Game Design Kindergarten

[christian]

http://www.pcgamer.com/richard-garriott ... ners-suck/

"If you like games, you eventually get to the point where you'd like to make one," said [Richard] Garriott. "But if you had this magic art talent as a youth, you can refine your skills and show a portfolio and say, 'I'm a good artist, go hire me' If you're nerdy enough to hack into a computer, programming on your own, you can go to school and learn proper structure, make code samples and go 'Look, I'm a good programmer, hire me.'

"But if you're not a good artist and not a good programmer, but you still like games, you become a designer, if you follow me. You get into Q&A and often design.

"And the most valuable part of creating a game is the design, which the programmers are technically executing. And they'd be happy to just execute some of them. But in my mind, most artists and programmers are just as much of gamers as the designers, and I usually find in my history that the artists and programmers are, in fact, as good of designers as the designers. They're often better, because they understand the technology or the art.

"So we're leaning on a lot of designers who get that job because they're not qualified for the other jobs, rather than that they are really strongly qualified as a designer. It's really hard to go to school to be a good designer."

Because most of those schools are actually kindergartens.

[christian]

Even in most of the game design texts I've read, it amounts to little more than playing with blocks. They get away with it because its wrapped up in so many technical terms that its difficult to tell just how shallow it all is.

[christian]

CPncS0uUsAERCRN.jpg (77.8 KiB) Viewed 12924 times

The implication here, of course, is that if you haven't completed a degree in game design, or spent however many hours on the Internet reading / discussing game design or what have you, then you couldn't possibly make something worthwhile in Super Mario Maker. It's such an outrageously flawed implication, but I've actually seen it in action, where people will refuse to even load up the editor because they've been so thoroughly brainwashed that they don't have the requisite skills to make anything good.

But the truth is that anyone can design. Anyone can create Mario levels. There's an overabundance of evidence for that now, thanks to Super Mario Maker. And as a result, now it's put up or shut up time for the intellectual game designers, who've been studying Mario under the microscope for ages now. If a 6 year old can actually create something better than, or even nearly as good as their work, then they've got a real crisis on their hands.

[christian]

You can see Polygon desperately trying to do something about this by putting together video features of their favorite intellectual designers making Mario levels.

Tim Rogers - http://www.polygon.com/2015/9/16/933895 ... vel-design
Derek Yu - http://www.polygon.com/2015/9/23/938123 ... age-design

[christian]

It's no wonder that the game design kindergartners are so enthralled with toys. They never learned to look beyond them. That's why their games seldom, if ever, have any connection with reality. It doesn't follow then why they should attack those that do. Until you actually hear one of them say, "reality isn't fun". Then it all clicks into place.

[christian]

I'd be especially cautious around any aspiring designers, i.e. those not actively employed as such. It's rare that they've not been either completely wrecked by an overexposure to Internet nonsense or, by a similar token, brainwashed by whatever game studies school they've recently emerged from.

[christian]

Ten Lessons Over Ten Years - http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JamesYou ... 01/260631/

Avoid dismissing what non-designers think

[christian]

http://south.paxsite.com/schedule/panel ... ame-design

Game design is a wide subject. The best approach to mastering it is to focus on the fundamentals, and what better place to do that than with Atari 2600 games?