Game Design's Evolution, From Warshaw To Now
Earlier in the week on GSW's sister education site Game Career Guide, veteran Crystal Dynamics game designer Jason Weesner was nice enough to post the next in his series on video game design, called, rather iteratively, 'On Game Design: The Designer' - and I think it's worth pointing to, since I'm not sure many people spotted it.
Weesner has been making games for 15+ years now, and this piece, for students and those wanting to get into the biz, is particularly good because it chats to industry originators like Howard Scott Warshaw, "a fantastic example of the early "proto-designer" whose role encompassed all facets of game's development", but also has Weesner explaining how formulating ideas for game design really happen when making games such as Tomb Raider Legend.
He explains: "Troy Mashburn, a senior designer at Crystal Dynamics, came up with the concept of the tea time. Tea time gets its name from the time of day that it takes place (usually around 3) and the presence of either hot tea or hot chocolate. Basically, tea time is a session (formal or informal) intended for the exploration of a specific idea. The format is roughly the same as a round table with scope being added to support the discussion topic."
To what end? "For example, the group could discuss different ways in which a jump could be used: object avoidance (variations on jump over or out of the way), object interaction (jump on to activate), jump traversal (interesting ways of using the jump to move around an environment), jump attack (the classic butt bounce), etc. The goal of the tea time is to walk away from the meeting with a laundry list of ideas at a brainstorm level which will later be filtered and refined to drive a feature."
Comments
As soon as he said "The first step is to get it through creative approval..." I just stopped reading. It's the same old same old. Design as a function of bureaucracy.
Posted by: CaRteR | June 3, 2007 5:15 PM
I'm not sure why you're championing the cause of Revenge of the Mutant Camels, CaRteR. Seems like a good idea to me to have to convince other people that your idea is worth spending money on, as, after all, you eventually have to convince the players to do the same.
Posted by: Merus | June 3, 2007 6:22 PM
It just is the idea that a group of people can create better than an individual flies in the face of a thousand years of art. I don't understand it.
If you want to make anything great you need to give autonomy. That means you don't need to seek approval after writing every paragraph of design rules.
Posted by: CaRteR | June 3, 2007 6:38 PM
To clarify, even in film, which is an intensively collaborative creative industry, there is wwwaaaayyyy more creative autonomy than in the games industry. And so film is a mature creative form of expression, relevant to the mainstream of our society. But in games, everything is collectivist. Everything is done with everyone seeking approval from each other. People with strong ideas as to what to create is shunned as "difficult". So, the strong-minded shunned, the industry seems to attract mediocre people who know how to play the system.
Posted by: CaRteR | June 3, 2007 6:43 PM
Well CaRteR, my articles are trying to offer practical advice and that will probably include a lot of stuff that you're not going to like reading / hearing and I'm not here to defend any of it. These are the realities of the game development industry and, for that matter, any creative industry. Just because you have to seek approval, doesn't mean you lose the voice of the individual. This applies equally to film as it does to video games. Thanks for the feedback! I'll explore your concerns in more detail in a future article.
Posted by: weezie | June 4, 2007 10:13 AM