Playing Like a Designer - I: Examine Your Experiences - Extra Credits

Many people have requested that we give a few more tips on how to start being a game designer. So this week we're going to cover how to play games like a designer. Now we've already talked about how a designer's job isn't just playing games, but a designer must understand a lot of games. They have to know how a set of independent mechanics translate into a specific user experience. They have to know the conventions that genres follow. And they have to understand how games relate so they can reference them when trying to explain mechanics of their own. In order to do this, they must experience games as a designer. The first thing you have to learn as a designer is the hardest, to observe while you are experiencing. This is an incredibly hard skill to master. For most of us the act of observing fundamentally colors our experience. Rigorous observation makes it harder to experience joy and excitement because you're so focused on trying to capture and analyze every second. On the flip side, while simply experiencing, you tend to miss the important details hidden in the most exhilarating moments as you're caught up in the rush of what's going on. As a designer, you must

get past this and learn to be in the moment while you observe it. Now I know that may sound like some sort of mystic designer nonsense, but trust me, it's a very learnable skill. Try beginning with activities that are extremely visceral but non-interactive. To start, take a ride on a roller coaster. Try and observe at which points you're excited, scared, exhilarated, relieved, surprised, upset, uncomfortable. Try and understand why you're experiencing any major emotion as you're experiencing it. Try to take in as many of the details as you can. How fast are you going? Is the track banking? Which way and why? What can you see? What do you smell? What are the moments that led up to this one? How was it set up? What were you thinking right before and during? What are the sounds around you? How does this all come together to shape the moments you're experiencing right now? Next, try to go to a rock concert and do the same thing. If you can manage it, try to go two different nights and experience the show from different positions. Be in the pit one night and up on the balcony the next. How do your experiences compare? How do they contrast? Once you begin to assimilate this skill, you'll start to notice things around you on an increasingly subtle level. You'll start to notice how

the conversation you were having at a bar synced up to the rhythm of the music, or how the smell of lilacs helped convince you that the food in the farmers market was fresh. And then you'll begin to be able to take in other people's reactions in greater detail. At first, you may notice the fact that the lady next to you on the roller coaster is throwing her hands up in the air and screaming. Later, you might notice that her long hair ruins the experience for the passenger behind her whenever you go downhill. Once you started to hone that skill, you can start working on recognizing your biases. Now, what do we mean by biases? Obviously, there are the larger ones you're probably aware of, like your preferences for certain genres or styles of play. But, there are subtler, more insidious biases we all pick up throughout our years of playing games. These are the biases of familiarity. You've all been playing games for a while. Have you ever popped in a new game for the first time, taken one glance at the HUD and known what 90% of it meant without ever having to look at the manual or play a tutorial? Ever have a pretty good idea of what buttons are going to do what based on the genre of game you're playing? These are our learned biases. Know exactly how to hold a controller? Yep, that's a bias, too. If you know your biases, you'll be able to put yourself in a mental space where you'll be able to examine what you would have otherwise glossed over. And while

much of this acquired knowledge is something that you'll want to integrate into your game, because hey, providing your target audience with something they're familiar with can be very beneficial, a lot of innovation comes from re-examining these things, and a lot of failed game projects took these things for granted or didn't consider how they could be improved. One of the biggest revolutions in first-person shooters came when the guys at Bungie asked themselves the question, "Why do all first-person shooters have health meters?" For those of you who remember Doom, you probably remember that the same room could be one of the toughest challenges in gaming if you came into it with no armor and a single digit of health, or a cakewalk if you were maxed out on both. Regening health allowed designers to create vastly better levels, because they could now anticipate exactly how much health a player would have when they entered a room. And it's actually much more conducive to the genre to have a mechanic that basically says, "If you're getting shot this much in this amount of time, you're probably doing something wrong. Try it again." than it is to have the player whittle down the enemy, run to retrieve health, and then come back. Of course, on the downside, removing health also seemed to remove all the exploration and hidden secrets from the genre, as it took out the necessity to scour levels as a means of survival, a consequence which few first-person shooter designers seem to consider these

days. But anyway, you see what being aware of your biases can do. Geez, we've got a lot left to cover. Hmm. You know what? Let's make this a two-parter. Next week, we're going to go over why a game designer must play a variety of games, both good and bad, how much time you should spend playing them, and then go into the nitty-gritty of some of the specific things you should do while you play. See you guys next time for part six. Later.