A Game Designer’s Choices

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.

Let’s talk about making choices. Full-time game designers typically make hundreds of choices every day. Most are tiny, some are more substantial. Most are made unconsciously or with only a second of thought, and most of the rest are decided quickly. These quick daily decisions are the engine of our game design aesthetic: they showcase it and refine it.

Article Series:

1. A Game Designer’s Brushstrokes
2. A Game Designer’s Genres
3. A Game Designer’s Choices
4. A Game Designer’s Aesthetic
5. A Game Team’s Aesthetic (Coming soon!)

Decision Scope

Not all decisions are the same scope. Let’s go through some examples at different scales:

Instant decisions, made unconsciously or with a sliver of a thought hundreds of times a day:

• Choosing where to place one of the eight vertices that define a trigger volume
• Deciding the default value of a variable you’ve made many times before
• Naming a file based on an existing naming scheme
• Rearranging desktop windows

Small decisions that come up maybe 50-150 times a day, where you may think for a moment:

• Choosing what shape you want a trigger volume to be
• Deciding the default variable in an uncommon situation
• Triaging minor bugs
• Setting the drop rate for a typical item in a typical loot table

Medium decisions, maybe 5-25 a day:

• Deciding enemy composition in an encounter
• Adjusting a spell’s balance by increasing its AOE size
• Triaging major bugs
• Prioritizing your own tasks

Big decisions, maybe 5-15 a week:

• Outlining the beats for a mission
• Deciding which missions in a campaign will feature the new combatant
• Making a request for a small tooling feature
• Deciding what your playtest focus for that week will be

Really big decisions, occurring at frequencies measured in weeks, months, or even years:

• Cutting or adding major features
• Redesigning swathes of features after a milestone evaluation
• Defining creative pillars for the game
• Naming the game

Why we choose

Why do we make all these choices? What is their purpose?

Most choices are utilitarian problem-solving to achieve a goal. Sometimes the goal is simple and objective, such as: “We need to cover a passageway with a trigger volume.” These goals are often building blocks in service to larger goals, which may be complex or subjective. For example: “The player should feel rising tension as they traverse this area,” or “We need to find acceptable tradeoffs so we can fit this feature into the level’s memory budget.”

But not all choices are problem solving: sometimes they are about defining the problem to be solved, or imposing constraints on how you will solve it. These may be choices about creative direction, like deciding what you want the game to be about and what influences you want to draw from. Or they can be driven by personal values, like deciding to use only human-made content, or deciding to avoid intermittent reinforcement to create compulsive purchasing behaviors in players.

Good Choices

Every game design decision we make has an impact. And many of them have a cascade of 2nd and 3rd-order consequences that can be unpredictable and unintended. For example:

• Adding an additional objective in an encounter might generate downstream work from other teams like production, world art, audio, writing, localization, and test. It might require you to rearrange the placement of the enemies to coax the player into looking in the right direction to notice the new objective. It might cause your encounter to go longer or get harder and now the rewards for it need to be increased, which could have a ripple effect on the economy design.
  
• Adding a new randomized rule when replaying a matchmade PVE activity could be really cool and shake the experience up! But if over years you and other designers all add special rules, keeping track of that can create a heavy mental load on players.
  
• If there’s a cool new enemy in this update, and you decide to include it in your content, and other designers all do the same, then the enemy will quickly feel overused and its impact in each instance will be reduced.
  
• If you add a lock-on mechanic to ensure the target is always on camera, you can now reconceptualize the targeting UI element as an in-world character (like, say, a fairy), which can in turn be used to solve other problems like tutorialization and story motivation.

A good design choice achieves your goal and has acceptable consequences. A great design choice is one that has a web of positive 2nd and 3rd-order consequences cascading throughout your game.

“A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once.” – Shigeru Miyamoto, 2010¹

“Any design decision should be justified in at least two ways. The more justifications you can find or create for any element, the better.” – Matthew Frederick, 2007²

How we choose

So you’ve got a fast-paced work environment where you make many choices, and those choices have a complex impact on your systems, content, and production. How do we make all these decisions?

There are a few lenses I use to look at how game design choices are made:

• Gut (unconscious or intuitive) vs reason (conscious or rational)
• Proven vs unproven solutions
• The speed of decision-making

Gut vs Reason

Folks will say that some designers make all their choices by gut, and others think everything through. A common joke is often that the former end up as level designers and the latter system designs. But this idea misses a crucial fact! Almost all of us make the majority of our choices with our gut. As I illustrated above, we make many choices every day. There isn’t enough time to make even small games if we fully reason out, analyze, and test every single choice we make. 

I think that for almost all designers, the “instant” decisions, the vast majority of the “small decisions”, and most of the “medium” decisions are made with a healthy dose of gut and intuition.

Luckily, we can train our gut! Just like a martial artist can internalize a set of kinetic motions in muscle memory, we can develop our design intuition. When we make choices intuitively or unconsciously, we’re relying on rules and conventions we’ve learned in the past, and on our past successes and failures. These rules and conventions can be the product of thinking and analysis we did in the past, the genres and games we have played, studio conventions, our own preferences, or much more.

If we drill down into it, I think a lot of our intuition acts upon and reacts against the design patterns that we discussed in the previous articles, the same design patterns that define genres. I said that design patterns are like the “brushstrokes” of game design. In other words, they are small atomic choices made repeatedly, and often unconsciously, as an expression of a learned style.

When we make reasoned decisions, we still use the rules and conventions we’ve learned or been exposed to, just in a conscious way. We examine our designs from different angles with our minds, on paper, or in playtests, rather than deploying them immediately in the moment.

Lastly, consider the fact that our gut can sometimes see patterns or chains of cause-and-effect that our reason will miss. Taking the time to reason and analyze a choice does not always make for a better or more informed decision.

Proven vs Unproven

Since every game is different, there’s no fool-proof way to make only good decisions. But we can get a lot closer if we stick to decisions that are known to have been good in the past: proven solutions to problems.

You may recall that in the first article I defined a game design pattern as “a known solution to a design problem”, or “a known way to achieve a design goal.” When we make a decision with our gut, we’re usually (unconsciously) relying on previous experience with similar problems. When we make a decision with our reason, we’re usually using known design patterns as lenses to examine the problem we’re trying to solve.

Proven solutions can come from many places, such as:

• Established best practices for the team or project
• Genre or franchise conventions
• Other games we’ve played
• Asking a teammate
• Personal habits
• Our own design aesthetic

First Principles

Unproven solutions may yield stronger results, but they’re inherently riskier because there is a higher chance of unexpected or negative consequences or results. Either we have to roll the dice and live with the risk, or we have to expend the time and energy to evaluate their impact, and the impact of all their 2nd and 3rd-order consequences. 

When a designer is intentionally trying to solve problems anew, relying less on proven solutions, they are designing from first principles.

My proven vs unproven dichotomy maps pretty closely to the explore-exploit tradeoff in economics and sociology.

Generally speaking, the more you design from first principles, the more likely you are to break new ground. But it is also more work-intensive and may end up being an expensive way to reinvent the wheel.

How quickly we choose

When you make fast decisions, you are typically relying more on your gut, and more on proven solutions. Doing more reasoning or more work to prove a choice naturally takes more time. This can be impractical for the many smaller decisions we make!

Your design choices reveal and define you

In a very straight-forward way, if, as I’ve argued…:

1. Most of our choices are made unconsciously, and many more are made with our gut and with proven solutions
2. The way we make those choices is by relying on our internalized rules, habits, and conventions
3. We’ve arrived at those internalized rules via past experience in development, exposure to games with similar design problems, and our personal values

…Then our body of work must unavoidably reflect our past and our selves as artists, and as we make new work we further train these rules, habits, and conventions.

Article Series:

1. A Game Designer’s Brushstrokes
2. A Game Designer’s Genres
3. A Game Designer’s Choices
4. A Game Designer’s Aesthetic
5. A Game Team’s Aesthetic (Coming soon!)

Citations

¹ Minkley, J. (2010, March 31). Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto. Eurogamer.net. https://www.eurogamer.net/shigeru-miyamoto-interview

² Frederick, M. (2007). 101 things I learned in Architecture School. MIT Press.