The Importance of Not Playing Games - A Balanced Game Design Education - Extra Credits

Most people who play games are pretty avid game players, and that makes perfect sense on the surface. Familiarizing yourself with the medium gives you a lot of experience to draw on as you make your own games. However, is it possible that spending too much time gaming, having too much familiarity with the medium or specific genres could actually limit our creativity? The answer to that pre-intro question is a resounding yes. And to help explain that answer, we've brought in Samuel Dasler, a designer who's worked on indie games large and small, and has also served as a designer in residence at a major university to help build eco games. And once, long, long ago, was a student of James's. Thanks, Sam. Video games, like other mediums, have developed a pretty stable set of conventions, both specific to genres and the medium as a whole. But the biggest problem with only drawing inspiration from other games is that no matter how hard you try, your preconceptions will always get in the way of your

creativity. In fact, once you see the conventions of a certain genre over and over again, they're going to be forever burned into your mind. And while it is possible to break away from those conventions, it's also extremely difficult. You have to actively examine all of the things you take for granted and look for things you subconsciously added to your design simply because that's how your brain thinks about the genre you're working in. So for instance, if I say platformer, you've probably got a pretty good picture of what you think I'm talking about. The genre itself is probably going to invoke images of a game that looks, feels, and plays like something resembling Super Mario Brothers. Now, it may have an inventive gameplay mechanic or two on top, a crazy art style, or an awesome narrative, but we're still probably also going to see some suspended platforms, jumping, collecting things, and if it's 2D, it's probably going to scroll from left to right. These mechanics were set 35 years ago for that one specific game, but they've become genre conventions that are often just taken for granted to this very day.

Ask anybody who's ever played games before to sketch out a design for a platformer game, and most people will almost certainly come back with something that, at its core, looks pretty much like what I just described. But, ask somebody who doesn't play games or has never heard of Mario before, if you can find that person, what they think a platformer is, and they might come up with something that's totally wild to us. In fact, we probably would have never thought of what they did simply due to our own preconceptions of what platformer games are. We're at the point where new designers entering the industry have grown up playing games, often from a young age. So, what references are these new developers pulling from? What else except the very games they grew up playing? Many of them probably spent hours as a kid drawing out imaginary games that were, in effect, their own versions of games they liked to play. And there's nothing wrong with starting out that way. However, the long-term danger with staying this course is that we end up with an endless churn of samey clonish games that don't seriously attempt to change the formula.

And actually, this becomes an even greater danger as major games like Overwatch, Fortnite, and Minecraft are designed to take up more and more of a player's time, consuming the hours that a budding designer would have once used playing a plethora of different things. The deeper one goes into one type of game, the less time they'll have to expand the depth and variety of their experiences. I mean, there's only so many hours in a day. Those are We and I are working on that. And we are in no way saying that there's anything wrong with sinking, say, 1,000 hours into Overwatch or 4,000 hours into World of Warcraft, if that's what you want to do. Games are meant to be engaging, after all. But, designers, as crafters of experiences, need to have, well, experiences. There's a whole world full of inspiration outside of games that can influence us in all sorts of positive and unexpected ways. So, it's important for a designer to step outside their game comfort zones and to get a new perspective. A great example of what this line of thinking can lead to is Papers, Please. Lucas Pope

conceptualized Papers, Please from his many hours of traveling between the US and Asia, observing customs and immigration officers stamping passports all day, and examining how such a monotonous task like checking passports could translate into a compelling game experience. Wolfenstein 3D was designed to invoke the idea of storming a Nazi access bunker. Pac-Man was based on the simple act of eating. His character partially based off a pizza missing a slice. And Shigeru Miyamoto famously was inspired by his childhood years of exploring caves and woods to create The Legend of Zelda. The designers of these early games had few or no prior games to reference. So, they were all largely pulling from their own life experiences and interests outside of games. Exclusively playing games or spending most of our time just on a few perpetual ones runs the risk of stifling our own growth by limiting our own experiences. And those life experiences, whether exploring caves or traveling through customs, are an untapped source of possibility for making incredible

experiences that may have never been seen before. Now, of course, we're not saying that as a designer, you should never play games because that would be weird. Rather, we're saying that games are like bowls of cereal. They're merely part of a balanced designer breakfast. Game designers should always be curious, always be hungry to learn more about the world around them. So, instead of sinking hundreds of hours into another online shooter, maybe think about signing up for a class, joining a sports team, or simply traveling if you can afford to. Or maybe read a book about some topic you know almost nothing about. There's never a downside to expanding your horizons. And because of these other life experiences, you may find yourself exploring concepts and interests while designing your games that you may have never imagined before. And it's integrating those new experiences, rather than just putting small twists on the games we've already seen before, that will truly continue to push games forward as an artistic medium. In fact, let us know in the comments what outside of gaming

experiences you've found most helpful in your game designs, so we can further the conversation. And of course, so Zoey and I can add more cool stuff to our bucket lists. Until then, see you next time, everybody.