testing new methods and heuristics. No matter how much you think you know about your audience, no matter how experienced you think you are, you get surprises on a regular basis. If you do your job right, you get your whole team going in the same direction, to make a greater game you ever could ever come up with alone.
Further Reading
- Very important for any aspiring game designers is the concept of Mechanics Dynamics and Aestetics. Have a look!
References
Article Update Log
26 Mar 2013: Article Created