Years ago, a more experienced game designer I worked with told me that I was still developing my “game design aesthetic”. I didn’t really understand. Questions lingered in my mind: What does it mean for an artist to have a personal aesthetic? Why is it so hard to develop one? Why is it important? And what is this strange gravity that they exert over us?
With this article series, I’m here to offer some answers—though maybe not the answers—to my younger self.
In the first article, I discussed game design patterns, and called them the brushstrokes of game design. In the second article I discussed game genres, and described how they were organic groupings of design patterns that had, over time, been given names. In the third article I discussed game design choices, and how we make them.
It’s time to finally talk about what a personal game design aesthetic is!
Article Series:
- A Game Designer’s Brushstrokes
- A Game Designer’s Genres
- A Game Designer’s Choices
- A Game Designer’s Aesthetic
- A Game Team’s Aesthetic (Coming soon!)
A Layman’s Caveat
I want to start with a caveat: I am approaching this topic in a bottom-up way. I don’t have a formal education in the philosophy of aesthetics. From that angle I am a layman, and I think it’s prudent for anyone who wants to know more about the nature of taste, beauty, and aesthetic judgment to seek out true experts from the field of philosophy. What I bring to the table is my expertise as a game designer: I can see these ideas through the lens of my time making games and synthesize concepts that I found helpful over the years.
The Nature of Your Aesthetic
When I talk about one’s aesthetic as an artist, I am referring to these three things and their expression in the work:
- Your artistic and personal values
- Your personal taste
- The heuristics and habits you rely on to make decisions
Values
Values cut to the heart of who you are as a person. What is important to you? What has meaning to you? What is the impact you want your work to have, and what do you strive to achieve?
Why do you make the art you make?
Explaining where your values come from, how they develop, or why you have them is a bit outside my scope here–they’re deeply personal and deeply felt, and their impact on us stretches far beyond our art. They can be conscious or unconscious, intrinsic or learned, and they are greatly impacted by the world and culture we experience.
Personal Taste
What do you like? What subjective experiences do you enjoy or prefer? What do you find enriching and interesting, as opposed to banal and forgettable? What speaks to you and makes you feel seen? What do you think others, your players, will like?
We like things for all sorts of reasons, and our taste can come from many places, much like our values. It seems to be greatly impacted by what we’ve been exposed to, and when, and therefore by the world and culture we experience.
Taste also has an element of literacy. As you become more practiced at playing and appreciating games, your taste gets more refined, like a wine connoisseur who can take one sip and tell you the vintage of a bottle. The higher your level of literacy in an art medium, the more angles you can appreciate it from, and the more you can perceive details of craft, intent, and meaning.
Heuristics, Habits, and Process
If values and taste are the why and the what, then this last section is the how. This is everything I covered in the previous article about choices. The way you make choices, and what choices you make. A “heuristic” is a pragmatic shortcut or strategy for solving problems, without necessarily arriving at an objectively optimal or perfect solution. A habit of course is a go-to answer or solution whenever you’re faced with a similar problem. And a process is the sequence of events and actions you embark on whenever you do design work.
These are truly the engine of our aesthetic. When you make hundreds of choices, thousands, tens of thousands, and every one of them was decided at least in part by the same foundation of heuristics, habits, and processes, then commonalities and patterns will emerge. They will aggregate into a game, and that game is indelibly stamped by all these choices stacked on top of one another.
And this is an endless cycle: your heuristics, habits, and processes are constantly updated as we hone ourselves through experience.
Expressing Your Aesthetic
At this point we’ve covered what your aesthetic is and where it comes from. Next up: how is an aesthetic expressed in our work?
Well, to put it simply, it’s a set of recurring game design patterns that appear in your games or content. Maybe your encounters tend to have more vertical play than others’. Maybe your puzzles tend to be about deciphering meaning or semantics. Maybe your games’ main challenges are always about putting friction in the control of your character.
Remember my definition of a genre?:
A genre is a set of design patterns that co-occur enough to be noticed and given a popular name.
Though personal aesthetics and genres arise from different things, I think the way they are used and reflected in our game design work is nearly identical. Often the biggest difference is just that genres are more clearly defined because they have more examples to pull from.
If you look at the work of a game designer with a highly distinctive aesthetic, like Bennett Foddy, you can see it clearly: his work is basically a genre unto itself. Even though his design sensibility, goals, and skills clearly improve over time, and his games are all different, you can see throughlines in his work. A feeling that yeah, these all came from the same place.
Or look at Nintendo: what we might think of as Nintendo’s house style largely arose from Shigeru Miyamoto’s leadership and sensibilities as he led Nintendo’s internal studios. I’ll talk more about group aesthetics—team, studio, cultural—in the next article.
Auteur Theory
When we hear “auteur” in games it tends to conjure images of capricious micromanagers, due to some high profile stories and the prevalence of bad production practices throughout our industry.
But the term is simply French for “author”, and auteur theory arose from film criticism in France in the 40s and 50s. It was an observation: some film directors seemed to exercise enough creative control that they could be called the author of their work, and by doing so their work would start to manifest a distinct, individual style.
In short: an auteur was a film maker with an aesthetic that could be observed across their filmography. Auteur theory is very interested in whether or not a film can be said to have an individual author. I’m uninterested in that part; I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game and I think in games it’s inaccurate to laud an individual above the rest in large productions, even a director. But auteur theory’s exploration of how authorship manifests in large collaborative projects, and how you can observe themes and patterns in a body of work, is super relevant! There’s a lot of material to dig into there, if you’re ever looking for more reading.
The Humanity of Ten Thousand Brushstrokes
While the most visible expression of our aesthetic is our big choices, I think the most powerful expression comes from the simple fact that making a game takes tens of thousands, maybe millions, of small decisions. Every choice is unavoidably informed by your aesthetic, making your art an expression of who you are and where you came from. Every choice has intent. Even when we can’t consciously identify the patterns in our work, they’re there.
This is the strange, inescapable gravity our aesthetic exerts over our work. It’s why we can feel the creators behind every corner in great games. Every detail is infused with their humanity in an almost literal sense.
How to develop your aesthetic
And that brings us to my final topic: how do we, as game designers, grow and hone our personal aesthetic? I‘m still figuring this out in my own career, and likely always will be, but I have some loosely held advice to give.
Iterate
The simplest answer is sheer iterations! The more games you’ve made, the more you’ll hone your aesthetic. You’ll have bigger mental models, fuller libraries of game patterns, more known solutions, more failures and more successes driving your choices. I think that working on projects from beginning to end–concept to ship or beyond–is especially valuable, if you have that chance.
Introspect
I think the better you know yourself, the stronger your aesthetic. What are your values, and why? What are your tastes, and why? What makes you tick? What moments stick with you or inspire you, and why, not only in games but in any activities or media you partake in?
Embrace Your Quixotic Self
Your interests and tastes are important. You should listen to them! Play the genres you like. Indulge your curiosities. Stop playing games when they bore you. Chase the hobbies you enjoy. When your gut wants something, it’s ok to listen to it. When someone asks you to list your pet peeves, remember: they bother you because of the values and tastes that make you, you! You’re allowed to treat them as serious problems, as the actual expressions of your aesthetic that they are.
This may at times put you in conflict with a team’s needs or practical concerns like markets and audiences. Navigating that tension is part of the job, but don’t lose sight of the fact that these personal quirks and tastes are real and have value in your art. Don’t give up on them in favor of practicalities. They are a priority, too!
Choose Fast
I’m a big believer in making quick decisions. I think quick decisions, which always have a healthy degree of gut driving them, tend to be purer expressions of our aesthetic. Do this with care though—it’s easy for this to manifest as recklessness. Try to create conditions where the danger of quick decisions is mitigated, or decisions can be undone. Be careful about the scope and downstream impact of your quick choices. But when faced with a choice, try putting a stake in the ground instead of chasing perfection through analysis.
I am rather bad at following this advice myself, because as you may have guessed after reading this article series I love analysis!
Practice Literacy in Your Medium
Experience new and different things in your medium. When you play games, ask yourself why the developers made the decisions they did. Know the history of it! Play games from many eras, for many people, from different cultures. Read interviews and watch post-mortems. Write critique. Read critique. Literacy is about deriving meaning from a medium: understanding the language that the creators are using to speak to you, both intentionally and not. See the humanity hidden in their ten thousand choices.
Sometimes you’ll hear the phrase “[x piece of art] is in conversation with the medium” or “[x game] is in conversation with the [y] genre.” This isn’t a figure of speech! This is quite literally what we are doing when we practice our art. We are seeing the meaning that others’ games communicate, the humanity of them, and we are in turn putting meaning back into our own, consciously or not. Your work will inspire or touch your players, often when you least expect it.
Exit
And that’s a wrap! I hope you’ve enjoyed this dive into the abstract nature of game design as an art, and I hope you’re coming away with some new lenses to apply to your own work! I think embracing and empowering our personal aesthetics is super important, both for making great art and for having fulfilling careers. The more we understand what an aesthetic is, how it works, and what conditions express it, the better equipped we are to make that happen in our own day-to-day lives as designers.
Of course, we rarely work alone. In my next and final article I will discuss the aesthetics of groups, and some of the dynamics that empower and disempower us when working in teams.
Article Series:
- A Game Designer’s Brushstrokes
- A Game Designer’s Genres
- A Game Designer’s Choices
- A Game Designer’s Aesthetic
- A Game Team’s Aesthetic (Coming soon!)