Beginner’s Advice
A Game Design Interview
From time to time, James Ernest fields questions from aspirants in the field of game design. He recently answered a few basic questions from a student working on a design project, and here are those questions and answers for your entertainment.
Q: How did you get started designing games, and what was your first game?
I have been inventing games for as long as I can remember. When I was a young child I often took long road trips across the Midwest, and we played a game called "cow," which was just a contest of who could spot the most fields of cattle on their side of the car. I tested several variations of that game, having nothing much better to do!
In high school I spent several months focused on a game design called Tishai. It was a chess variant (technically, an abstract game you could play with a chess set). The game was a core feature of a fantasy novel. I never finished the novel, but I did finish the game. Unlike "cow," which was a purely random game, Tishai was a pure strategy game.
My first game industry job was writing for Wizards of the Coast, in 1993. I compiled a digest of their Magic: The Gathering mailing list, and also helped them re-write the rules for Magic. Four times! I started publishing my own games in 1996.
As a new game designer, I’d say that it's important to remember that the games in stores are not the only kind of games. Retail products have a specific set of features that make them different from lighter and more traditional games. There are many great games that would be terrible retail products (and sad to say, the opposite is also true).
Q: How many game mechanics are too many?
Different players have different preferences for the complexity of a game, and there isn't a single right answer. What's more helpful is to ask whether specific rules are carrying their weight.
We describe the overall difficulty of the rules as the "cognitive load," the amount of work required to remember them. If certain rules are rarely used, or if they don't make much difference to the experience, then they probably are not necessary. As I develop a new game, I'm always looking for places where the rules can be made simpler, without taking away from the fun.
Think about your game from the perspective of the players, considering the experience you want them to have. Learning the rules is part of the cost of playing the game, just like time and money. For some players, learning complicated rules is its own reward, but for others the task can be challenging or impossible.
Your patience for the details of your own game will always be higher than anyone else’s. Test the game with its target audience, watch how they react, and be objective about what you see. If they struggle to play correctly or to remember all the rules, then there are probably too many.
Q: How do you keep your game from being too much like other games?
It's easy to copy what we know, and harder to be original. Some artists spend their careers duplicating other people’s work, while others may create original work, but struggle to find an audience. Even the most novel games can be described as remixes of things that have come before.
The marketplace supports derivative work in several ways. If a game idea is popular, players will seek out variations on it, because it's familiar and because they enjoy it. Customers, including retailers and distributors, are more likely to buy a product if they understand what it is, whether that's a familiar genre, mechanic, or theme. And publishers often feel safer investing in ideas they have seen before.
However, it still makes sense to try to make your games different. It's more artistically satisfying, and if novel ideas catch on, they can be very successful. New ideas come in many forms, and originality in the games industry has been defined not only by novel mechanics and themes, but also by inventive marketing and business models.
For me, novelty is found by thinking about games in terms of the stories they tell. If a game has a story, I ask if there is a real-world system that could serve as the basis for the mechanics. How does that system work, and how could that be abstracted into a game?
Even purely abstract games can often be similar to real-world challenges. For example, Tetris feels a little like trying to pack boxes into a closet - at least, until the boxes disappear!
Q: I'm making a card game, how do I figure out how big the deck should be?
I don't think there is a single answer for this, along the same lines as "how many mechanics are too many"? There are so many different card games, with decks from five cards to five hundred.
If the deck must be shuffled often, you probably want to keep the deck at a manageable size. Most people can shuffle a 52-card poker deck, but they may struggle when the deck gets much bigger (around 60 cards).
If the game is mass-produced, the number of cards will affect the price. So you'll have to think about how much a player would be willing to pay for the game. Like the mechanics question above, you should consider removing any cards that aren’t worth their cost.
Q: How much playtesting is enough?
This will differ greatly from one project to the next. Games go through several phases of testing, and each phase might be fast or slow, depending on how long it takes to find the right answers.
In the earliest phase of development, I often workshop the idea of a game, with no game mechanics, trying to figure out if people would be willing to play it. Sometimes I spend a long time in this phase, refining the concept, or the name, or the component list, until I have a pitch that people find interesting.
Once you have a playable prototype, each test should ask specific questions. It’s not very useful to ask "is this fun" or "would you buy this." Instead, try to ask something clearer that helps you make the next version better.
Early questions might be on the order of "does this concept make sense," without too much attention to details. Once the foundation is stable, you can ask about specific mechanics, or specific strategies, always with a goal in mind.
If you were playtesting chess, you might ask early questions like "does this game offer interesting challenges" and "can you remember how all the pieces move?" Later on, you might ask more specific questions like "are there various opening strategies that can lead to different types of endgame" or "does the King need a way to avoid being pinned down in the early rounds?"
You will learn from experience how to take your games through this process, though you will also learn that they are never really "finished." The best games can always be improved, even after they are published.
Q: What makes a game fun?
Different players enjoy different aspects of games, and this is a difficult subject, but let me give you a high-level answer.
Play is a fundamental behavior of all creatures. It's how we learn about the world. Play is experimentation, poking at a system to see how it will react. Sometimes we do it seriously, and it feels like work. And sometimes it's just for fun, and we call it play.
A “system” can be anything: a ball on a string, a pair of stilts, or a board game. As we play with it, we develop a mental model of that system, which helps us predict how it will respond to us. Over time we might become bored, and move on to another system, or we might continue to find mystery in the details, and devise new theories and new tests. And different people find fascination in different things.
In A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster describes "fun" as a state somewhere between boredom and confusion. As we poke at the game and make guesses about the results, we are having fun as long as we are usually right, but not always. Knowing all the answers can make the game feel stale, and so we may slip into boredom. On the other hand, if everything is unpredictable this can make the game confusing, and so we might give up because we never know what to expect.
Different players find their fun in different games. Some people enjoy the challenge of learning rules and maximizing results. Some enjoy poking at the other players and seeing how they respond. Some like to challenge their luck and see what the dice will give them. Some folks care only about winning, while others prefer simply to interact with friends. A great game provides something for different player types, though it can be hard to satisfy them all.
If your game can provide a sense of experimentation and discovery, in one way or another, then it can be fun. You will usually see this when you watch people play it.
You might also want to check out my lecture about building family games, which has more discussion about some of the topics in this article.
Thanks for your questions, and best of luck with your designs!