We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

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We could always use more jaded ex-BFA’s in ACS, y’know

Settle Down; You Got The Wrong Guy

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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.

tl;dr: this book is more like an elaborate glossary than a guide

Also also, game design, like other fields of design, can be described as being uncomfortably stuck between “an art” and “a science”. The science can be taught. In games, miraculously, some of it even is, though in the grand scheme of things we’re probably more stuck on, say, the (metaphorical) nuts and bolts than on assembling (metaphorical) working machines. I think designers get just teensy bits better at that each year. The art, on the other hand... well, that’s where you get off into that unresolvable debate that every art has, as to whether you can even teach it or if it comes from some innate miracle-spark or years of plugging at it with plenty of self-introspection or whatever.

I can safely say I kind of suck at designing games at present.