If you've ever played a really horrible game, you've probably thought: Wow, the people who made this are talentless. You fume at the derivative, seen-it-before gameplay; you complain that the levels are far too monotonous, or far too unmanageable. After a while, you throw down your controller and boast: Hell, I could make a game better than this.

Ah, but could you?

I recently found out when I spent some time with Blast Works, a brilliant new Wii title that allows you to create your own games. What I discovered is, as you might expect, it's pretty damn hard to make a fun game. You'll probably fail.

But in the process of doing so, you'll learn a ton about what makes a good game good. Or to put it another way: Designing games makes you a better connoisseur of them.

On the surface, Blast Works is a side-scrolling, spaceship-blasting game with a clever twist. Much like Gradius, you drift inexorably rightward, ever beset by blocky, polygonal enemies. But when you blast them into pieces, you can – much as with Katamari Damacy – swoop in and scoop up any loose parts, which then stick to your spaceship. Turrets from enemy guns remain functional, so you quickly can amass a huge, unruly mess of weapons that jut out from every direction. If you did nothing else but play the single-player component, you'd have fun.

But if you stopped there, you'd miss out on the philosophically rich treats to come.

Because also embedded inside Blast Works is an amazingly full-featured editor that lets you create customized spaceships, bullets and levels. Almost everything, from physics to camera zoom, is tweakable. Objects can be designed down to the last pixel if you're obsessed enough. Basically, it's everything you need to craft your own side-scrolling shooter.

Hot damn, I thought. I plunged into the editor and decided to try crafting a shooter with a nutty electric-guitar aesthetic. At first, it seemed really easy. In barely 10 minutes, I designed a crude Flying V-style ship. I crafted a couple of even more crude-looking enemies: Weak ones were shaped like guitar picks, and more-ferocious killers were shaped like ... well, big lumps of something or other. Hey, I'm tolerable at design, but only barely. And in any case, I was getting impatient to try out my creation. How would it play?

I loaded the game, hit Start, and when the Flying V ship drifted onscreen, I was hit with a giddy jolt of pride. Dude! I'm playing my own game!

But my pride quickly deflated, upon a sober realization: My game sucked.

I'd clustered the enemies far too closely together, making it impossible to avoid their attacks. Hell, I didn't even leave enough breathing space. The first notes of the ominous they're-here music had barely started when the armada arrived and sliced through me like I was soft cheese. I went back in and tinkered with the attack spacings, but found I quickly tipped into the opposite problem: Now the game was too easy. Hmmm.

Over the next few hours, two things happened. I got deep into the weeds of my game, tweaking and teasing the enemies and the landscape to try and balance things out. More important, I gained an amazingly rich sense of just how remarkable truly good game design is – the talent that's necessary to reach that tightrope balance point where something's optimally challenging without being controller-chucking frustrating. I mean, if I was having this much trouble crafting a simple side-scroller – one of the most rudimentary genres – imagine trying to create a complex online world, an immersive shooter or a mystery game. How the hell do Blizzard, Bungie and Cyan do it?

Creating a game, in other words, makes you a better consumer of games, because it forces you to think concretely about the linguistics of the craft: balance, collisions, human motivation, camera work, artwork, physics. It's like how being required to write speeches and short stories in elementary school trains you to appreciate a truly spectacular novel or bit of oratory – or how knowing how to play an instrument, even poorly, gives you a deeper insight into true musical genius.

But the fascinating thing is that there are lots of people out there who are pretty good at game design. If you go over to the Blast Works website, you can download ships, enemies, weapons and entire levels that gamers have created, and try them for yourself. The creativity is occasionally stunning.

There are re-creations of famous Nintendo characters like Mario and Link; there's even a precise rendition of the original Super Mario Bros. Someone assembled a hilariously spot-on homage to Star Wars. And one gamer, amazingly, re-created the look of Space Invaders by crafting a level so narrow it doesn't scroll – and you thus remain on one screen.

I'm not suggesting that these are addictive, must-play games. No, they're more like fan fiction – a way of thinking about what game design really is. They remind me of how new-media artists like Cory Arcangel have plundered old-school game environments as a form of cultural commentary. (Indeed, I've even now been inspired with my own quasi-artistic idea: I'm designing a Blast Works level that has no enemies at all – just a backdrop of buildings that will slowly spell out a message in enormous letters as you scroll by. It's Gradius as a form of text messaging!)

Of course, Blast Works isn't entirely new: Many previous games have offered modding and editing tools before. But I've never seen any game that mixed such flexibility with relative simplicity – and offered such a quick way to share your design ideas with others.

And at the very least, it allows you to finally answer your own windy boast: Man, I could do that.

Well, sure. Just try.

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Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.

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