Play Like a Game Designer

“Play like a game designer” is one of the most popular recommendations for people who are taking their first steps in the profession. But what does it actually mean?

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According to the authors of books and articles, it means you should play as much as possible. Play games in various genres. Don’t just play good games, but bad games too. Do everything you can to improve your gaming literacy.

There’s nothing wrong with improving your gaming literacy, but for some reason, it’s not obvious to everyone that literacy alone isn’t enough. You need to not just consume games, but take a critical approach to them as well.

The results of your critical analysis could take the form of an article or video about how the developers met certain objectives in the game.

So who is this for, and why?

First of all, this kind of reading is useful to you as a developer, as well as your colleagues.

Unlike games journalism, which is designed for players, game criticism is designed for specialists. It can be of use to them by providing descriptions of good solutions, interesting finds, and teachable mistakes.

Here’s one way to perform this kind of critical analysis.

PREPARATORY PHASE

What to do

1. Play the game. This might seem like an obvious requirement, but our main goal here isn’t to spend a few hours in front of the screen, but rather to examine all the aspects of the game from various perspectives in order to develop as objective feedback as possible.

a. It’s best to beat the game — as long as the game is beatable, that is. If it takes dozens of hours to beat the game, you need to at least finish the main storyline.

b. If the game features asymmetrical gameplay (as in StarCraft, for example) with various strategies, you need to play as various factions and against various opponents.

c. If the game has various difficulty levels, try playing them all.

d. If the game has various modes (single-player, multi-player, etc.), it’s preferable to try all of them. The same goes for board games — play with various configurations and with various numbers of players.

2. Your primary goal is not to have fun playing the game, but rather to make observations that you will then use to perform an analysis. There are no requirements for how to take notes on your observations — just make sure they’re easy to work with.

Try to focus on establishing a connection between design solutions and gameplay:

which solution was implemented

how this was reflected in the gameplay

which in-game resources were employed in order to achieve this

which goal was accomplished by doing so.

These solutions could reside in various aspects of the game, including interface, graphics, sound, balance, controls, game components, etc.

3. You should also take notes of your personal impressions. They won’t have a place in a critical article, but they could influence your thoughts on how a given solution affects the player’s experience.

Jot your impressions down in the form of a “developer’s solution — your reaction” pairing, e.g. “No rally point for trained units — irritating.”

What not to do

1. Don’t read previews and reviews of the game until you’ve played it yourself and written the first draft of your article. First of all, you probably won’t get anything useful out of reading that stuff (you’re more likely to find advertising, emotions, spoilers, unfounded judgments, and useless details). Second, other people’s opinions will just ruin your focus.

2. Don’t rush into your analysis until you’ve completed all the steps listed under “Play the game.” There’s a good chance that you’ll see the game in a whole new light during the later stages, and then you’ll either have to rewrite the whole thing (which will take up time) or just you won’t be in the mood to redo your work (which will hurt the quality of your work).

3. Make sure you take notes and don’t just rely on your memory. You run the risk of completely forgetting certain factors or wasting time looking for them in the game in order to pin down the details.

4. Don’t mistake the rough draft of your article for a complete analysis and publish it before it’s ready. Follow the recommendations from the next phase first.

2. ANALYZING THE GAME AND WRITING YOUR ARTICLE

What to do

1. During the preparatory phase, you identified the connections between design solutions and gameplay. Now you need to organize these connections and flesh them out. If you need to play for a while before you can do this, go ahead and play. The results could take the form of connections such as:

The game has no “fog of war.” This reduces the amount of information hidden from the player and increases the amount of time it takes to get ready to attack the enemy, which in turn increases the importance of scouting.

2. Identify the objectives the developer set for themselves (this is easier to do after doing some work with the connections you found in the previous step). Determine how these objectives were met (or not entirely met) and what was employed in order to achieve this. If the results aren’t clear, spell them out. Try to describe the objectives that were met in such a way that the solutions are reproducible. For example:

Objective: simplify the process of translating and localizing the game.

How this was done: the game has no voice-over — the words in the dialogs are replaced with incomprehensible gibberish, so all that had to be translated was the subtitles and the interface; there is no text in the game world.

Result: the game was released in ten languages simultaneously.

3. If there’s anything else in the game that demands your attention (e.g. a new mechanic, a surprising solution), identify it.

The same goes for elements you liked and for which you were unable to identify an objective or function — set these notes aside; they might come in handy later on.

4. If you have any recommendations on how the game could be improved, they should be specific and well-founded.

a. Specific recommendations are those that describe HOW to solve a problem — instead of “I’d readjust the weapon balance,” write about how you would change the attributes of a certain item.

b. Well-founded recommendations are those that clearly explain WHY a given solution should be changed. When developing well-founded suggestions, it’s best to refer to similar solutions in other games, and not just talk off the cuff.

5. Recommendations for the layout of the article:

a. Identify the developer, publisher, year of release, genre, and platform.

b. Provide a link to a gameplay trailer for readers who haven’t played the game — this will save them time, and they’ll appreciate it.

c. Provide visual aids in the form of screenshots from the game. Sometimes it’s better to make a gif.

d. SPOILER ALERT: warn about spoilers, and hide text containing spoilers.

e. If, despite these recommendations, you decide to talk about your impressions of the game, set them aside visually in such a way that they are distinct from the main text of the article.

What not to do

Here are some typical mistakes that occur when the author of an analytical article mixes their criticism up with something else.

1. Don’t assign the game a rating, and don’t evaluate its various aspects (e.g. 3 for graphics, 4 for gameplay). First of all, ratings aren’t very informative, and second, your goal is not to compare the game to other games. The quality of critical analysis and the quality of the game itself usually have very little to do with each other. The usefulness of analysis is determined by how much the reader can learn from it, and listing specific mistakes in an unsuccessful game can be more valuable than an emotional, praise-filled 10/10 review.

2. Don’t express your emotions. If you can’t stop yourself from providing an emotional evaluation of a certain solution, at least try to provide a logical basis for your point of view.

3. Don’t recapitulate the storyline. Describing the storyline usually isn’t very valuable to script-writers. It would be better to point out interesting storyline developments and how the storyline affects the gameplay.

4. Don’t recapitulate the rules (if we’re talking about a board game). A critical analysis isn’t a tutorial! Try to focus on how certain rules affect the way the game is played.

5. Avoid superfluous details, especially when describing mechanics. A critique isn’t the same as an exhaustive breakdown! A detailed examination of a jump mechanic could be important when analyzing a platformer, but for games in which this isn’t a key mechanic, it probably isn’t worthwhile. If your analysis includes mathematical formulas or lines of code, you’re probably on the wrong track.

3. WHAT YOU CAN GET AS A RESULT

Your result can be something like this. Here’s part of my analysis of Firewatch, with no spoilers or superfluous details.

This is an analysis of a video game, but you can do the same thing with a board game. Board games are typically a little more difficult to analyze, since, first of all, they’re usually more expensive, and second, they’re physical objects (you need to go to the store and buy them, then keep them somewhere — if you’ve got 100 boxes, this could become a problem), but the main thing is that you need other players to play with on a regular basis. If this isn’t a problem for you, great.