What Games Are: Game Design, Development, Publishing, Marketing and Art

Games Are Not Experiences

E3, trailers and previews mostly sell games based on potential experience. Look at the haunting graphics of Journey or listen to a podcast about the epic scope of Skyrim, and the promise of experience is there. Come into our worlds, they say, they are thaumatic.

Sometimes they are, however those worlds which are successfully so are based on more than just experiences. Experient design’s goal may be to take the player on an emotional journey, but it’s the games that pay attention to what happens in between emotional events that truly are magical. Experiential highs are just one tool in the making of games, not what they are. 

The Perils of Franchise Fatigue [Single Franchise Publishing]

Q: What’s the biggest mistake that a successful studio can make?
A: Walking away from its key franchise.

Q: Why would a studio do that?
A: Because the staff get bored.

Q: Why is it a mistake?
A: Well…

The Little Deck of Game Design [Project]

In 1975, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt published a deck of cards named Oblique Strategies. Their idea was to give creators a tool to help them get unstuck or see differently. I want to develop a similar kind of deck for game designers. 

Would you like to help?

The Ding Economy [Art]

Some will frame the work of Steve Jobs as showmanship, hoodwinking millions in the quest for power and money. Those same people will roll their eyes in disbelief at fans who left flowers or memorials at Apple stores, or think of it as evidence of just how clever at branding this man was. That cynicism is what prevents ambition or achieving anything of worth and is why most people live what Thoreau called ‘lives of quiet desperation’.

Jobs once said that his ambition was to put a ding in the universe. He did it through being a businessman and artist rather than one or the other. It’s a way of working which inspires loyalty, which social media amplifies. It’s no accident that art-and-business companies like Apple and Nintendo have dominated their respective fields over the last decade, or why James Dyson can charge more than competitors for state of the art vacuum cleaners and yet still win.

The 21st century economy belongs to business artists. It is a creative economy where dings spread like viruses and create huge profits. It’s also the economy where commodity jobs get devalued down toward near zero. I’m not saying you need to be Steve Jobs. I am saying you need to find your own ding and then create it. What does your ding in the universe look like?

(Today’s image comes from Scalar Scopes.)

Find the New Positive [Motivation]

Making games is so tough that most makers do not stay beyond half a decade. Frustration, stress and uncertainty nip at them while bad management and poor practises sap their will. This tension is common to all of the arts and it breeds very negative creative cultures. Failed actors, alcoholic pulp novelists and game makers who develop liver damage from stress are all the same breed. They want to make people laugh or cry, or maybe just to make a generous living, and when neither happens they grow resentful.

The only real solution is to find a new source of positivity.

Fun: Simple to Explain, Hard to Accept [Constants]

Game developers ask ‘what is fun?’ and academics often answer that fun is seemingly simple but actually fiendishly hard to explain. Everything is potentially fun and trying to encompass it all in one statement is impossible.

When any debate becomes so wide, the intent of the original question is lost. Developers are not really asking ‘what is fun?'’ in the universal sense. They’re asking why does their game suck. Pragmatically then, fun is:

The joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics.

However the idea that fun can be reduced to 9 little words is just the sort of thinking that makes some people angry, because it sounds like (and is) a hard limit on what games can be.

Your Rage Is Pointless [Motivation]

Network is my favourite film. It tells the stories of Howard Beale, and more broadly of network news itself, as Beale goes insane on air and taps into the rage of a generation. “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!” he cries, and the whole nation cries with him.

Sometimes it’s like that in games. Consider how many developers hate Zynga, Ian Bogost’s declaration that gamification is bull, or a recent thread on Facebook asking whether Angry Birds is really that good, to be met with a torrent of acidic responses. Consider many of the threads in forums like The Chaos Engine where shared misery is a state of being.

Resentment, anger, begrudgery, disappointment and so on are common in any creative field. Yet they serve no purpose and can sap your enthusiasm for trying to do something awesome if you let them.

Would You Play It? [Passion]

So maybe you have an idea but you’re not really sure whether to develop it or not. How would you know? Well how about:

Do your thoughts keep drifting back to it?

Do you find yourself carrying around a notebook and scribbling half-imagined thoughts at inappropriate times?

Are you obsessing on particular parts of it just for fun?

These kinds of behaviours are what passion looks like. They’re the point where game making is not just an intellectual exercise or a problem to be solved, but instead where you’re excited. The most important question to ask is this:

Would you play it?