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Pitfalls of the Working Game Designer: An Introduction

I hear it time and time again: “Game design must be the best job in the world. You sit around, think up game ideas, and then you get to play the game you’ve always wanted.” As compelling a fantasy as this is, though, it has very little relation to the realities of working as a game designer in a commercial studio. This series of short pieces identifies specific issues that come up in the day to day business of game design. In part, it is written for the lay audience, to give some insight into what actual design work deals with; in part it is written for other working designers (or those who would like to be working designers one day) to share insights and occasionally strategies.

To start, let me make a few corrections to the fantasy of design. First, the actual work of game design has very little to do with coming up with ideas. Every studio has more ideas than they could possibly use; heck, most developers do. An idea is worth very little, in fact, because it has no bearing on the actual production of the game. An idea is a goal, but a design is a method of reaching that goal. An idea simply has to be compelling, but a design has to work. Engineering has to be able to implement it; art needs to be able to produce assets for it; testing needs to be able to verify its function, and all of this has to be done with a limited budget of manpower, time, and money. Coming up with ideas can be fun, but coming up with a design that the player has fun with is work.

Second, no one gets the freedom to design the game they always wanted. With product budgets in the 8-figure range for a triple-A title, the game designer always has to answer to someone: to the team, to management, to the investors, to the stockholders. Even if it starts out with a dream and a vision, the road to realizing that vision is going to involve changes, compromises, shifts in emphasis. What you end up with at the end may bear some resemblance to that dream, but it’s going to be a different animal, although you may be just as happy with it.

So, leaving the fantasy behind, in the practical and day to day work of game design, the designer has to navigate a variety of minefields to successfully steer a project through pre-production, production, and testing to finally arrive in the marketplace. Along the way, there are plenty of pitfalls that can wreck both the project and the designer. This series of articles focuses on what those pitfalls are, and in some cases how to avoid them.

Let me be clear, this is not a tutorial on how to arrive at a good design. This is not some version of the 400 rules of game design; these pitfalls are about the process of doing design work, not what the design contains. You will not learn how to design a blockbuster game; there are no heuristics you can rely on to ensure success. However, there are some essential lessons in what you need to avoid to have a chance at getting to success. This is a practical guide for working as a designer, without regard to what you actually come up with.

Next: Not Defining Design
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