A number of recent events have me worried. I've been abusing the EBGames 7-day return system for PS2 games. "If you don't like it, bring it back," kind of deal. I almost always took the games back. Most of the games I bought/swapped were so badly designed that they were just unplayable. Some of them even had great graphics (silent hill origins) but basically lacked a good game. So the attendent notices I've been coming in a lot and asks me what kind of games I like. I tell him the last great game I played on PS2 was Shadow of the Colossus. He blinks at me before gesturing with his hands: "Yeah, Shadow is kind of up 'here' where most game are kind of down 'here'. Maybe you shouldn't expect so much from games." I was shocked. This totally blew my mind. Why the hell shouldn't I expect good quality from my games? Am I doomed to sit back and make snide remarks forever? What the hell is so wrong with paid professionals that they can't make good games? Games AS GOOD as Shadow of the Colossus, Ico or Portal. Why can't all games at least be playable? People get paid for this crap. That was event number one. This is event number two. I recently applied for a job transfer at a local developer. The job was a game design position to do specifically with level design. This is not a new concept to me. But the market was open and a lot of my associates were also applying for various other jobs at the same company. Many of the artists I knew were made to do a 4-6 hour test; presumably to test their knowledge of certain programs while assessing their artistic skill under pressure of time. The process was pretty similar for any coders applying for low-level positions. Crucially, only minimal previous experience was required to sit the exam. But the designers had a different format. Individually, we were given a stock game mechanic and told to design a level exploring it. We only had twenty minutes to do so. At the time I figured hey, whatever, I'll design a level experimenting with the mechanic in 20 minutes. But afterwards I thought about it a bit more. Why did the artists and coders get a whole day's worth of a test while the designers only got 20mins? That hardly seems right. Sure, I designed a good level in 20mins... But so what? That's moot when you consider the stuff I could have done in 6 hours. As if anyone can tell whether you're a good designer based on 20mins of work. What if some kid randomly hits on the only good design they'll ever create just that one time? Do all companies only spend 20 mins on each level design in their game? No freaking way! Do you give an artist 20mins to model, texture, skin and animate a character in 3dsmax? No way! Do you tell a coder to make a game in 20mins in C# and base his job application on that? No! The company didn't end up hiring any of the applicants. And so... I thought the days of people considering game design a joke were over. But I see that there's still a warm place in consumers' hearts for bad game design. If I had my way, badly designed games would be held accountable; just like if you have a plumber who doesn't screw your taps shut tight enough. Why do people still accept bad game design? And is this the reason so many developers still don't care about it as much as art and code, even after good game design has been proven again and again? 20 minutes? Gimme a break. I may have a biased opinion because I didn't get that job - but neither did anyone else; what is that company going to do for their level designs? I shudder to think.

Quote:Original post by MachiniMax
So the attendent notices I've been coming in a lot and asks me what kind of games I like. I tell him the last great game I played on PS2 was Shadow of the Colossus. He blinks at me before gesturing with his hands: "Yeah, Shadow is kind of up 'here' where most game are kind of down 'here'. Maybe you shouldn't expect so much from games."

I was shocked. This totally blew my mind. Why the hell shouldn't I expect good quality from my games?

He was only trying to tell you that games vary wildly. But 'quality' is a very subjective concept. The degree to which they vary means that if you love one game, it's unlikely many others will impress you to the same degree. In fact, part of the quality of a game often comes from its novelty. That means it is very hard to replicate. That's not a failing of games - that's just part of how it goes. For every person like you who complains that no game has impressed you as much as XYZ, there's someone else complaining that too many games are like ABC. Originality is one axis of quality, ease of use is another, familiarity a third, aesthetic qualities a fourth, etc. It's easier to improve one of these when you stick with lessons learned on the others. Time and resources are limited.

Ultima VII is probably my favourite game. No other RPG really comes close in my mind. But Baldur's Gate beats it for quality in the interface department. Oblivion beats it in the presentation area. Planescape beats it on plot, and FFVI beats it on characterisation. Which has the highest quality?

And do you have the same criteria for movies? Should every film be a 'Citizen Kane' or a 'Casablanca' or near enough, just because they too are made by paid professionals? The fact that we still refer to these as two of the benchmarks when they were made over 60 years ago demonstrates just how hard it is to replicate that sort of success. Sometimes a mixture of hard work, talent, and luck conspire to make something greater than expected, and future amounts of equally hard work won't necessarily get you anywhere close. All repeated endeavours end up distributed over a somewhat wide range of varying acclaim due to a number of factors.

Quote:Am I doomed to sit back and make snide remarks forever? What the hell is so wrong with paid professionals that they can't make good games? Games AS GOOD as Shadow of the Colossus, Ico or Portal. Why can't all games at least be playable? People get paid for this crap.

You are being very opinionated here. Not everybody wants to play games like SotC or Ico (which are pretty much the same game in wider terms) so why would you expect all games to be that way? Paid professionals make lots of good games all the time. Just because they don't meet your criteria, doesn't make them less good.

Paid professionals are also paid for a reason - not to do the best they possibly can for you, but to produce a product for a client who has a target audience in mind (which often doesn't include you). Developers who have expertise in car racing games are not going to create a narrative-driven 3D adventure just because you feel that the latter is of higher 'quality'. It's like when people complain about a study showing people's romantic habits, saying "why aren't these scientists spending their money curing cancer instead?" Scientists are not fully interchangeable between disciplines, and nor are developers all interchangeable between genres. Yes, scientists and game developers can learn and diversify a bit, but on the whole people hone their own areas of quality and play to their strengths. You just have to accept that their strengths may not lie in the areas that you care about as a consumer with certain interests.

Quote:Do all companies only spend 20 mins on each level design in their game?

No, but neither do they only give coders or artists a day on a task either. They're deliberately artificial constraints to test the applicant. And not every company will have the same relative time constraints so I would suggest not generalising from this.

No not really. By itself a game designer can barely make a board game or a P&P RPG game. When you're applying for a game design position you're applying for a middle management position(even if it's not the same look and feel). And lets be honest how many of those do you need, and how many people would you hire right off the bat to do so.

I was curious, what was the stock game mechanic that you had to design a level around in "event number two"?

Were you told to design for a specific genre or given any other constraints?

if the company feel that allowing limited time for level design is important to them, they want the kind of people that can produce their idea of good levels in that sort of period.
perhaps they are looking for pure creativity rather than planning.
there can be different kids of level design.
I can plan something really elaborate that may not work out. or i could do a lot of small different things that are all unique and fun and many of these simple ideas could be really good fun.
in some game engines, level design is really a very small part of it because teh game may be dynamic. like viva pinata for example. or little big planet.

given 20 minutes, one designer might start to place trees and make platforms etc. another designer might try and place NPC's and try and make some narrative.

I don't think it means designers are less valuable. I think it just means the producers have different ideas on what will make them money.
as with lots of movies these days, visuals tend to take front seat.

designers tend to be more valuable in comanies like valve.

The best designers, in my opinion, are the ones that form a "remote" bond with the player. They're not just making levels, they're testing and toying with the player in their own domain, and the really good games make the player feel as though the designer is sitting there behind him the whole time, watching him play.

Some designers like to have the player trust them: "If you jump down this hole, I'll take care of you", while others also do this, but later betray the player and have him prove that he can outwit the designer.

Right now I'm playing my way though Doom 3 (yes, four years after its release), and am really enjoying it. Sometimes I'll look at a hole in the floor and just know something is going to pop out of it.. But as I pass by it, nothing happens, and I can just hear the designer behind me saying "Yeah, I know what you're thinking LONG before you know what you're thinking buddy".

Sadly in the popularity of multiplayer gaming, there isn't much room for this kind of designer / player interaction, and kids these days think that game design is just about building maps, placing items, and that's it. It's sad to think that development companies are also sporting this kind of mentality.

Designers are the game's souls. Great designers make puppets out of their players. You think you can outsmart them, but really you're just trapped in their twisted world.

Quote:Original post by Wavarian
Right now I'm playing my way though Doom 3 (yes, four years after its release), and am really enjoying it. Sometimes I'll look at a hole in the floor and just know something is going to pop out of it.. But as I pass by it, nothing happens, and I can just hear the designer behind me saying "Yeah, I know what you're thinking LONG before you know what you're thinking buddy".

This made me laugh out loud!

yes, I find that my best ideas come out when i am creating something for my friends to play. It's like i'm going about the map leaving little traps here and there and leaving some odd things to make them laugh. I think a really good fun level comes about when the designer is really having fun. it is certainly like a sort of communication.

Thanks for the replies guys.


There's an interesting general trend among designers on the net which is pretty obvious in this thread (and in most game design discussions). That's where people consider game design to be art and where good game design is a purely subjective thing. But I don't think that's really true.

Yes, the fact of the matter is; people can like poorly designed games, but it's not necesarrily the case that games people like are well designed. I liked playing Grim Fandango but I also understand that much of its game design was really really flawed. I subscribed to it for the novelty of the world and the briliant acting (not even the storyline itself) but that doesn't mean it was well designed as a game.

But this isn't about my preference in games. I don't subscribe to genres or story arcs. I like the original Spyro the Dragon just as much as Portal and I like Portal just as much as I like Defcon; I believe they are all designed just as well as each other. If someone has a vendetta against dragons, they might not want to play Spyro, but the point is that if the DID want to, they could do so without any misinterpretation of the rules; its design is solid.

This is basically why games design is a science to me and not an art, contrary to most beliefs. It's all in the psychology that Wavarian touched on. The designer needs to know what the play will think (there's your science of psychology) and the best designers will do artistic things with that science (where the story of Portal complements the gameplay). People who don't believe in that statement also tend to believe God of War was well designed.

I'm often told by game developers that 'we have to make what people will buy'. I think this is pretty much a harsh reality for the major league industry. A successful game isn't necesarrily well designed - and that's really what I'm getting at. Its accepted that this is the case so people think that good game design is subjective.

Poorly designed games (like WoW or God of War) can still do very well so I guess it makes sense that game design isn't that big an issue; or more so, like an art rather than a science. Hit and Miss, right? But I have to stress to people who think this way: sure that poorly designed game was successful, but imagine what it could have been were it also well designed.

Shadow of the Colossus was just the case in point and while that game is largely pretty solid, its design breaks down at the end when it tries to get artistic. Automatic death scenarios should never exist in games no matter how loud the story calls for it (and I'm not talking about the ending itself). That game is about as well designed as Max Payne or Hitman Blood Money; pretty darn good but with noticeable issues.

And yes, for context, movies are the same. A good example of a poorly done movie would be one where plot hooks happen for no logical reason or where close-ups look at a character's shoulder rather than their face (as the shot was supposed to) or even where the editor has simply forgotten to put a black filter over one scene in the middle of the film. They're all technical issues and where game design breaks down, I consider it to be a technical issue, not an artistic one. Here's looking at you, Too Human.

Lithos said that when you apply for a game design position, you're basically applying for a middle management position. I think that's true. I also think that's bad. While some management is required in almost any job, the designer should ideally focus on creating a design which works for the player - not for the team or the honchos.

Whenever I work on a game (specially as a lead) there's a sort of mentality among the higher-ups that the game is 'their' design. While I'm all for sticking closely to a brief, I'm kind of disheartened when someone who isn't a qualified game designer insists they know what they're talking about because they saw 'it' done in another game... You all know what I mean. Try telling an artist to make the game look like a Picasso painting because Picasso is one of the greatest artists of all time... Right? It doesn't work that way.

Some stuff in game design just works (and is often required for the design to be any good), other stuff doesn't. Gameplay gimmicks (like the portal gun in Portal) can go either way to begin with but they should be tested for proof of concept: rapid prototype away. The same goes with story gimmicks like the dragon thing in Spryo; he didn't need to be a dragon (he could have been an all-purpose tiger tank in neo-vietnam) but it made good sense. That's good design.

It seems to me the longer people keep accepting the 'all-purpose tiger tank scenario' the longer we won't need designers as much as we should. Consider also that people who've played good games can generally pick a bad one, even if they don't know why it was good or bad.