1. What Is a Game Designer?

The best of men

That e’er wore earth about him was a sufferer,

A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit,

The first true gentleman that ever breath’d.

—THOMAS DEKKER, THE HONEST WHORE

Asking the question of what a game designer is seems pedantic, especially to someone who has chosen to read a book about game design. Yet so many people have misconceptions of a game designer’s role, abilities, and responsibilities.

Responsibilities of a Game Designer

Game designers have myriad responsibilities that often differ depending on the type of game and development environment. Making a print-and-play card game for free release on the internet demands different skill sets than does designing for a yearly, iterative, big-budget software title. However, many similarities bubble to the surface:

• ESTABLISH DESIGN GOALS AND PLANS ON HOW TO REACH THEM. Game design is rarely a jam session where you use automatic writing to document ideas as they come to you. Game design is problem solving to meet goals. Without clear goals and plans on how to achieve those goals, the game designer is just riffing. Many designers create content by riffing because it’s more difficult to prove the design ideas wrong and it protects their ego. However, the most effective designers, those who end up with a game that reflects their original intent, are those who problem-solve within the framework of understood and well-defined problems.

• THINK IN SYSTEMS. Games are interactive systems. Some have more interactive depth than others. No matter how nuts-and-bolts designers are in dealing with the day-to-day tasks of game development, it’s absolutely essential that they have a deep understanding of how all the game’s systems work together. It is not enough to know how a feature works in isolation or to apply normative values like “good” or “bad” to individual implementations or features.

Here’s an example: I once worked on a yearly iterative American football video game. A feature request was made where mistakes on the field would lower the probabilities that, say, the quarterback would hit his targets effectively, receivers would run correct routes, and so on. This is fine in theory. However, a lack of understanding of positive feedback loops and of how the game’s unique systems function under the hood and are revealed to the player can lead to disastrous results. When implemented, the feature caused the first player who made a mistake to enter a death spiral of ineptitude as his onscreen players followed mistakes with more mistakes. Eventually, the game looked buggy as quarterbacks passed to empty field positions because their ratings dropped so low. Players had no idea what was going on because these systems were not revealed through the user interface, so they complained that the game was broken. The designer failed in understanding the system both internally (the feedback loop problem) and externally (the user-interface problem).

A contingent of practitioners exists—on both the bootstrap indie end and the mega-millions publisher end of the spectrum—that has no time for any consideration of game design theory. How dare anyone tell these practitioners how to make a game? Their process boils down to a complicated dance of “guess and check.” They put something they think is “good” into a game—maybe it’s good or maybe it’s not. It’s the most rugged form of determinism—wherever they end up was where they meant to go all along.

Good design is not just whatever works or whatever sells. That is a koan at best. The study of game design is an attempt to find repeatable, predictive things that help game designers meet their design goals. These “things” may be immutable laws, but more than likely they’ll just be helpful heuristics, bound to fail and be built upon until the originals have become as quaint and old-fashioned as imagining that light is a particle traveling through ether or that behavior is regulated by four cardinal humors.

• SEE WITH THE PLAYER’S EYES. Game development can be horribly tedious at times. In frustration at a non-functioning or poorly functioning feature, designers often do whatever is the quickest that allows them to move on to the next task. But the designer’s primary role is to understand how players will see this in the final product. The easiest solution is rarely the best solution. Should this menu take three clicks to navigate or is there a way to do it in one click? What if the three-click method is much easier to implement? Is it worth the trade-off? Tracy Fullerton, in Game Design Workshop, calls this “be[ing] an advocate for the player” and cites it as the designer’s most important responsibility.¹ It is difficult for you to see with the player’s eyes because you are biased by having seen the game from embryo to finish. You have the luxury of comparing a game in its current state to what it was in an earlier unfinished state, so it will always look better to you than it will to a new player without all that information and baggage. The game designer often has to play the role of villain in telling the team (or even themselves) that what they have made is not what is best for players.

¹ Fullerton, T., & Swain, C. (2008). Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games (2nd ed.). Amsterdam: Elsevier Morgan Kaufmann.

• EMBRACE BEING WRONG WITH HUMILITY AND WITH UNDERSTANDING OF ALL ITS CONSEQUENCES. Ego is great for promoting successes and inspiring others. It is horrible for remaining objective. Game design requires iteration. Designers are always tempted to treat their ideas as sacred. But when players experience those ideas and find them wanting, the designer must be okay with admitting that the idea didn’t work and changing it into a form that better meets the design goals. Playtesters are sometimes wrong. More often, they are right. A responsible designer knows when a playtest reveals that major changes need to be made.

• COMMUNICATE WITH TEAM AND PLAYERS. Understanding the game’s systems and design goals has an additional responsibility: The game designer must be the one who helps the rest of the team understand those goals so they can work in concert. In large teams, this is often done by writing effective and clear game design documents and reiterating the goals and design focus when appropriate with every team interaction. This communicator-in-chief role extends to communication with the players. The most brilliant, detailed system will fall flat with players if players do not understand it. The zeal with which the designer must carry the torch of the design goals and the means to achieve them must be duplicated by communicating clearly with the players through thoroughly tested user interface and content.

• FILL IN THE GAPS. Large “AAA” software titles can afford to be highly specialized due to the size of the team. They can hire narrative designers, user interface (UI) designers, designers who specialize in economies, and so forth. The smaller the team gets, the more the designer has to be a jack-of-all-trades. In the singular case, a team of one can rely only on the designer and the players. Anything the players cannot do on their own must be done by the game designer in this case. The game designer needs to have a polymath’s skill set to fill in the gaps where the game’s goals are not being met.

• FACILITATE PLAY. All the previous points are applicable to any user-centered design process. With some change in nomenclature, those responsibilities make sense for designing a better ATM, or a website for ordering custom-tailored shirts. The difference in games is that the freedom that comes with play is fundamentally different from checking a box to determine whether a use case was satisfied. The game designer who errs on the side of staid checklists is just as remiss as the designer who riffs without having goals in mind and never finishes. Games are about play. That play can facilitate different types of emotions and aesthetics, but at its heart, it is still play. The designer shares in the producer’s responsibility to keep the game on schedule. He shares in the engineer’s responsibility to make the game functional. But the designer’s unique responsibility is to ensure that the game is aesthetic and playful.

• DON’T BE AN AUTEUR. The common outside stereotype of a game designer is similar to the stereotype of the auteur film director. The auteur has tyrannical influence from beginning to end, dictating her unique vision to a team of cogs who implement her genius design. The auteur’s ideas come from her mind fully formed. If the audience does not “get” it, then it’s their fault for not being sophisticated enough. This is a stereotype without many successful antecedents in the real world. The successful game designer shares more traits with a successful scientist than with an auteur.

Attributes of a Game Designer

As an administrator of one of the largest game design programs in the world, I constantly have different stakeholders (students, parents, admission representatives, and other university staff) ask what qualities a good game design student should have. Should they be mathletes? Should they be expert tinkerers? Luckily for nascent designers, my experience has led me away from believing in the existence of any innate traits that make for a good designer. My answer tends to be just three elements, all of which can be cultivated by anyone: varied interests, persistence, and mindset/purpose.

Varied Interests

In my classes, I almost always ask the students why they want to design games. Quite often, a student says, “I have been playing games since I was in the womb!” He (this is always a male student) claims that he has played every game released for every expensive console for the last 20 years. This, he claims, makes him extremely qualified to be a designer. These students tend not to care about game design theories because they know what a good game looks like already.

To this, I usually say how odd it is that I have eaten every day, maybe upward of twenty or thirty thousand meals by this point, yet I am just not a proficient chef. I have a refined palette, I know what I like and what I do not like, and I can even approximate it to some degree. Yet I often need a couple of tries to make a good cake. It is almost as if experience in consuming something correlates quite weakly with the skill involved in making something!

In my experience, the best designers are not ones who are singularly interested in games. This is somewhat counterintuitive. The best designers are those who are interested in everything and can learn new skills and disciplines quickly. Not only does a designer often need to fill in and ramp up to a new responsibility quickly, but it is the core of creativity to draw from varied experience. Ernest Hemingway is quoted as saying, “In order to write about life, first you must live it.” Legendary designer Richard Bartle says, “Designers read up on every subject they can conceivably find. [...] They’ll spend six hours absorbed in the details of the inner workings of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1970s because somehow they sense it will help their understanding of guilds, or orcs, or griefing, or terrain, or who knows what.”²

² Bateman, C. (2009). Beyond Game Design: Nine Steps Toward Creating Better Videogames. Boston, Massachusetts: Cengage Learning.

A technical term for this is philomathy. A philomath is a lover of learning. The goal of the philomath is to pursue varied skills and knowledge. Of course, a philomath can be a dilettante by not applying that varied knowledge. Therefore, a great game designer employs practical philomathy—applying the lessons of many different fields to a practical project.

Some, such as educational researcher James Paul Gee,³ believe that games encourage learning because of their ability to teach the transfer of skills and knowledge between different domains. If this is true, then the game designer must also be comfortable transferring between domains of knowledge.

³ Gee, J. P. (2003). What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Computers in Entertainment (CIE) 1(1), 20.

Persistence

Any successful creative endeavor is a slog. The most enjoyable times to be a game designer are at the beginning of a project, when the possibilities are endless, and at the end of the project, when the work is complete. Unfortunately, most of the project lies between those two points. The middle contains unfathomable bugs, bratty and rude playtesters, teammate squabbles, external flies in the ointment, and intense periods of self-doubt.

Poor designers settle or quit and then blame the bugs, playtesters, squabbles, and more for falling short of success. Excellent designers have the fortitude to stick with it when it gets tough and are generally rewarded for their hard work by better output. “Sticking with it” is not a measure of time. It is not a metric of how stone-faced you can be while you wait out your troubles. Ego-driven designers can wait out a tsunami of criticism, but if they do not adapt to that criticism, their work never improves. Instead, “sticking with it” is a measure of work. How can a designer adapt to all the obstacles in their path? That measure is a key attribute of a good designer. But it is not innate! It is something that can be trained.

Mindset/Purpose

I see two distinct mindsets among potential designers.

Some want to design games. They are perfect for the program at my university because that is exactly what our program teaches. They have no problem throwing together prototypes, and many students I work with have a history of making games before I see them in our program. They embrace failure as a step toward success. The act of making games is what sustains them through the tough times.

The other type of potential designer is made up of folks who want to be game designers. These people I find much harder to help. All these folks want is the gravitas that comes with saying that you are a professional game designer. They want to tell someone what to make and have it made. They want to be the mythical “idea guy.” These people shy away from or are dismissive of making things themselves. Often, they claim they “don’t have the skills” to make things. They want the title without the work. This comes from a common misconception of what game design actually is in practice.

The problem with being an idea guy is that everyone is one. Everyone has a great game idea that they have been itching to make. But actually making it is difficult. Sometimes it requires specialized knowledge; it always requires a significant amount of work and revision. Why should someone pay you for your ideas when everyone else has ideas? If you were a programmer, would you want to work on your ideas or someone else’s? “But my ideas are great!” you may say. How do you know? Can you prove it? The way you can prove it is by making a playable prototype, which requires you to be someone who makes things, not just someone who talks about making things.

The concept of idea guys is a running gag in the industry. It is shorthand for people who want to work in games without actually doing any work. Either they are afraid of doing work or they are so afraid of their egos being damaged that they offshore and delay the work that might prove their idea is no good. There are a few notable idea guys in the industry today, but they earned that role by working really hard at implementing their now-famous ideas until they were successful. For example, Will Wright sometimes plays the role of idea guy, but he designed and coded SimCity by himself, not to mention tons of other games that never reached that level of success. There are no idea guys who started as “idea guys.”

Before you continue on your journey toward learning about game design topics, take time to consider whether you want to design games or be a game designer.

Make Things

David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book Art & Fear is a great collection of observations about creating things.⁴ The following excerpt is about ceramics, but its lessons apply to almost any creative endeavor, especially making games:

⁴ Bayles, D., & Orland, T. (2001). Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. Eugene, Oregon: Image Continuum Press.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: On the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A,” forty pounds a “B,” and so on. Those being graded on “quality,” however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A.” Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: The works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

At the start, ideas are exciting. It’s easy to see an idea only for its promise. There is a honeymoon period where all the fun bits are coming together. But extraordinarily, rarely does an idea go from form to product in a smooth transition. Most projects enter a period where the idea needs work: Either the code is not working, or the game is testing poorly, or there is just a lot of foundational work to complete. Those parts are no fun. At that point, the creator has a choice: Slog through the difficult parts and finish, or choose one of the other new, exciting ideas and start working on the fun parts that it promises. You can imagine what most people choose. It ends up leaving us with a graveyard of half-finished ideas. Sometimes giving up on an idea is justified and useful, but always chasing the next promising idea without ever finishing the one in progress is an easy mistake to make. Worse yet, if you abandon a project with a difficult trajectory for one with potential, you never learn the valuable lessons about the craft that the process of slogging through difficult and tedious tasks often ends up teaching you.

This is what Bayles and Orland are talking about. The “quantity” group probably made some terrible pots. That is okay. By doing so, they did not shame themselves or reveal that they didn’t have it in them to create ceramics. Instead, they were able to build upon their mistakes. Their goal was not the one perfect pot, but better and better pots.

Do not underestimate how difficult the evolution can be at times. Sometimes students cave in to the pressure that comes from the distance between where they are and where they want to be. They respond to it by lowering their expectations of their own work because they are “only students.” Architect, designer, and professor Christopher Alexander has this fight often with his pupils:⁵

⁵ Gabriel, R. (1996). Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community. New York: Oxford University Press.

In my life as an architect, I find that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low. If I ask a student whether her design is as good as Chartres, she often smiles tolerantly at me as if to say, “Of course not, that isn’t what I am trying to do.... I could never do that.” Then, I express my disagreement, and tell her: “That standard must be our standard. If you are going to be a builder, no other standard is worthwhile. That is what I expect of myself in my own buildings, and it is what I expect of my students.”

In this book, we’ll discuss many of the fields of study that touch and inform game design. But these lessons are intended to guide your decision-making as you craft new games. These lessons are not intended to make you a game designer. Only you can do that through sustained, deliberate practice.

Abandon the common desire to achieve perfection. The Platonic ideal of your game exists only in your head. To approximate it is a worthwhile goal, but to demand adherence to it is not. Like Moses, your game can see the Promised Land but will never reach it. At some point, you must finish that game to have the experience of finishing. It needs to be released to the wild, not buried in a notebook or on a private thumb drive.

Additionally, your repeated practice in making games must be deliberate. If you make games, that is good. But if you make games with a purpose toward becoming better at making games, that is a whole lot better. Always challenge yourself to stretch outside your comfort zone. This is the only way to grow. As Susan Cain writes in Quiet about deliberate practice:

When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful—they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them.⁶

⁶ Cain, S. (2013). Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Broadway Books.

Cultivate Your Gardens

Playing games is, of course, not the same as making them. You do not have to be a master at playing a game to understand why it works or to be able to describe and emulate its systems. But understanding what is currently being done in the field saves you a lot of time. And to do that, it is helpful to know how many different types of games solve their design problems. You do not have to reinvent the wheel if you can use best practices from other games. How does Halo do weapon switching? How does League of Legends implement end-game feedback? Perhaps you want to make a game by combining elements. It helps to know whether that game already exists, or whether a similar game exists and what it did right and wrong.

The most helpful research you can conduct is often to play bad games. Good games are similar, but bad games are different in a myriad of unique ways. Bad games teach you hundreds of things not to do. For instance, you can learn just as much about level design from Gunvalkyrie as you can from BioShock. The other benefit of playing bad games is that it differentiates you as a designer. Most designers have played Final Fantasy VII, so most designers have internalized the same lessons. However, few will be able to tell you the lessons they learned from Mario Is Missing, Dino Crisis 3, Rule of Rose, or Azurik: Rise of Perathia.

In one class, I have students practice making presentations. At first, I let students select any topic that didn’t violate university guidelines. Roughly 80 percent of the presentations ended up being about games they had played or games they wanted to design. It was the same presentation every month on the newest, hottest game. It was dreadfully boring. Then I changed up the assignment and forbade them from doing any presentation on games or game design. Instead, I challenged them to teach the class something new that was not about games or pop culture. I received a lot of pushback from students. They claimed that games were all they knew! I let these protestations fall on deaf ears. When I finally received the presentations, the topics were diverse and interesting: how to cook perfect chicken wings, the struggles in adopting three children from overseas, why greenhouse tomatoes are better than store-bought, tips on figure drawing—one memorable presentation even did an ethnographic study of Juggalo culture! People become more interesting if you push them away from what makes them wholly comfortable. Writer Geoff Dyer once wrote: “How can you know anything about literature if all you’ve done is read books?”⁷ The same goes for games or any other creative endeavor.

⁷ Dyer, G. (1999). Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence. New York, New York: North Point Press.

Inspiration and guidance come from every aspect of our lives. When we all do the same things, we mold ourselves into cookie-cutter patterns that make us identical to our neighbors. In some aspects, this is useful: We can communicate more easily using shared experiences, and we can understand the motivations of those who think like us. However, in creative endeavors, it can be a death knell. If you are identical to every other designer, then why should anyone hire you or play your games? Products that are identical to their direct competitors are called commodities. Commodities are priced as low as possible. Do you want to be paid as low as possible? Or do you want to be different and command the highest prices?

On Ontology and Dogma

Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.

—FREDRICH SCHILLER

Since the reality of play extends beyond the sphere of human life it cannot have its foundations in any rational nexus, because this would limit it to mankind. The incidence of play is not associated with any particular stage of civilization or view of the universe. Any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing on its own, even if his language possesses no general concept to express it. Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

—JOHAN HUIZINGA

Many game design books start by posing this question: What is a game? Surely you have to know what you are creating in order to create it. So most game design textbooks have a chapter covering this question. The primary problem with designers considering this question is that no matter what the answer is, it’s not instrumental in making better games. The main output of “what is a game” discussions is argument. We discuss it here only to give it some air, since it constantly comes up in nearly every generalist game design book. But this topic is covered only in a perfunctory way to make more time for concepts that have a direct application to craft.

Formalism

The topic of the essential features of a game is an important debate in the field of game studies. Game studies is an interdisciplinary catchall term for any research surrounding the cultural and ontological components of games and play. Game design is a subset of game studies that is most concerned with the normative aspects of how to make a game.

Scholars and lay folks have long attempted to pin down what exactly is meant when we say “game.” Here are a few samples of what has been published:

• French sociologist Roger Caillois, in 1961: “an activity which is essentially: free (voluntary), separate [in time and space], uncertain, unproductive, governed by rules, make-believe.”⁸

⁸ Caillois, R. (1961). Man, Play, and Games. University of Illinois Press.

• Games researcher Clark Abt, in 1968: “any contest among adversaries operating under a limiting context for an objective.”⁹

⁹ Abt, C. C. (1968). “Games for Learning. Simulation Games in Learning,” Sage Publications 65-84.

• Researchers E.M. Alvedon and Brian Sutton-Smith, in 1971: “an exercise of voluntary control systems in which there is an opposition between forces, confined by a procedure and rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome.”¹⁰

¹⁰ Avedon, E., & Smith, B. (1971). The Study of Games. New York: J. Wiley.

• Philosopher Bernard Suits, in 1978: “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”¹¹

¹¹ Suits, B. (1978). The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

• Game designers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, in 2003: “a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.”¹²

¹² Zimmerman, E., & Salen, K. (2003). Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

• Game designers Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams, in 2007: “a type of play activity, conducted in the context of a pretended reality, in which the participants try to achieve at least one arbitrary, nontrivial goal by acting in accordance with the rules.”¹³

¹³ Adams, E. and Rollings, A. (2007). Fundamentals of Game Design. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

• Game designer Jesse Schell, in 2008: “a problem-solving activity approached with a playful attitude.”¹⁴

¹⁴ Schell, J. (2008). The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann.

• Game researcher Jesper Juul, in 2010: “a rule-based formal system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.”¹⁵

¹⁵ Juul, J. (2010). The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness. PLURAIS-Revista Multidisciplinar da UNEB, 1(2).

• Game designer Stephen “thecatamites” Murphy, at some point: “some combination of the following indivisible elements: skeleton, red key, score thing, magic door. If you see something that looks like a video game but isn’t, you should immediately call the police.”¹⁶

¹⁶ Murphy, S. (n.d.). “VIDEOGAMES.” Retrieved July 8, 2019, from http://harmonyzone.org/Videogames.html.

We could wander far into the weeds of philosophy, wondering if we are using the ruler to measure the table or the table to measure the ruler, but the point here is not to argue the validity or invalidity of any particular definition or definitions of games, but to understand why these definitions are not important for this exercise.

Planetologists argue about the definition of planets (see the recent furor over Pluto), yet the planets keep their orbit regardless. Researchers Espen Aarseth and Gordon Calleja argue that we, as game designers, do not need definitions at all.¹⁷ They say that fields such as literature, media studies, and planetology have unsettled debates on definitions yet have no problem continuing on in the production of their field. They also argue that rigid definitions hurt multidisciplinary fields. As we have already covered, game design is a vastly multidisciplinary field.

¹⁷ Aarseth, E., & Calleja, G. (2009). The Word Game: The Ontology of an Undefinable Object. In lecture delivered at Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Vol. 178, pp. 12–25.

As the cultural reach of games has increased, some works have been created that do not look at all like games, and do not appeal to the same aesthetic goals and audiences. This is expected when a medium grows. However, in some sort of insane tribalism, some commentators use the previous definitions of games as a tool to exclude these works and creators from the community of creators.

A recent flare-up of this debate surrounded the indie game Gone Home, by Fullbright. It was a top seller and had wide-reaching critical acclaim,¹⁸ yet it eschewed many of the features of mainstream games. There is no way to lose or win. There is no challenge in the traditional sense. Players explore a house and piece together the story of the home’s inhabitants. There is no antagonizing force. There are no resources per se. It fails some of the accepted definitions, yet many (including the creators)¹⁹ consider it a game. Critics of the game often throw out that it is not a game at all and is thus somehow unworthy of praise or scrutiny.

¹⁸ Grant, C. (2014, January 15). “Polygon’s 2013 Game of the Year: Gone Home.” Retrieved July 8, 2019, from www.polygon.com/2014/1/15/5311568/game-of-the-year-2013-gone-home.

¹⁹ Gaynor, S. (2014). “Why Is Gone Home a Game?” Game Developer’s Conference. San Francisco, CA.

Imagine an 18th-century art critic who writes that art is the depiction of images as a true depiction of their real elements. That was what art largely was at that point. Then when abstract and surreal art came along in the 19th and 20th centuries, that definition had to change. A dogmatic following of the critic’s rules would have denied the world the beauty of images like those popularized by painters like Salvador Dali and Piet Mondrian, or even those by fantasy artists like H. R. Giger or Frank Frazetta. Ironically, Frazetta’s work has influenced almost every popular fantasy game since the dawn of the genre.²⁰

²⁰ “Tracing the Influence.” (n.d.). Retrieved July 7, 2019, from www.hardcoregaming101.net/tracing/tracing2.htm.

If the purpose behind game formalism is to deny other works the light of day, then it is garbage scholarship. The medium needs boundary-ignoring works or it risks being stuck in an endless status quo. This should not be threatening to game designers. There is room for both the status quo and the new and original. Saying that something is “not a game” when one really means “I don’t like this” weakens the entire medium of games by considering that only something that meets guidelines of taste is allowed to be in the medium at all. This puts a huge burden on designers: Make a thing with this list of features and it must be appealing and good or else you cannot be a game designer at all!

So why have game definitions in the first place? The term game means something. When you use it, you are attempting to communicate a concept. If it could mean anything, then the term itself must be empty. Relativism does not help us communicate. We consider the topic so that we can find commonalities that inform all our work. To the end that a definition works, it is helpful. Otherwise, it is not. An attempt at a definition is not to be exclusionary, but to distill what the magic is that defines the medium in which designers labor and love. Any definition of games that we determine now may become irrelevant by the creation of something new that invalidates that definition. Arguing about that definition is just territorialism.

Make what is in your heart. Let someone else worry about classification.

Summary

• A game designer needs a variety of skills to be the jack-of-all-trades that meets a project’s varied needs.

• Nothing that a designer needs is innate. All design skills can be cultivated through practice and a correct attitude.

• Reading about game design can be helpful. That’s why you have this book! However, nothing is a substitute for making games. If you wait until you are ready to make games, you’ll never make a single one.

• Games are great, but don’t only be about games. There is so much to learn in this world in vastly varying domains of knowledge. You never know when you’ll be able to connect what you learn to games, so try to learn everything.

• Don’t worry about people who waste time arguing about what is or is not a game. It is philosophically interesting, but it does not have much relevance for actually making anything tangible. At worst, it forces design into rigid limitations. If you make something clever and someone calls it “not a game,” you have still made something clever, and they have made nothing at all.