Why do you waste your time here?
The latest big issue to be discussed on blogs is how much game designer blogs suck.
Now, admittedly, I like to think of this as a "game development" blog instead of "game design", but I'll pretend to be thin-skinned enough to take Cuppycake's words to heart and be very offended that she told me I sucked. But, instead of crying into my beer, I'll offer up some justification about why you should bother reading my self-indulgent blathering.
Of course, this is the "controversy" we get when we allow a community manager write about game design. Unfortunately, we didn't learn our lesson the first time around. (*grin*) But, this shows some of the benefit of reading game design blogs, even as a non-game designer. I learn a lot about community management by reading community manager's blogs (unless they start blathering on about game design). But, you can apply the same things to community management blogs: Do they know what they’re talking about? Are they even good community managers? And, do other community managers get benefit from reading their blogs?
So, let's step back a moment and consider: why write a blog? For me, the big issue is staying active and getting notice. Many people know me from my work on Meridian 59, but I haven't been doing much with it lately. Further, how many people will really go play it just to learn what I've done? Not too many, I fear. So, I write on here and increase my visibility.
There are other reasons unique to the game industry, too. Combine the "internet time" perception of online game developers with an industry where burnout happens frequently and sometimes unexpectedly, and not doing anything for a few months gets people thinking you've given up. Posting on my blog is one way of saying, "No, I haven't started a compound in the middle of California proclaiming myself as a prophet." On top of that, even if you are active people may not realize that you have done anything. In 2007 I was working with a German company as lead designer on a project to turn a single-player franchise into an MMO. Jessica Mulligan was producer on the project, and I was taking night classes in German in anticipation of a move across the sea. When the company owner sold the company to Ubisoft and didn't keep a license to do the project we were working on, well.... Let's just say that I'm still living in California and don't remember much German anymore. Not exactly something that you understand from just looking at my resume.
So, yeah, the blog is all about you knowing about me, right? Well, not entirely. There's another important aspect of this: history. One problem we have with game design is that we don't have a lot of recorded wisdom. Game design, for the most part, has been epheremal in nature. For example, what were the design principles considered when Monopoly was developed? (Other than possibly ripping off a previous game?
If someone cared enough to look, you could find some interesting discussions of important issues that keep coming up. Want to know what it was like in the early days of WoW's PvP, before battlegrounds and arenas and all that fun stuff? Read that post by Damion to see how just throwing a reward system can radically change a system like PvP in a game. This is just one example of a discussion that's already happened.
Really, one of the reasons we have blogs is because online developers were frustrated by having to reinvent the wheel (then later learning they were tackling already-established stuff). Blogs were a natural for us because we were already online. One of the main reasons I started a blog was because I got tired of posting the same thing in half a dozen different MMO-focused community sites.
So, why have so many blogs about game design? Well, because you get different perspectives. I like to think that my game design ranting has an interesting perspective since I have a highly technical background. Raph has a bit more academic bent to his blog, for example. By contrast, Scott Jennings brings a much more direct perspective, having worked is way to game design from an avid fan on a rant site to working on seekrit projects. (Scott is also insane, not that I can throw stones.)
But, what's the point? Cuppycake wrote:
I know a lot of talented game designers in the industry that [...] don’t read blogs, they don’t read design theory novels, they don’t analyze the psychological reasons why people interact how they do. They simply know how to make good games, and don’t use theories behind it.
That's great, but not everyone is so blessed. Perhaps Tami has been lucky to be surrounded by true prodigies, but in my experience that kind of designer is rare. As Raph points out in a comment, those designers may not be able to turn every nugget they produce into gold. Perhaps they only make good games and not great ones. Perhaps they can only make good games in their narrow category. Perhaps they won't always be a good designer if they don't keep up with changing trends.
So, that brings us back to the blog and sharing information. Instead of going over the same issues again and again, we now share our troubles and our tribulations for others to learn from. Along the way, sure, we may become better known. But, we can also hope to see some good forward motion in the industry, perhaps see some interesting game design that isn't just a rehash of popular examples in the past.
Do we need deep, academic analysis of game design principles in order to help us make cool games? Obviously not. You can make a game you think is cool, and then find out a few hundred other people agree with you. But, if you want to do this on a larger scale, you need to know the rules and explain them. Even if you want to do something different, it's often helpful to know the rules so you know which ones to break.
I still like to think of game design as a bit of a black art, still, and that analyzing it to death takes out some of what makes it interesting. On the other hand, it'd be nice to have better guidelines than, "Yeah, I think this is pretty fun," to show people when I'm talking about an idea. But, we'll still be pleasantly surprised when someone comes out of nowhere to create something we didn't anticipate because they didn't follow the rules. Then, I hope they blog about the experience so I can learn from them as well.
So, now, let me turn this around and listen to the audience for a different perspective on this issue. Why do you visit my site? Why do you read "game design" type blogs? If you do game development professionally, do you really get any benefit out of it?
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"But, you can apply the same things to community management blogs: Do they know what they’re talking about? Are they even good community managers? And, do other community managers get benefit from reading their blogs?"
I'll answer that one for you. No, they don't. And community management blogs are a FAR worse scenario than game design blogs. The only CMs I know who blog about communities aren't in the game industry - they're in web. And all they do is say the same common-sense things over and over again. It's rare that I read something about online communities that makes me think. Generally it's mindless drivel like "How to connect on a personal level with your community" and "how to run a forum". Sort of similar to community panels at the MMO conferences. There's a gem now and then, but for the most part....it's all common sense that everyone should know - especially someone managing a community. :) And let me tell you why I don't ever blog about community management - because I have nothing of value to add to all the nonsense already out there. If I ever have something to say that I think people will learn from, I'll post it...but I don't think it's happening anytime soon.
And as for the question you pose, yours is one of the perhaps 5 design blogs I can think of that I actually enjoy. :)
Comment by Cuppycake — 25 April, 2009 @ 11:35 PM
Excuse me, development blog, not design blog ;)
Comment by Cuppycake — 25 April, 2009 @ 11:38 PM
What I feel is that most game designers don't talk about game design in general. Rather, they talk about designing games exactly like the ones they do. I mean, like half of your blog posts are about how to balance MMOs and RPGs and MMORPGs and it's the kind of thing even 75% of game designers won't be arsed to bother about.
...
no offense.
Comment by Zaratustra — 26 April, 2009 @ 12:23 AM
I'm a community manager and game designer - I like reading blogs such as this one as I'm able to nod my head in agreement and know that I'm not insane.
There seems to be a lot of idiots in the world that think "more gunz=bettar!" and other such nonsense.
Sometimes life lines me up with several dozens of idiots in a row and I start to wonder if maybe I'm the one in the wrong... And I keep coming back to blogs like this just to do a sanity check. You're my cozy blanket that makes me feel safe. :P
Comment by Andy Moore — 26 April, 2009 @ 1:24 AM
Oh it's on, son. Next time I see you, I'm grappling with your beard. I'll have you know that writing about game design might have helped me actually get a design job. Also, you suck.
Comment by Ryan Shwayder — 26 April, 2009 @ 7:18 AM
I read your blog and others because when I went looking for a book named "the magical recipe to success on game development" I didn't found it. Must be backorder I guess...
I also read (and sometimes post) these blogs because when I have this kind of discussion with my "offline" non-game developer friends, I must make sure I give them enough beer to keep them interested. Not saying that I cannot have great discussions about this subject with them but you can only get that far.
As to judge the content of these blogs, I'd rather not have someone else tell me what is good or bad. If someone is serving me some hot beer for free, I won't complain about it. I might not drink it but I won't complain about something free.
Many people had the same thoughts/ideas as me even before I was born. Reading about them gives me a sense of having some kind of guidelines that I can decide to use or not. But if someone took a path in the past similar to mine in current days, I might as well listen to them and see if I can avoid some pitfalls or use their experience to build my own.
Comment by Over00 — 26 April, 2009 @ 7:45 AM
I've been known to blog about game design issues from time to time. And I like reading what you have to say about it. What can I say, other than I find it interesting. And if someone doesn't find your blog, or mine, interesting, then they shouldn't read it, full stop.
I have to say, the whole attitude of "I know lots of good gamedevs who don't know nothing and still make good games" to be amusing. I've seen that attitude before, many times. It's like saying "The Wright Brothers didn't use a wind tunnel to make their plane, why do you think you need one? And calculus for that matter, they didn't know that either. Calculus is a waste of time."
The stuff we're talking about doesn't make stuff fun, I'll grant that. But it does touch on stuff that will spoil the fun.
I once heard a talk about blind UI testing, where you sit uninitiated users down in front of your new GUI, ask them to do a task, and then shut the hell up and watch how they struggle (or, if you're very, VERY lucky, accomplish the task). The comment was that the users could never tell you a good way to design the UI but they can sure point out all the bad ways.
Comment by Toldain — 26 April, 2009 @ 8:10 AM
I read your blog for the same reason I argue about sports and politics. It helps me to wring more fun from the games that I like. I don't think anybody believes that we're here to come up with big answers. We're just kicking ideas around. Maybe somebody learns something, maybe somebody relaxes at the end of the day. There's no need to prove to anyone that the blog meets some kind of arbitrary standard for utility. I appreciate the time everyone spends on it!
Comment by Bret — 26 April, 2009 @ 8:17 AM
Vicarious living. I'm a chemical engineer stuck knee-deep in industrial waste who would rather design games. And I love M59, so that's plenty of reasons! :D
Comment by Black Molly — 26 April, 2009 @ 8:18 AM
"half of your blog posts are about how to balance MMOs and RPGs and MMORPGs and it's the kind of thing even 75% of game designers won't be arsed to bother about."
That's kind of silly. :) Where do the 25% of game designers who are making MMOs and RPGs go to find that kind of information if nobody is supposed to talk about it? More power to ya, Brian!
Comment by jason — 26 April, 2009 @ 5:12 PM
I don't work in the game industry. Would I like to? Honestly, I don't know.
But I know I enjoy reading many blogs out there, because they make me think in ways I could not were I alone. And so, i started blogging because I want to share what these thoughts may be. Some bloggers I respect have deemed me worthy of their blogrolls, that's enough for me as far as recognition goes.
But knowing I am not alone thinking some things about the games I play, or seeing things differently after reading a post?
More than worth the time it takes...
Comment by Modran — 27 April, 2009 @ 3:10 AM
I started reading dev blogs a few years back. As a WoW player back then the best blue response was vague at best and didn't really delve into reasoning much. I don't just want to play a game, not anymore. I feel like I want to see the man behind the curtain, or at least know what he thinks about.
Some MMOs have a playerbase that rivals cities. For a lack of better term, developers are mayors and senators in their own right. I'm curious to see how this affects people who simply make games.
Comment by Stern — 27 April, 2009 @ 9:25 AM
They serve as a good communal discussion board (usually outside of the blog - conversations between a couple designers who read the same post) and as an idea bouncing board. Like playing games, reading blogs helps keep me thinking about games. I don't care if every post is insightful or shows me something new. After all, I get plenty of value out of playing games that have nothing new, and thinking about them from various angles. Every game doesn't need to be Deus Ex to trigger valuable thoughts. Blogs aren't any different for me.
Comment by David Ryan Hunt — 28 April, 2009 @ 10:19 AM
This is the reason I'm a blog commenter rather than a blogger myself. I've tried. And it's never got beyond two posts before I delete it.
Other people do the front page format better than me, and to be entirely honest I'm just not that comfortable with blogs - I prefer talking TO people rather than AT people - forums over blogs, thanks (or email, as a second choice).
Comment by Andrew Crystall — 28 April, 2009 @ 6:22 PM
I come here because it's nice to see someone asking the same sort of questions that I do about game design. The answers aren't always the same ones that I come up with, and that's valuable data for me when I'm trying to see different angles of an issue.
Also, I wholeheartedly agree that game design isn't a mystical art only practicable by a dark priesthood. It can and should be dissected, studied, and intellectually and historically chronicled. It's nice to see articles that do that, blog or otherwise.
I suppose I also have a bit of an indie/anarchist streak in me, and don't trust the "big boys" of game journalism or design. There's entirely too much "appeal to authority" and inbred thinking going on there, so in order to get a better bead on thinking, I tend to look for divergent opinions, even if I don't agree with them. Often, someone complaining about things can be more useful than someone toeing the corporate line, gushing over the latest pixel shaders or WoW release. Critics may not necessarily offer up a perfect solution (or one at all), but if all I can find is a chorus of yes men, I'm not really learning much.
As for why *I* bother to write about design when I only professionally dabble in it (I'm an artist doing a little crosstraining), it's a way to get ideas out there to stress test them. It's like a thought experiment in science, or a beta test for a game before committing a lot of time or resources.
...which brings me back to the indie scene. What of the Catch-22 of gaining job experience? Great designers have to learn step by step like anyone else, and often, that means getting your hands dirty and just trying things out. Perhaps those luminaries in the field have blown past that part of the learning curve (though one should always be learning), but there are those designers today who still need to learn, and may well have something to offer even though they aren't working in a corner office in the bowels of EA.
The democratization of information exchange works for game design as well as other disciplines. Of course there's static out there, but there's bad design even in the hallowed halls of the gaming world's Big Brother. I'm pretty sure that Sturgeon's Law applies to the pros, too (as was so adroitly pointed out over at Lum's place), so if I have to look around a little, even to blogs, to find something useful, I'm going to do so.
Comment by Tesh — 29 April, 2009 @ 4:48 PM
Because I love when you mention Meridian 59. I loved that game and wished it would have done better. It would have been amazing if it kept advancing in graphics and popularity and if the game with all its themes and mythos entered into the scene with Oblivion graphics--now that would be a marvel.
Comment by AtTaTuRk — 30 April, 2009 @ 10:41 PM
I came here to learn more about the history of my favorite game, Meridian 59!
I've played the game since I was 10 years old with my brother... using
printouts of the mainland map to figure out where we were going! Now that it is free,
the population and community went from 1-7 people to 75 the other night, a three way
guild war, and lots of PKer / Hunter action. Please keep this game free, implement an
in-game pay service system (cash for shillings, regs, etc). It is the only way
the greatest online game can stay alive! Thank you for keeping such an amazing game
going!
Comment by Malachi — 1 May, 2009 @ 6:57 AM
You worked with Jessica Mulligan? I think she did a great job over at Asheron's Call. That and Meridian 59 are the games I've stuck with for many years. Still have an account on both.
I read blogs like this to learn about exactly the 'reinvent the wheel' problem you mention in the MMO market. It's rife in the industry. There's dozens of clone games with ridiculous problems that should never be perpetuated, yet they are. Those who create these MMOs seem to have played a few games, and they take designs from those, good and bad, but there are literally thousands of games now and nobody can possibly have played them all. After all this time spent as a third party observer, though, I know what the problem is.
It's a hole in skill sets.
Game developers typically have a wide range of programming and design skills. One thing they do not have is marketing ability. The Internet is filled with games that are marketed poorly, incorrectly, or not at all. Game developers don't seem to know much about:
: Market research
: Brand positioning
: Effective advertising
: Consumer experience with the product
And as a result, developers just look at what their competition is doing and copies them. This leads to every single game advertising exactly the same thing. 10,000 monsters, 200,000 items, 9 million spells! You know how I claimed game developers don't have time to play every single game? Well, players don't either. Game markets are finally varied enough to mimic real markets. Players have to go by the marketing messages they receive to judge a game. In the subscription MMO market, I truly believe this simple equation:
'Marketing dollars spent = Incoming players gained'
All other qualities of the game only matter for retention. You can have the best game in the world, but *nobody will know* unless you spend money on marketing. Why do you think Blizzard's World of Warcraft is so huge, even though the quality of their game is arguable? It's because *they market!* They advertise, they position their game to have a specific brand image, and they actually have the capacity to do market research and act on the findings.
Other, less funded games need to stop copying their competition and find ways to differentiate themselves. For example, I play PC's Meridian 59. Just so you other developers reading this know, from an objective standpoint, Meridian 59 is better than any MMO that currently exists. You should all steal from it, seriously. Meridian's retention rate is insane - I'd guess that around 90% of the players that started with PC's relaunch 5-6 years ago are still around in some form.
The problem is, Meridian 59 has no marketing dollars behind it. That 90% of us that stick around comprise about 300 people. It's a much smaller scale game then World of Warcraft, yet has the same $11/month billing model that WoW does. Those 300 of us that have played for 6 years are the majority of the people that have played Meridian in the last 6 years. We are highly proactive in getting people to try the game, but few new players stay. In their minds, they can pay $11/month learning this old game, or they can pay $11/month to play World of Warcraft on mental autopilot and be cool like everyone else.
What's holding Meridian 59 back? I think it's their positioning. Trying to compete with the WoWs, Darkfalls, and AoCs of the world is simply insane for a 13 year old game. Unfortunately, this is the space PC has chosen, and I don't blame him. When NDS launched 6 years ago, it was the only market space that existed.
But now there's hundreds of games based on a new model, one where the game itself is free and money is generated through virtual sales within the game. Runescape and the plethora of browser MMOs (like Dark Orbit) are all doing this. It's working now. Players are accustomed to it. This model allows the 'network effect' to market the game for virtually nothing. Players get their friends in it, and why wouldn't they play? It's free! Sure only 1 in 10 will spend money on the game, but you win in the end when your game has 20 times the players it would have otherwise.
Now if Meridian 59 were to reposition itself into this market, with no changes to the game itself at all, it would suddenly move from an extremely weak market position to an extraordinarily strong one. Meridian 59 would actually benefit from its age - it has low-CPU useage, can be opened and logged in to in less than a second, can be exited just as quickly, and can be run in the background and any time you like. Guess what kind of consumers are looking for these qualities in a game? People who play flash games in browsers, like Runescape. Then add to that the fact that Meridian is 'so advanced' that it actually has a downloadable client and first person controls. Meridian 59 is extremely superior to browser MMOs.
Moving to a 'free but donations' system could allow a game that has flatlined to slowly but surely bust into a new market and become reinvigorated.
This is a marketing decision, not a game design one, so I understand that Near Death Studios probably won't do it.
But my point is, market research (to find out what players want) and brand positioning (to give it to them) goes virtually ignored in the MMOs market. I believe it's the biggest problem right now, and will slowly result in players shunning any new game because every new game advertises itself the same way. Why try a new game when you can just stick with your current one that has the same things?
Comment by Gar — 1 May, 2009 @ 7:41 AM
I read design blogs to listen to people who are or have been where I want to be in the future. It's also a way to keep a pulse on the industry, since, as a rule, designers will post about stuff that interests them, including current events. Also, I like to participate when someone comes up with an interesting design challenge, to see what I can come up with and compare it to what others think up. I keep a blog to share some of my thoughts, as another depository for thoughts and ideas, to keep in the habit of writing (almost) every day, and to maybe get a little visibility and feedback.
Comment by Destral — 1 May, 2009 @ 7:33 PM