Gamers are not game designers

Jonathan Barbara
Aug 9, 2017 · 5 min read

… but they can be

It is common for gamers (by which I refer to game players who regularly dedicate more than 2 hours to playing games) to be so enthralled with the virtual world they inhabit that they want to extend it with their own ideas, or possibly build their own. Especially when the game session has not yet provided closure — there are loose ends which players feel they need to tie up, in their own way. But just like listening to the radio will not make you a musician, playing games does not give you the faculty of designing and developing games.

Since childhood, we tend to make our own stories in representations of the virtual worlds we experience through various media be it traditional TV or interactive media such as games.

We have got the tools…

Back in the ’90s idSoftware made it a point to allow players of their hit game DooM to build their own levels and populate them with demons, zombies, lava traps, and crushing ceilings countered with provision of weapons, ammunition, radiation suits and secret chambers offering some temporary invulnerability — while teleporting to otherwise inaccessible places for strategic positions from which to bring down the enemy.

Level design in DOOM looked like a technical design software with a 2D top-down view, lots of vertices, linedefs and sectors. Choosing textures was like browsing through a curtain catalogue. If you like human skin for curtains, that is.

Strategy games likes Age of Empires and Starcraft followed suit allowing players to build their own maps on which to wage war on their enemies while mining resources to supply their ever-growing armies. Even then, while the ability to build was being provided, the placement of resources, enemies and terrain could not be left to chance as it could easily favor one player over another.

The Starcraft Map Editor offered a WYSIWYG interface so that you could tell what the map would look like without having to play it. But it didn’t tell you how well it would work…

As games became more realistic and complex, provision of such editors decreased: as competition grew, game developers were becoming less artistic and more commercially driven, keeping their development secrets to themselves. What transpired was the emergence of game engines: the licensing of an existing game engine to other companies who could not afford the time and manpower to develop a whole game from scratch but could be well served by skinning an existing game engine with their visual and audio content and configuring parameters for the physics and game rule systems.

GameMaker Studio offers a whole development IDE for a variety of 2D games and more

With the development of the indie scene, where aspiring game developers who could not make it into the top game studios decided to band together and make their own games with whatever skills and resources they had available, a market grew for the provision of rudimentary game engines that lifted these indie developers up a level or two. Engines such as Twine for interactive storytelling, GameMaker for 2D games, and Unity for rule-based gameplay appeared on the market with various attractive schemes of use. While these engines offered an ever growing collection of ready-made game components, they also limited the variety of games that one could generate.

Unity 3D is one of the most popular development engines for 2D and 3D games

More than tools, we need skills beyond our comfort zone…

Providing the tools to make games however is only part of the story. Going to the arts & crafts shop to buy brushes, paint, paper, a variety of pencils, and an easel will not make me an artist. And if I like landscapes, and have spent much of my art appreciation looking at landscapes, I will probably be limited to pitiful attempts at making landscapes. Likewise developing games requires a game design process, wherein how the game works, and not just how it looks, is planned, designed, prototyped, attempted, analysed, reviewed and refined. On top of that, only a small percentage of gamers tend to play a large variety of game genres on a regular basis: they tend to stick to a particular genre, if not a franchise, and regularly play that specific kind of game thus being exposed to a finite set of game mechanics. A game designer needs to be exposed to a large variety of game genres and underlying game mechanics in order to expand their arsenal of available gameplay options and be able to choose the most fitting game mechanic to the play experience they wish to facilitate for their prospective players. This is because game designers who design the games they would like to play have a target audience of at most one: themselves. If they want to develop games that attract the attention (and money) of the masses then they need to broaden their scope of gameplay and understand what the current trends in game genres are and extend or revolutionise them. There are various ways one can do so: observe others playing, live or on video, read reviews about the game, or actually sitting down and playing it.


An Education in Game Design and Development is here for you

Students seeking a higher education might be surprised to see Game Design and Development as a stream option. But in view of the above argument, it makes sense that to seek a career in the games industry, one must broaden their scope beyond their own limited experience of gameplay and a guided instruction facilitates this through play sessions that elicit reflections on the underlying game mechanics and infer suitability and application areas for their implementation. This is followed by an analysis of what works and what doesn’t work for a target audience and what combinations of game mechanics lead to gameplay that is immersive and engaging. Of course the game mechanics on their own will find it hard to engross players in the game and sensory experience through visual and audio cues is necessary to be well designed and executed — and a believable narrative that tells the game’s story also goes a long way.

Paper prototyping is the method of choice for Diploma level students as their technical skills in programming are still in development

This is what the Diploma in Games Design and Development offered by Saint Martin's Institute of Higher Education aims to do: expose the student to a variety of game mechanics, in both digital and non-digital form, and engage students with visual and audio design fundamentals. Assessments challenge them to combine the three into a game design document, supplemented with technical knowledge of hardware architecture and programming skills with which to implement the designed game: allowing the student to develop a portfolio to present to prospective employers and providing the foundation for further tertiary study.

St Martin’s decade of experience with complementing the high standards of the University of London programmes in Creative Computing to generate first class students together with its annual industry-judged Game Dev Challenge competition now in its 8th year provides reassurance that the student’s academic progress is in the best of hands.

Jonathan Barbara

Written by

Creative Computing and Games Design lecturer at Saint Martin’s Institute of Higher Education

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