Spoiler

(03-25-2013, 01:14 AM)BRPXQZME Wrote: »The textbook we are using in Intro to Game Design still says to use L and R buttons, just one more reason our class has devolved into "point and laugh at the author."

Fffffff okay look

See, the problem here

I have opinions about shitty Game Design educational practices from having had to sit through two years before figuring out, holy shit, these people are going about this entirely the wrong way, so

The problem here isn't so much that the author is giving you terrible advice on how to set up the camera, it's

Why is the author giving you advice on how to set up the camera at all?

Yes, that is a technical issue that people putting together a game are going to have to figure out and deal with. But it has nothing at all to do with game design.

Critically, there's this obvious and faulty assumption that you, the game designer, learning from this book about game design, in a course that is supposed to introduce game design... are specifically going to be developing games for consoles. Their supposition (on top of preventing the player from being able to look up or down at will) is that you're gonna be programming for something that needs a controller, which is just... completely blind to any side-on, top-down, PC, or non-digital game.

My own textbook falls prey to this as well when it starts going on about how you're gonna need to know how to do 3D modeling- in the chapter about character design. Again, a technical issue that may not even matter if you opt to forgo 3D imagery. On top of that, 3D modeling is something that'd affect more than just character design; on top of that, character design ought to be more about how to convey a character than through what medium they are conveyed.

There's even mention, funnily enough, of how you should be able to prototype your game on paper, so you can test if your mechanics work before the code is implemented. But the thing just assumes- and, I mean, yeah, it's the bigger, better-known industry, but- there's just this unspoken assumption that Game Design means Game Design For Consoles Or Computers. There's a sense to it, but it's not very well-thought-out.

Part of the issue, I'm sure, is that education itself isn't set to adapt to new developments, and the whole reason the games industry is big right now is because of all the new developments going on. There probably won't be a book about Kickstarter for another decade or so, let alone one that's education-focused.

But, even beyond that, beyond academia's sluggish reaction speed, there's this... subtle supposition, I think in part because most-if-not-all game design teachers are industry vets, that... like, they're teaching us how to construct games, not design them. They're calling it Architecture and teaching Carpentry. I only noticed it because I got fed up with how... misdirected all the teaching was and decided to switch majors. As it turns out, the one GD course that's required for the Minor but not the Major is actually better at teaching pure design than any other course I've taken in the program. It is hideously and endlessly frustrating.



Gettin' mad on the internet

SpoilerBasically, the primary issues with the textbook we are using in this class (Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design) are threefold:
- It is more or less centered from experience acquired in the world of game design and marketing for large commercial operations... and a long time ago at that. I doubt it completely reflects how the job works at those kinds of companies in the present, and it certainly does not hold up in light of the indie-splosion of the past few years, where you are winging a lot of things and are your own lord and master. He strongly admonishes against things that will make games unmarketable, when really you can get away with lots of those things if that doesn’t matter.
- Most of it was clearly written a long time ago and hasn’t really been updated for the latest revision from 2009. Things have changed since then; we’ve had that aforementioned indie-splosion, MMOs are not the subscription cash cow they used to be, there are now lots of people who play smartphone games exclusively, and so forth. Sure, some things should be timeless principles, but few of even those principles have been written down in such a way as to keep them timeless.
- The book often consists of long-winded descriptions that miss the forest for the trees (I consider the chapter “Storytelling and Narrative” to be actively harmful to aspiring game writers, though—that is a rant for another time).

On the other hand, I wouldn’t say there is a problem with it telling you how various forms of camera controls work (the book tries to be platform agnostic, and does look outside computer games). It’s just that L2/R2 camera controls are downright antiquated now and weren’t that common in 2006 (the date of the first edition), either, and we keep coming across hilarious signs of decay like this.

Basically, this book is not about game design as in game mechanics but as the whole package. It would be appropriate for a game designer to be designing camera controls (maybe the only other kind of designer—by title, anyway—you would want to put in charge of that sort of is a UX designer), as the title itself is fairly broad, and such broadly differing responsibilities would be divided amongst a team of designers on a large project.

I certainly can’t say I recommend this book, but I’m stuck with it for the semester. Plus I don’t know a better one for what it aims to do, and it will probably still warn a lot of students who read it about making very common but critical mistakes (N.B.: Adams is the guy who curates the annual “Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!” series), so it is better than no such book at all. If given many more authors and 20 years of straight up revision, I’m sure it could be refined into the encyclopedia of game design we’d all want to have. But then it would never make it to print.

The up side is that since it does try to broadly cover all of game design including a few of the more forgotten corners of history, it’s given me a lot of ideas for things to throw in my kitchen-sink “dream” game engine codebase.

From a cursory glance, his more recent book on game mechanics (Adams & Dorman, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design) seems considerably more practical and less infuriating but I haven’t really had a chance to get into it.