Author Archives: David Mullich
Game Design and the Art of Listening
Game designers really need to know a little bit about everything when applying their craft: algebra, archeology, architecture, creative writing, history, mythology, music theory, statistics — it’s far more than just knowing how to play games. Game designers also need a wide variety of skills: creative writing, technical writing, scripting, presenting, organization, teamwork. However, because game design is all about ensuring that a game is fun for other players, the most important skill of a game designer is the listening. Game designers’ initial thoughts about what will make their game fun to play are quite often wrong, and so it is critical to listen to the feedback from the play testers trying the game out during development.
Veteran game designer Greg Costikyan recently posted this on his Facebook page, and I thought it was well worth sharing.
“What is the most important skill for a game designer?” asked the interviewer.
I thought for a moment and said, “The ability to listen.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You start, of course, with your own sense of aesthetics, your imagination, and your knowledge of game design patterns. But I remember talking over a design spec I’d written with our tech lead years ago, and he asked me ‘But how do we know this will be fun?’ I had to say ‘I guarantee that it will suck — at first.’ Problems always arise, your players don’t get it at first. Even if the basic design is sound, it’s highly unlikely you’re going to hit the target perfectly on the first attempt.”
“So where does listening come into that?”
“You have to listen — to your players, to your metrics, to your team members, to the financial and time constraints under which you operate. And you have to adjust, to iterate, to refine; to kill the things that aren’t working, to see where new things need to be added to provide balance and tradeoffs, to let go the features you’d love to have but that time and money don’t permit.”
“So… you just do what other people say?”
“No, no, no! Listening is not obedience. Much of the time you consider what people have to say — and ignore it. Or not ignore it; try to tease out what the actual problem is from the problem they perceive — quite often they are very different.”
“Can you give me an example?”
A moment for thought. “Yes. Years ago, I played quite a lot of an indie MMO called ‘A Tale in the Desert.’ It’s a crafting game, and what hooked me was that one of the first things I did was grow and harvest flax. That sounds dull, but it was enjoyable; you plant the seeds, the plants grow in stages, you must water and weed when the imagery tells you it’s time, and the flax plants themselves are beautiful, waving gently in the wind.
“Later on in the game, you spend a lot of time smelting ore. You’re staring at a kind of ugly smelter, adjusting sliders to keep some parameters within limits; fail, and you have to start over. You have to do this a lot, and it’s boring and repetitive and kind of horrible. On the forums, the players complained about it bitterly; they said that smelting ore took too long.”
“So?”
“So the developers listened, and they made the process quicker and easier.”
“Problem solved, then?”
“No, they hadn’t listened. The players SAID that it took too long, but that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that it wasn’t beautiful. Smelting ore needed to be as joyous as planting flax. Listening doesn’t mean doing what your players — or your boss, or your team-mates — say; it’s figuring out why they’re saying it, and what the real problem is. They solved the wrong problem.”
While designing your game, use the data your gather from surveys, interviews, metrics and observation to find out what your playtesters are saying about your game, and then analyze those results to determine the causes of the reactions you’re getting. Then go back and playtest a new version of the game that addresses those causes to find out if you listened carefully enough to what your playtesters said.
Wanted: More Female Game Developers
When I greeted my game production class a couple of weeks ago, I was surprised. The group was racially and ethnically diverse, but there was not a single woman among the fifteen students. Last weekend I attended my first open house at The Los Angeles Film School, I was disappointed that there was only one woman among the prospective students who came to hear about the school’s Game Production Program. There appeared to be many women taking tours of the Film and Recording Programs, but those of us in the Computer Lab were visited by this one Russian woman who was interested in a career in game programming. Needless to say, the other faculty members and I tried very hard to persuade her into enrolling in our program.
When I later inquired into the school’s history with female students in Game Production program, I was told that there have been only a handful of women among the hundreds of the program’s graduates.
While the Game Industry has always had a reputation for women being a tiny minority among its ranks, my own experience is that I’ve always worked with women throughout my career, and not just women who worked in Marketing or the Art Department.
At the first game company I worked at in the early 1980s, EduWare, there were two women programmers. Later, when I joined The Walt Disney Company in the late 1980s, my immediate supervisor was a woman, as was one of my fellow producers and the Vice President of our division. When I went on to work for a CD-I developer (I know, I know), the two production executives we dealt with at our publisher, Philips Interactive Media of America, were women. Years later, when I joined The 3DO Company to produce the Heroes of Might & Magic Series, my lead level designer was a woman, and I later promoted her to Assistant Designer. At Activision, our president, Kathy Vabrek, was obviously a women; and when I joined the Spin Master toy company, my immediate supervisor, my assistant producer, and a programmer on my development team were women. So, women having programmer, producer, and production roles has been a constant throughout my thirty-year career, the question for me is: “why aren’t there more of them?”
Is it a demand problem? Are there so many hiring managers in the game industry who have a hiring bias against women? I find that hard to believe. If any of my past colleagues have gender bias, they’ve done a very good job of hiding it from me.
Or is it a supply problem? Are there too few women interested in being game developers? According to 2010 ESRB study, forty percent of all gamers are female, so I also find it hard to believe that very few women are interested in being game developers.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know one thing. I would love to have more female students in my class. And I’m always on the look out for good designers, programmers and producers to hire; all I care about is your talent.
David Mullich 