Design Sense

TALKING ABOUT DESIGN. WHY DESIGN?

At one point in time, while talking about game making, someone told me the only safe career pursuit was coding. That the coding was any game's live blood and without programmers you wouldn't have any games. This was brought up because I mentioned I do the writing for a group making games and that I consider myself a game designer, and occasionally artist, who has little to no understanding of coding. Which is why I've had such trouble physically finishing any designs. The chap I was discussing with called writing and design the easiest part. I don't know about that. Now I might be wrong, some things come easier to others so for him they might be the easiest part. He could have his coding down, and a natural grasp of story and the design talent to back it and make functional beautifully thought out interactive experience. But for the most part when people say writing is stupid easy or think that coming up with a game that sells million copies first week is just stupid obvious, are the kind of people that have never done those things. Like, they think writing a best selling novel is really easy because they haven't written much so they don't really know much about writing, and chock up the art as a simple task. They misinterpret the aesthetics, the visible content, for the craft of putting the content together.

Say we're talking about a novel. What makes the novel great is not if it has robots or werewolves in it, or even the grammar. It's the way those things are presented that makes it work, it's the pacing and use of story devises. Understanding how the reader will feel reading the work, what and how they'll think while you introduce characters and elements. It's not solely the characters or elements but the significance in their use. Everyone has read a good book (I hope), and everyone has read a boring or dull book from the same genre. Even if the grammar in both was perfectly fine, if both books had gunslinger good guy, a hot distressed victim, an evil as sin bad guy, with a three act structure, and a hero sacrificed conclusion; the good book would never be compared to the bad. No one who had given either any consideration would confuse the two. When asked what's different, you might hear "This one's just got an awesome hero, he's super cool, and killed like thirty badguys. The other killed a bunch of guys too but he's just kinda lame." We've all had those experiences where a book or film just kinda "tell" us we're suppose to like hero X or think they're the coolest but we're just not into it. You can have as many special effects and good actors in a movie, but if the story is terrible and the character's are compellingly written, the movie will be rated poorly. Now that has nothing to do with someone's sense of grammar or including cool stuff, that's the result of design. Great stories are great by their merits in design and execution. Those two things just cannot be divorced. You can't make a classic book out of great storytelling but bad grammar just like you can't make one out of good grammar but bad storytelling. Personally I feel the great storytelling will help a book/movie more then good technical execution. Poor special effects and filming is something you see everywhere in cult classics, but if the story is soulless and poorly shown you're going to have a harder pressed time finding fans. Look at the 5 dollar bin at your local Walmart.

Bringing this back to games, I'm comparing grammar to coding, and storytelling to design. I agree with the individual that coding is the lifeblood of games, but if that's true then the art is the skin and outside, the story is the animal's temperament, and the design is design of the actual animal. The design is how the internal organs work, the system of how the animal moves, what the animal does. How it frightens it's predators, finds it's food, survives. Think about animals in a design sense. Animals that were well adapted and had a design that was well suited for the environment keep living, others died out because their design wasn't suited for the environment. Sharks are really, really old, they're still around because to today's standards they still do what they need to. Like how classic old games still stand up to today's standards as engaging and fun. 

What's Going On?

I think what's happening typically when consumers or starting up game developers misunderstand and dismiss the term design, it's because they haven't been given a context to really see design as what it is. Like learning English someone points at an apple, says apple, and you think apple just means red fruit. It's more than it's surface material. There's more to writing than just put words on paper and more to drawing than just lines on paper. That's not to say they can't design. It's just they're not as aware of what they're doing. Like people who can sit down and play something ridiculously complex off the top of their head, completely impromptu on the piano without ever taking a lesson. That doesn't prove that musical theory is bunk, it proves that it's something innately appreciated. You don't need to know a think about music to appreciate Queen. You don't need to understand or acknowledge all the little bits of brilliant in a Miyazaki film to be drawn in. None of that's important because design is an invisible art, a soft science even. You enjoy and are drawn to a well designed advertisement without ever knowing it. We're bombarded with thousands of logos and graphic art a day but will still notice a well designed image dispute ourselves. We'll categorize that image and remember it for years to come without giving it a second thought, not because we tried to remember it, but because the designer knew what he was doing. Design is a thing you enjoy effortlessly, good design is something you barely notice. You might internalize a general understanding and design sense by being exposed to a medium, but then might not be able to explain later why something is bad. You'll know it's bad, but you might not be able to exactly articulate why. 

"How was the movie?"

"It was boring."

"Why?"

"Just was."

Everyone who makes anything is practicing a level of design. Anything creative is designed and could have it's merits judged by it's design. Everyone who makes games is at worst and amateur designer. I'm not saying this to make a point about designers being the most important people in game production. No, I'm just saying that what being a designer means isn't what people always think it is. Design isn't an idea, it's the execution of an idea. It's not "Game with werewolves and guns!", at it's simplest it's "tower defense, werewolves", and that's the basic idea you start with. But throughout the production you're making more and more design choices. Level design, deciding what to include or exclude to balance complexity curve, gameplay, the interface, the guns work, the way the enemies work. Yes without coding you wouldn't be able to translate that into a functioning game, but from start to finish design is implemented throughout the game and has direct effects on the game. That theory I have with storytelling and grammar in books is the same with games, how many times do you pick up that great old game you love that has the occasional glitch over the brand new one with the uninteresting gameplay? You never pick up that last one because you traded it in at Gamestop or where-ever. 

Design isn't just 'idea guy', and if you're getting into game making thinking it is, you're in for a sad disappointment. Design is something that every contributor implements in their part aspect of the production, game design means the gameplay and the level design. To me design is all I really care about in a game. If a game has a fantastic story or art but cannot draw me in with it's gameplay I won't care to continue playing. If then the art and story are created perfectly to fit with the gameplay and paced well within the levels, then there's a game I love. 

When I'm working on a game when I feel the most alive is when I have the squares and pre-art bits moving around onscreen in the way I want them too. Transitions, puzzles, effects, controls. In the back of my head I have all the art assets, but those are just the skin, what's really happening in a game happens by design. Of course none of that happens without the rest of production. Squares are nice, but can't always convey a meaningful experience like art and sound can. Think of how iconic game music is, think of how popular sprite art is in gaming culture. Think of well written stories and how that contextualized fight scenes into an epic experience you'd come back to again and again. Then think about how none of that would be possible without lines of code.. complex.. computer language. You can't expect to divorce these elements from each other and weigh one or the other as more important.. well.. actually you can have a game with no sound. And then they have made that one mobile phone game where it's pitch black and you use alone to figure out where you are in the digital world... that's such a cool design. 

OKAY.

You can't dismiss the design side of games any more then you can dismiss the technical side. It'd be like removing the rules of chess from the physical board and pieces, or taking the physical construction and pieces out of the equation and just leaving the idea.. it's just not possible. Either way, you wouldn't have chess. Even if you were to try to image a game of chess you'd need to imagine physical properties to conduct the game. The aesthetics are a softer element of production, but just as vital. Dwarf Fortress depends on it's graphics as much as Minecraft or Super Meat Boy, without their individual aesthetic sense the games wouldn't be as iconic or convey the same experience they do. If you thought Mario, Zelda, or Pokemon could be the same without their musical numbers then you're wrong.  

I know they're old videos and everyone's seen them, but a great study of design in the way it effects game experience is Egorapter's Sequelitis series.