9 minutes ago, swiftcoder said:

A number of those seem cultural, rather than absolutes. You may find that someone trained in music theory in say, China, or Ghana, disagrees strongly with Western notions of harmony and rhythm.

Those conventions also tend to very centred on singular cultural tradition. Hell, Western literature critique is having trouble comparing male/female narratives, let alone narratives from other cultures.

All this to say, I think the same applies to game design. Attempting to define a single, global taxonomy of what constitutes "good" game design is... doomed to failure, either by bogging down in definition, or by producing a definition that is exclusionary to some portion of the audience.

I think you're right here. One thing I am seeing now is that any critique or analysis has to be very specific or very simple to hold. For music, for instance, I don't imagine in any culture one note played over and over has ever been considered music, but you're absolutely right with respect to culture and harmony. I think you CAN find limits, but they all tend to be in the extreme (e.g., randomized note arrangement) but that then leaves us with what? An upper bounds for the question, maybe, but nothing more insightful. Fiction I think suffers the same phenomena. ("I woke up and got out of bed" I'd wager is probably a story in no culture.)

Even if we talk mechanical design, we have to be narrow and specific. Rules for wings and wheels are not the same, and while this is entirely obvious now, there was a time in the past when it wasn't. In game design we seem to have general conventions we follow without entirely knowing why they work, with an often hideous amount of risk involved in varying the "special recipe" in any significant way. Success seems highly dependent on luck and the mood of the audience that moment. Maybe that's actually all there is with games, and we'll learn nothing unless we're highly specific ("portrait painting" rather than "painting", "noir fiction" rather than just "fiction" etc.)

There is game design as science, and there is game design as art.  They coexist in any game.  The science is what makes the game function how it functions, and the art is what you do with it that makes your version of it unique from everyone else's.

Like a previous poster essentially said, there is no one correct answer.  What I might think sounds like a really bad idea on the surface might wind up being a great game when someone else makes it, because of their unique "art" in how they did it that I could not see until they showed it too me.

If there is a single common thread to find, it is making games that function in interesting ways at their core.  In how the fundamental basis of whatever game that you are making works.  Chess and Acquire are the ultimate examples of this, they both function in interesting ways at the core of how they work.  At their most basic level, which is why there is so little too them and yet they are timeless classics with endless replayability.  This comes from their science, not their art.  They are both intricate and interesting even though there is almost nothing too them.  This is the height of game and simulation design, achieving a level of depth of similar to Chess with as few rules and game elements as Chess.

It is easy to keep piling on "band aids and strings" to patch together "a good game".  But, really, you are just fooling the audience into thinking it is a "good game".  It is might not be a "well-designed game" even though a majority call it a "good game".  Is it still a "good game" if you remove all of those band aids and string and just play the fundamental core of it without all of that "masking"?  If not, it was not a "well designed game", even if a majority call it a "good game".  A good game that is not a well-designed game is an example of a game that is more "art" than "science".

38 minutes ago, kseh said:

It seems reasonable to me that poorly executed project directing might end up being perceived as bad design.

This might be part of the problem: Most computer games are made up of complex, interrelating parts. (Not all, but most.) Music, art direction, narrative context, user interface, computer science all have to work together in harmony. I can imagine, for instance, "bad" coming from all of these elements working well save for memory management and all the pains that come from a failure in that domain. The director's job is pretty much to make the best of the limits of all these elements, so there's merit to that.

49 minutes ago, Oberon_Command said:

Are you ruling out music that only uses percussion instruments? I mean, most of the time you don't play "different notes" on a cymbal or triangle, or a maraca. 

 

No not at all! These are good examples but I would note common elements such as rhythm. The clapping piece was particularly striking because I would ask, "Can the audience clapping before the performance be called music?" This is the point I was making about the troubles with procedural content generation earlier, which to me is very striking with respect to design: Random pixel generation or even random terrain generation can be considered art in a way that random noise generation cannot. The question is why?

34 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

Like a previous poster essentially said, there is no one correct answer.  What I might think sounds like a really bad idea on the surface might wind up being a great game when someone else makes it, because of their unique "art" in how they did it that I could not see until they showed it too me.

This is definitely true, there are cases where a perfectly good idea turns out poor on implementation or even where what sounds like a good idea turns out poor because of hidden, unexplored implications.

One reason I raised this topic is to explore some limits around what we can know about a design in advance. I can't find the Medium piece that inspired me, but someone made a comparison between "unconscious design" and "conscious design" in game development. The gist of it is to compare designs which we follow in gamedev which are pursued solely because they worked in the past versus deliberative designs we know tend to work because we understand the underlying elements which make the design successful. The author compared the craft of wagon wheel making to modern game design, noting that at one point in time we made wagon wheels by borrowing from what came before. If something didn't work, we tended to retreat back to what did rather than delve into the underlying physics.

I don't know exactly that game design is comparable, but I'm intrigued by the idea that there actually may be some hard limits to be found by asking the question. 

14 hours ago, Wavinator said:

The gist of it is to compare designs which we follow in gamedev which are pursued solely because they worked in the past versus deliberative designs we know tend to work because we understand the underlying elements which make the design successful

That's a slightly more constrained question than your original, because games are typically produced for a particular audience/demographic. It's certainly possible to distill down the stylistic preferences and emotional responses of a specific demographic... thought at the same time, many game designers have been trying to break free of demographic bounds of late.