We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

People who are in game design courses or who had them, how much of what was taught was actually about the fundamentals of game design and how much is detail stuff? The person I know who understands how video games work and should work best comes from a background of amateur board game design, and I'm wondering if that is actually better at preparing designers than all the coursework is.

The course I am taking now is split between the first half of the book (before it branches out into genre-specific advice) and prototyping games (mostly in Pygame); it is under the computer science department, so it’s understandable they might want us to work with code a little “close to the metal”, but Pygame seems a bit little obtuse to me. This is under the philosophy that you do not get good at this sort of thing without practice. Some things we are required to get through is menus and splash screens and blitting sprites (again, Pygame) and such, but we also had to write a “pitch doc”. The fact is, a lot of CS degrees are already something like a 5-year courseload compressed into 4, so they have a limited allowance to slip in coursework concentrating on game design alone.

All in all, board game designers do seem to have a better grasp on their field, and I think there is more than one reason for that. One of them is that video games handle the rules of the game for you, but in traditional games, you handle the rules. There’s nothing quite like that for hands-on training. And video games rarely if ever are tested or at least quantified that way—part of it might just be that nobody involved thought of manual intervention, but certain operations in video games are just so complicated (physics calculations, for example) that you would never want to do it by hand. So board game rules have to be something where you understand what you’re doing. Lots of video game rules take place way behind the scenes (like offscreen NPC activity), or are not something the player is expected to think too hard about (like camera controls); moreover, almost nobody goes to a game’s code and takes a good hard stare at those rules, aside from the original developers, whereas to even play a board game you should get out the instruction sheet.

As a result, board games have an imperative to keep things as simple as possible (but no simpler). When you make the rules of play and actions simple enough for people to really get, you can study all sorts of things much more closely. Anyone can get pretty deep into thought about what their next turn should be in Risk, but the only people who really get rules that activate 60 times a second are people who are wayyy into getting an edge, like speedrunners and competitive players.

I think one of the problems of teaching game design is that not a lot of people who work in the industry even seem to be that good at it

Yes, by that “nuts and bolts” statement I really do mean designers are trying to write novels when all we have invented is the alphabet. We can slap together a bunch of game mechanics and try to make them all cohesive and whatnot, but for all the increase in hardware power, we are not seeing a whole lot of advancements or innovation in things like gameplay elements and game engines; just a few here and there, and a lot of incremental improvements or variations on something well understood.

Richard Garriott recently took a bit of heat for (rather inelegantly) stating that there weren’t really that many good game designers around, and there are plenty of people who think he’s not all that hot either (nor the other guys he named), so uh. Yeah. Controversial statement or not, he’s right. That’s where we are.

N.B. this post mayyyy or may not have been posted in the middle of a lecture and mayyyy contain oversights or downright stupid things to say