Great original post and comments by all. I wanted to respond to Tom’s question:

Tom said on July 9th, 2008 at 11:06 pm:
How? How do you master both of these skills? How do you even go about training yourself in them?

There are some things you can do.
For #1 – You must play a lot of games. However many you think ‘a lot’ is, play more than that. You study how other people play games, especially people that don’t play like you or all the hardcore gamers that you work with.

You can play games that aren’t video games – kids games, board games, “New Games” and “Junkyard Sports” , games played with the imagination and with string and sticks..and study the roots and history of games and people’s relationship with play.

And then when you have experienced lots and lots of different game systems your brain will help you make connections and shortcuts to new and elegant ways of communicating with and challenging the player. Mechanics will pop into your head like songs do now when you hear a matching phrase.

And when you have a base of experience to work from – that you really understand because you’ve tried those systems out – then you can start to make new rules and new mechanics and explore new ways to communicate with the player.

#2
I find my experience with improv theater (Renassance festival volunteer, musician, and character) is something I go back to again and again to understand (and explain) dynamic story and interacting with an audience.

You should personally understand the role of the audience in storytelling or theater or juggling or any entertainment medium…learn to read them, see when they are engaged and what excites them.

Experience Awe – maybe that is Burning Man, or Mardi Gras, or walking through the great redwoods or the cathedrals of Europe. Then once you have that emotional yardstick – once you’ve stretched your imagination enough – you can try to put that in your games. To take someone on that journey with you.

When you can think about the journey you want the player to experience, and you can see the whole thing from start to finish, and how every detail meshes together it is a very powerful thing. What do they feel, what do they think, what do they have time to do think? How does the journey change you? And how will it become an individual journey for someone else. What will they learn, what will they take away, what will they bring?

Watch people play your game in focus groups, or you just sit there quietly where you can’t guide them, where you see them trying to have that amazing experience but frustrated with controls, and confusing interfaces, and that thing that the Publisher thought was a good idea…and it changes you. So you start to see not just the experience you want to make but the pitfalls that get put in there by mistake – not with bad intent – just that nobody has the eyes for someone new to the experience after awhile.

You have to love the player that you will never meet, and remember their needs. You want to give them this gift, this unique experience they cannot get from any other medium, something unique and special and personal.

That is what kees us going at night, that dream.

-Mark

@Morgan, yeah ditto. I’d also add that those games from the 80′s are still fun and very popular, and singular developers are still making games today. That’s something that never ended. But it’s just not a viable way to make a living for most devs, so such games that we all know and love are most often developed in people’s spare time.

@Bartle, I’d say that everybody has the potential for those skills, but it’s like music or writing. They have to be trained. Fortunately it seems to be pretty easy to pick up on, especially among people who play a lot of games.

i still need to get my hands on that book too… in time when funds allow.

although i have dr. rigby’s idea on why video games attract players and have found that an interesting read; Rethinking Carrots

i see the word ‘fun’ thrown around like so much food at a mess hall, but i sometimes wonder, what truly is ‘fun’?

“The 1980s are long-dead and gone. Move on.”

Really bad advice. Studying games from the late 70s and early 80s is one of the best ways to get comfortable with these principles. The game mechanics are closer to the surface and you don’t have to cut through the glitter to see them. That was the golden era and we haven’t really done much new on core mechanics since then, but so much exploration happened in those years that truly “moving on” is easier said than done.

raph said: “All the great game designers I know are omnivorous constant readers.”

True of so many fields that require a synthetic mind. Feed the kitty. They also have a slightly lazy streak.

All the good songwriters I know are readers. The best ones are painters too. The very best usually have a background in theatre. Games probably have more aspects of theatre than other forms, but I found the really good songwriters have that ability to create an entire play inside 16 lines of lyrics. It really is the summit of the art form.

Just for comparison: do the really good games come to you all at once, in chunks, or do you have to noodle until you get a piece, get the next piece and so on. When I was young, I wrote songs from front to back. Now I find I sometimes write from back to front and get better results (goal-oriented; I know how I want that final emotion to play out as the song closes and I write that down, then write a front, then build the peaks).

It is all glorious good fun, isn’t it?

@Slyfeind: so you basically say that the “single-person teams” of the 1980s created games that sucked?

The third crucial skill is recognizing when you should modify the former to satisfy the latter, and vice versa.

This additional skill set makes it more likely (though still far from guaranteed) that the designer will be able to create something that is actually fun.

So true, so true. I understand you need both, but lately I feel as if a lot of developers just don’t “get” the part about turning off the mechanics/design circuits in their brains. They fail to understand and accept that sometimes the seemingly smallest details like sound play a critical role in how an experience feels.

Some recent comments from the developers of a certain game Raph previously worked on have been frustrating. The comments were about the unique mood/emotes system in this game and how “more time should have been spent making quest building tools (etc, etc)”. Aside from the fact that the original vision for the game relied on player created content and not scripted quests, it shows me this person is likely concerned only with mechanics.

The unique chat/mood/emote system in this game is taken for granted. It is now seen as something that makes new changes “really hawrd”. This is really too bad because the system plays a huge role in bringing a player into the virtual world and if it were gone people would surely notice.

I’m sure quest building tools are nice (bleh, scripted quest). But I’ll tell you what’s more magical than a quest – when you chat in a game and say “Yes, I’ll help you” and your toon nods his head. When you say “lol” and your toon animates. That is magic.

True. Or put differently, see things holistic and from a reductionist point of view. It only appears to be impossible, because of connotation noise in the words (this or because seagulls never hatch in Burkina Faso). I would also add: good at finding mechanics for metaphors and metaphors for mechanics. And some other yet secret knowledge.

@Morgan, part of the problem is that in order for the project to be consistent, you need to at minimum be able to recognize these things or you end up with a two headed monster.

Having someone working with you and catching these things is helpful, but only if you’ve got a basic aptitude to begin with. You don’t need to be *very* good at it for things to work, but you need to at least be able to understand how to adapt the part you’re good at to the part that the other person is good at, and that requires at least *some* ability to walk on the other side. But the better you are at both, the cleaner the end result is, because it doesn’t have to be filtered through people that can’t *quite* communicate in a way that the other can fully understand.

That being said, I’m not entirely sure how much of the latter is actually different than the former. User interface and aesthetics are, in my mind, a form of mechanic. Gauging response as to whether or not something is “fun” or “cool” is harder, but seeing whether or not a UI element will break or be confusing is not much different than examining things like “force projections” and “territory control in a graph”. You’re looking at patterns and applying them to pre-existing models. Determing what you want to do aesthetically is also very close to a mechanical system; you’re simply applying a set of rules (is this case the effects of, color, style, tone, etc) to a very different effect (user should feel a certain way rather than behave a certain way). They speak in different “languages” but they’re functionally very similar; though the words are different the grammar is the same. So if you’re good at one, there shouldn’t be any reason why you can’t be good at the other, you just need to learn the right patterns.

Honestly, the biggest key here is the awareness of your built in assumptions and the ability to question them. If you can pull that off you can avoid most of the problems without necessarily having to fully compartmentalize your pre-knowledge of the mechanical systems. Not all of them though, because you still won’t necessarily be able to view it through the same eyes, and thus if you missed a preconception, it can cause you issues. But trying to recapture that original sense of wonder seems like a losing proposition to me, most players are incapable of it once they’ve started playing something for a little while; for people who are continually peeking behind the curtain to not pay attention to the man standing back there, I’d say it’s nigh impossible…