When I was asked to write something about game design, I remember what I have been working in the past, what I have learnt and why I choose to become a game developer for my lifetime job.
In definition, game design is the process of designing the content and rules of a game [1]. To me, game design is not only an ideal job for every dreamer to express their ideas and visualize their imagination with a higher level of enjoyment, but it is regarded as a fusion of entertainment and human life.
Generally speaking, game design is about creating and ruling many aspects related to human experience and activity. From past to present, human spends time for fun with some simple rules and they are eager to get achievements and enjoyment from that. For example, kids like playing hide-and-seek which is regarded as a tactical stealth FPS game [2]. This concept of entertainment is applied to the digital technology nowadays which game designers have a platform to produce a new form of entertainment with various game rules and users’ experience. Apart from generating simple ideas and follow the existing rules, the higher underlying concepts is to nurture the users and motivate the development of high technology of play.
These days, game design is taking a role to teach users how to experience and/or create a virtual space.
Dialogue, story, characters, lighting, graphics are contents that fill these spaces but game design requires more on the gameplay and core mechanics for interacting with players. A good gameplay model can trigger users’ emotional sense and let them to engage in the media while a bad one with poor core mechanics may distract users and discourage them to play. With a little objectives or some inspiration from elsewhere, game design is to modify the existing ideas, refine it and present it with more fun or more attractive way. It requires a team work and spends about years to make a good rating game with high quality graphics and joyful experience. Therefore it is revealed that game design is a toughest task to entertain with audience.
On the other hand, the key of game design is motivating the development of high technology. Over the past decades, game design use limited capabilities to generate unlimited thoughts. From Atari home console to Nintendo Wii, the technology behind is the evolving of ideas from many designers in order to meet the expectations for the players. Compared to the old days, 2D 16-bit pixels, low interacting console have been evolved to high quality realistic 3D scenes with different types of game handheld devices and the gameplay experience is kept evolving to the next stage of using voice command and motion detection. At that point, game design is a process to break the rule of physical limitation of present technology to generate new amusement to users.
Since game design is not an easy and lightly tasks, game designers are persons who should have a creative mind with special talented. In my views, game designer is like god, a scholar and a adventurer. It may sounds adorable that game designers has the full power to create their worlds, to set the rules and to manipulates their teams to accomplish the game, but in fact game designers are restricted with limited resources and try their best to make something possible. Take accounting of Guitar Hero, the designers generate an idea of new digital musical input controller which let players feel like playing music which is a new footsteps to the game industry.[3]
As a game designer, the one should have high responsibility and translate their story and experiences into a media with joyful experiences to communicate with the player. It is required to gather a lot of information ranged from scientific research to life stories and brainstorm ideas endlessly. Arts, literature, science, history, psychology, culture and even daily life are potential elements that game designers should have the background on that. Like Will Wright, the original designer of “The Sims” series, who did a lot of research, reading books and study on many aspects of human and finally came up a very famous title. [4]
“A coin has two sides” – being a game designer is a risky job. A good game designer can help their company to survive while the bad one will let company face bankrupt. It is obvious that game design is like a gambling and everyone is hunting for the jackpot, which means that if the game design is a great success, the reward is fascinating. That’s why many people would like to take an adventure, looking for uncertainty, trying to explore and take every challenge in every move in order to achieve their dream and goal, including myself.
To sum up, game design is not fun and the process is full of tears and blood. However, the achievements is much higher than expected if success. It is not only that game design is a cashcow which the intellectual ideas can be a product for customer to enjoy, but it is a methodology to impact the majority’s minds as well as nurture the audience our cultures and experiences for our next generation.
Reference :
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_design
- http://bbrathwaite.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/a-students-question-what-genre-is-hide-seek/
- http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2801/book_excerpt_inside_game_design_.php
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wright_(game_designer)