Design Blog

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Game Design and Cooking

I started thinking today about how I could describe game design to people in a simple way. It seems to me sometimes that the intricacies of this industry are difficult to comprehend and that results in a lot of misconceptions about how this job works and the effort and knowledge that is required to get things to go well. When I was growing up and wanted to get into the game industry I had a lot of these misconceptions about what goes into a good game. I don't think that I'm fully there yet, but I think that I have found a decent way of explaining how it works to others.

Video game design is like cooking.

It sounds a little weird at first but I think it's something that most people can relate to. First of all both of these professions involve a lot of creativity on the part of the designer/cook. Both professions can seem deceptively simple on the outside, but have deep intricacies that take time to learn. They also both rely a lot on the subjective opinions of their customers to be successful, and as a result, both of them need to have a good degree of understanding when it comes to the "tastes" of their patrons. Finally, and I want to emphasize this part, being able to consume and enjoy the product does not inherently make one an expert on it.

Knowing what tastes good is not the same as being able to cook something that tastes good. Similarly, knowing what in a game is fun, is not the same as knowing what makes a fun game.

I'm a little worried that last sentence came off as a bit arrogant, so I'll clarify that I'm not saying that game players or their opinions are unimportant. Far from it, as I think it's imperative for a game designer to take feedback from the players of his game as well as his peers in order to improve his skills. However, I think that often times the feedback that a game designer receives from players and beta testers is highly skewed and cannot be taken at face value. What I am trying to get at here, is that the feedback from players is something that needs to be tempered by the game designer's own opinions and thoughts.

To get back to the cooking analogy, let's compare a game to a full course meal. The designer does his best and tries to prepare a meal/game which is balanced in flavor, nutrition and texture. He then asks the customer what he thinks could be improved.

The customer tells him, "I really liked the chocolate cake that I had for desert! Chocolate is really delicious, I think you should make the other dishes more like the cake and put in more chocolate. That would make them taste better."

This is difficult advice for the cook to follow. In his mind he realizes that putting chocolate in the salad or the mashed potatoes is a bad idea and wouldn't really help the dishes very much. Beyond that he also knows that if he were to feed someone a full course of chocolate dishes that they would very quickly tire of the flavor and the impact of his later dishes would be lessened. The customer may have eaten the food of a lot of famous cooks from around the world and knows what he likes and what he doesn't like. He might even think that he can make something that delicious by combining a lot of the dishes that he's seen before. But this isn't what makes a good meal and the cook knows it! So how can he use this seemingly useless comment?

The first step is to examine the origins of it. Why did the customer focus on the chocolate? Is it because the other dishes had too much salt and not enough sugar? Perhaps the other dishes were too bland and the sharp taste of the chocolate cake stood out more than the others. Was the dish that the customer had before the cake particularly good for complementing the flavor of the chocolate? All of this can come from simply analyzing the question in a little more detail, and there's a lot of lines of thought that can come from it. The cook also needs to be able to ask better questions as well. Perhaps the chocolate answer wasn't useful at all, maybe he should have specified that he wanted to know what the customer thought of the texture of the food, or if he felt bloated after eating it. Being able to realize what questions to ask next time is important as well.

From there it's a matter of exercising his expertise to craft a better dish for next time.

This is where the designer/cook has to put his own thoughts into the matter. As the creator, he's in the best position to know which of these threads to follow in order to improve. Perhaps when he was tasting the soup earlier he also thought it was a little bland. Or maybe he realizes that if he cooks the chicken a little less that the retained water will cause it to be less salty. He could even discover that cooking with a different type of oil produces the flavor that was lacking. There's room for improvement even from such a narrow response, the trick is being able to find it. This mentality and capacity for analysis is something that I think a game designer absolutely has to have in order to be able to improve.

And the end result will be something that both creator and customer can enjoy.

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Extra Note #1: Also like cooking, sometimes ingredients that don't seem like they would go well together end up forming an unexpectedly good combination. Perhaps combining the chocolate with the chicken will get the cook the mole poblano flavor that he has been looking for. Combining disparate elements from game genres that don't necessarily go together will sometimes get you something unexpectedly delicious. (Though sometimes it gets you an inedible mess.)

Extra Note #2: There's a saying that bacon goes with any dish. I imagine there may be a game design convention that fulfills a similar role, but I haven't discovered it yet.

Labels: design philosophy, game industry

posted by Saikyo at 12:32 AM