This semester, I was actually enrolled in two classes with the words "game design" in their title. One of those classes could have more accurately been named "have the C4 engine actively fight every design decision you make", but that's a story for another day. For the other class - this one, that is - my primary role was that of a designer. Along with Dan Spaventa (the conspicuously beardless member of Team ADD), I wrote out the specific mechanical elements of our game and was responsible not only for ensuring that they were implemented properly, but also for ensuring that our design goals were clearly communicated to the other members of the group (artist, programmer, etc.). As the semester progressed, one of the main things I learned was the importance of communication (both active and passive) in the design process, and just how much some of our earlier readings and lecture in the course affected the design and implementation of our game, Daydream.
In terms of readings, the most prominent ones that spring to mind are The Well-Played Game by Bernie DeKoven and all our related activities and discussions about the "New Games" movement. As it stands now, our game is set up to have an "end" condition in the form of a test that comes as the lecture video draws to a close. Originally, we intended the game to just be open-ended - there was no test and the concepts of winning and losing didn't even enter into our design process. However, as we started talking about it, we realized that we wanted to start playing around with traditional ideas about what it means to "win" and "lose" a game. As such, the hard-coded win conditions are very unsatisfying - you watch a five minute lecture and then take a really easy quiz - while the lose condition allows you to freely interact with different mini-games and is generally more enjoyable. However, if you ignore the lecture, the quiz becomes much harder and, if you fail, the game restarts. We felt it was important to have this self-reflexive exploration of user or player defined "rules" by having hard-coded rules in direct conflict with everything that makes the game fun. It is similar to the idea of Earthball discussed in Fron et al's "Sustainable Play" - while it is very possible to win the game, it is much more satisfying to "fail" and keep interacting with the game as long as possible.
Another design consideration we had involved the gender of the player and their avatar representation. Many of the readings and lectures for this course dealt with failures in this area, so we knew we wanted to design the game in such a way as to be as gender neutral as possible. In the end, the designers resolved this issue by setting the game in a first person perspective (the player never sees their "avatar") and by having none of the interactions suggest a gender for the player. Unlike typical first person action games or FPS's, because the interaction involves a classroom (which contains both male ad female students), and because our audience is, in this case, primarily Tech students, we figured that allowing the player to have this perspective would give them a very strong sense of agency and would feel as though they were playing as themselves and they were actually daydreaming in class.
One thing that was very new to me was carrying the design process of a game all the way through and having to worry about artistic considerations. Anyone who has spent enough time around me knows that I am something of a mechanical purist when it comes to game design (ask me about The Marriage sometime), so typically when I produce a prototype the art is a tertiary consideration. However, after interacting with my group, and studying games such as Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time, I began to see how art itself could become integral to gameplay and mechanics. For example, our game requires people to be interested in various elements in the game space, and we had to consider how to design these objects that players would actually want to interact with them while still maintaining the "real world" look and feel of our primary visual style. I still believe that mechanics are more important than graphics, but now I know that artists are actually useful in the design process itself (I admit, I was pretty close-minded about this in the past).
Probably the most personally useful aspect of the course for me was the interim group evaluation. I assumed (incorrectly) that the feedback I would get from the group would be largely useless and vague, but I was surprised to find that there were things I was doing that were actively harmful to the design process without me even realizing I was doing them. Mainly, I didn't realize that my strong personality and tendency to dominate conversations was discouraging people from speaking up, and that I was having trouble passively participating in conversations (read: listening to other people). After that evaluation, I worked on being less forceful in my assertions during group meetings, and try to listen to what people were really asking rather than just listening for the things I wanted to hear. I feel like as the semester went on I was able to more easily communicate my specific design goals to the artists and programmer, and was also able to address there concerns and questions more thoroughly. I will keep this in mind for all future group projects and try to more of a helpful influence in the future rather than a dominating one.
Overall, the organization of this course, and it's encouragements to play around with traditional game conventions, was very useful for evaluating and learning about the design process as a whole. As someone who wants to work as a designer, being able to write up an initial design and see it through to the end while working with a team (rather than individually) allowed me to see the value of accepting input and changing/revising designs without viewing it as corrupting the purity of my own ideas. Also, the design restrictions in place for the course make it an interesting challenge that forces designers to look at the underlying mechanics of in-game conflict and come up with new design conventions rather than just rehashing or updating old ones.
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