Recent Ubisoft games have been observed to share a lot of game mechanics. The formula gradually evolved through the years but took its roots in the first open-world title of the company, Assassin’s Creed.

The core system of this formula is the Reach high point mechanic, that lets players make Altair climb a tall building, synchronize to unlock all quests in the area, and jump down through a signature Leap of faith.

As I had the chance to participate in its design, I would like to share with you how we got there, and what made the system so successful that it’s still used in games, 8 years after its debut. As you’ll see its strength can be analyzed through the lens of biology and psychology.

I believe the strength of this mechanic lies on how strongly it motivates players. This is achieved through proposing a clear objective, and a significant reward that immediately follows challenge completion in a very tight loop. This echoes the conditions for flow stated by Csikszentmihalyi that create maximum engagement when performing tasks. Let’s deconstruct the different components that make this system so rewarding and efficient.

The first characteristic is that the reward of unlocking nearby quests comes immediately after synchronizing. This creates a strong and apparent link between cause and effect that brings clarity to the system. The direct reaction to the players actions also represents a dopamine-based reward. It is Nature’s way to motivate us to impact the world around us.

Secondly, the fact that multiple quests are unlocked at once increases the pleasure response as it reinforces the player’s feeling of agency. The bigger the difference between a small action and a big response, the stronger the dopamine release, motivating us to create strong consequences.

The initial design for this system involved talking to characters hidden outside of cities in order to unlock individual quests players had to travel to. These two factors explain why having multiple quests unlocked immediately available creates stronger reward.

The pleasure created by a tight loop with immediate and important reward mimics kids reactions when they press elevator buttons, get the immediate visual and sound feedback and put the whole cab in motion.

Another aspect is the fact that this system grants intrinsic rewards. Instead of extrinsic abstract prize like gold that the player would have to trade in, the player now gets access to more challenge/reward loops. Not only intrinsic rewards are more satisfying, but they also increase a player motivation and engagement with the activity, compared to extrinsic rewards that rather encourage players to exit the current loop, and literally break the flow.

References:

1. Wikipedia- Flow – link
2. Gamasutra – Addiction and the Structural Characteristics of MMO Games – link
3. Youtube – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us – link

Compared to Starcraft’s very predictible systems, Warcraft 3 and its randomness always puzzled me. Here are my conclusions on how such a random game can still be fit for competitive play.

Here is a short video on why you shouldn’t use the word fun as a game designer or as a producer/manager. It actually echoes the article on creative management I wrote last year and extracts its essence in a more accessible way. Hope it will entice you to go and check it after watching the video.

The GDC Vault has recently released Professor Brian Moriarty’s talk from the 2012 conference, Lehr und Kunst mit Perlenspiel, that reports on the game design course he has been giving at the Worchester Polytechnic Institute.

The focus of Brian Moriarty, known for his early work on adventure games at Infocom and Lucasarts, is to enable his students to “express game ideas in code”, and he developed a simple game engine to do so: the Perlenspiel. An engine without pipeline and assets, so simple in fact that it would allow his students coming from all different disciplines to each complete 6 interactive pieces within the 7 weeks of his class. Having been involved myself in teaching game design to students, I must say that I found the method that Moriarty used very interesting as the use of an engine that would keep their work abstract and away from asset building made sure they were concentrated on game rules as well as the creation of gameplay.

I would recommend this talk to anyone interested in learning or teaching game design. Also please note that Moriarty’s gameclavier Perlenspiel is open source and freely available.

Some links:

• The Perlenspiel opensource engine: http://www.perlenspiel.org/
• Biran Moriarty’s GDC 2012 talk: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015620/Lehr-und-Kunst-mit
• Gamasutra’s article on the topic: Link

Our industry tends to use many terms without having strong understanding of them. Pleasure, motivation and addiction are generally mixed up and misused despite being central to entertainment. So much so that the generation of pleasure seems to be the main and only objective of many recent games, to the expense of challenge, and that being addictive is often considered a desired trait for a game. Gasp!

In this article, I want to use the standpoint of biology to advocate that the key goal of play is personal development, pleasure only being a consequence of it. In addition, I will show that pleasure without learning only creates an empty experience that can be dangerously addictive.

Let’s first debunk a very common confusion by establishing a distinction between fun and pleasure. Pleasurable experiences like eating a good tasting cake aren’t necessarily fun. On the other hand, I think we can admit that everything that is fun is pleasurable. It means that fun is a subset of pleasure and that’s the reason I want to focus on exploring the notion of pleasure.

Pleasure is a positive mental state that is the result of electrical stimulation of certain parts of the brain. That stimulation is typically generated by cell receptors after activation by their neurotransmitters, mainly dopamine and different types of endorphins. The actual biochemistry is irrelevant to us except to know that you can bypass the proper triggers of it and still obtain the stimulation of the pleasure centers. This can be done by using replacement molecules that trigger receptors or amplify the effect of native neurotransmitters. These are actually called psychotropic drugs and affect our central nervous system’s ability to perceive and compute information. Of course induced altered states like being tipsy or plain drunk might seem like a good source of “fun”, but let me hold that thought for now and keep on with the actual discussion on pleasure.

Pleasure is a positive mental state that is the result of electrical stimulation of certain parts of the brain.

Since it can be “forged”, pleasure on its own has limited value. A famous experiment had monkeys pleasure centers wired so they could activate them at will which led them to constantly push that button and totally ignore to feed themselves, to their ultimate demise. A freely accessible pleasure source can be dangerous and even plain lethal as everything else ceases to represent any interest. This is a good illustration that living beings are complex systems that function in their own environment but are prone to collapse if a modification that they are not adapted to is introduced and that one part of the system gets singled out.

Now that we’ve reviewed the mechanisms of pleasure and its limits, let’s try to discuss the possible role for pleasure. Biology considers pleasure as an adaptation mechanism for evolved animals. All living cells can be modified as they split, due to errors in the replication of their genetic code. This is how different traits appear in species and allow mutated individuals to survive evolutionary pressure. Typically, natural selection is rather a negative type of filtering that eliminates all individuals that can’t survive a change of conditions like the presence of antibiotics if you are a bacteria, the disappearance of low-hanging leaves if you are an small herbivore, or a giant asteroid hitting your planet if you are an ecosystem-dominating razor-teethed dinosaur. Because of how often unicellular organisms can reproduce and how simple their DNA is, they are way more likely to develop different traits and thus be ready to survive environment changes. More evolved organisms like mammals have to wait for sexual maturity to reproduce and mix their DNA to create offspring. Evolved species DNA is so complex though, that traits are dependent on multiple genes, making new traits way rarer to appear. This is where pleasure comes into play (no pun intended).

As we saw, pleasure can be an absolute motivator, so if an individual’s brain is wired to give us pleasure in response to a behavior that makes him more fit, this will encourage him to engage in the related activity and help his survival. For example, our brain releases dopamine when we understand something which obviously plays a role in the fact that humans are actually quite smart. Our body generates endorphins after a physical exercise, giving us the post-workout high which motivates us to train again and build more muscle. More interestingly for us, and like most evolved animals, we also trigger pleasure when we play.

If pleasure is linked to positive behaviors, it becomes a positive feedback loop for development

It is as if, in nature, the balancing element of pleasure is the effort required to obtain it, thus indicating that the true role of it is to motivate evolved animals to engage in activities that will fulfill their needs. Arguably, humans have needs of different types: Physical, emotional, spiritual, social and intellectual. Video games have historically represented a physical challenge with focus on hand-eye coordination and naturally grew into the intellectual sphere by including strategy and puzzles. With more focus on narrative, they started touching on emotions and spirituality, and with the development of multiplayer we are also expanding to social, giving them a pretty good potential as personal development tools.

Conditioning makes our brain fire up with excitement, but is it meaningful?

But unless they somehow deliver a learning experience they can become a pleasurable but mind-numbing grind that leaves you feeling empty. That type of game that provides pleasure and can be played without effort and thus without limit, I call addictive. It is the type of entertainment that tricks our body and brain to focus on meaningless glitter and look for the next release of dopamine. Pleasure itself is the only currency promoted and the participants pretty much end up like the monkeys in the aforementioned experiment.

The function of games is not to give us pleasure as this is only the consequence that motivates us to engage in it. Instead, the value of games is to learn, challenge or develop ourselves in situations that real life wouldn’t allow. If we let ourselves go only after pleasure, we just create a perverted and hedonistic system that doesn’t provide any benefit and instead establishes such a short and easy loop to pleasure that becomes addictive and ultimately destructive to your body, mind and soul.

Some links:

• The role of pleasure in evolution and how it can be turned into addiction – How cocaine turns users into addicts
• “By definition, we are the biological descendants of the tribes who told stories to survive.” – Into the woods: A Practical Guide to the Hero’s Journey
• Psychology applied to reward systems – A look at the behavioral psychology of random loot

You probably heard of game theory at one point, nodded your head trying to convince the people around you that you knew what it was about, but like me, struggled to grasp its applications to actual game design.

Game theory is a field of mathematics that studies the outcome of complex games, looking for points of equilibrium, value of different strategies through the payoff resulting from the different choices available. It must certainly be interesting on its own, but is most generally applied to concrete situations like politics, economics, sociology, competitive gaming and thermonuclear warfare.

I am not going to try my scholar impersonation and try to outdo proper definitions like wikipedia’s.You should probably read their article if you want a good introduction.

The immediate value of learning about game theory is to hear about the terms of zero-sum or non-zero-sum games, games with complete (like chess) or incomplete information (like Starcraft), the concept of decision tree and the different tools to model and analyze games as well as the famous prisoner’s dilemma. Not only this nomenclature will allow you to consider games in a more abstract fashion and to better categorize and analyze them, but it can also help you discuss them with fellow designers that would share the same knowledge.

Past this, I must admit that most of my efforts to dig deeper into game theory have left me with a feeling of lack of adequation to game design, probably because our craft is so young, or because my own understanding of it is too limited. The books I could lay my hands on weren’t really written with game design in mind and I couldn’t learn in a satisfactory fashion, but I know about ways to learn about game theory in a way that is relevant to game design, and that’s what I want to share with you today.

To me, game theory applied to game design is: The science of establishing optimal play in a complex game situation. In this perspective, it is more about understanding a player’s process when he is trying to make the best move. It impacts design in an indirect fashion, but it is still a way to inform it.

The key methods that game theory uses are based on the systematic listing of the different options and their respective payoff, in a matrix or in a tree, depending on the game itself. Way before I heard about game theory, I had used these methods in two contexts. The first was when trying to solve the logic riddles of Raymond Smullyan’s book “What is the title of this book?”. In it, the reader is taken through riddles about the inhabitants of a strange island, that are either knights and speak only the truth, or knaves that always lie. One of the very first problem goes as such:

According to this old problem, three of the inhabitants -A, B, and C- were standing together in a garden. A stranger passed by and asked A, “Are you a knight or a knave?” A answered, but rather indistinctly, so the stranger could not make out what he said. The stranger than asked B,  What did A say?” B replied, “A said that he is a knave.” At this point the third man, C, said, “Don’t believe B; he is lying!”

The question is, what are B and C?

So, let’s evaluate B’s statement, exploring the possibility that he would be right. Then that would mean that A would have said he was a knave, which is impossible as if he was lying, he would be a knight and would have lied, and if he was saying the truth and was thus a knight we would experience a paradox and all life as you know it would stop instantaneously and every molecule in your body would explode at the speed of light, which would be bad.

We can then safely conclude that B is a liar, thus a knave.

The evaluation of C’s statement “Don’t believe B; he is lying” concludes of course that he is a knight.

Now you might say that this is not truely game theory, and you would probably be right, but the fact is that the logic and systematic approach are the same than those used in game theory and are adapted when evaluating a game position. It also relates to how game theory applies to player undestanding as we are trying here to find the solution to a problem, “win the game” as you could say, which segways into the other way to learn game theory related skills: Competitive gaming.

Playing a game to win is akin to what we just did, solving Smullyan’s riddle. We evaluated all the different possibilities in order to find the best one. This is actually the same process you go through, consciously or not, when you try to select the best option when playing a game. The more competitive one becomes, the more he thinks about the different choices and tries to establish an optimal strategy. Competitive street fighter player and professional designer David Sirlin describes this behavior in his book “Playing to Win”.

A competitive game, to me, is a debate. You argue your points with your opponent, and he argues his. “I think this series of moves is optimal,” you say, and he retorts, “Not when you take this into account.” Debates in real life are highly subjective, but in games we can be absolutely sure who the winner is.

Now trying to engage in competitive play yourself might be quite a daunting task, and actually quite unnecessary. Just like car engineers don’t need to be Formula One champions, actual high skill level in playing games is overrated when designing them. Instead, understanding how top players function and what attracts them to specific games will help you design games that have depth and can hold the test of time. Once again, designing games is informed only indirectly by the actual practice of games. That’s where Sirlin’s book can help you get an insight into competitive behavior. On a similar note, thanks to the recent development of e-sports and streaming sites, you can also find many web show about the different competitive games. Listening to their analysis really helped me understand the depth of these games. I would recommend the Day[9] daily as a first foray into competitive gaming.

There you go, I hope these pieces of advice motivated you to dig a bit into game theory!

Related links:

• Wikipedia’s entry on Game Theory
• David Sirlin’s website
• The Day[9] Daily

My article Lifting the Designer’s Curse proposed a breakdown listing skills of the field of game design, but voluntarily left out other design disciplines like level design and narrative design. Here is a short post that aims at detailing the different disciplines, the related skills and pointing to reference articles whenever possible.

Please note that they are mainly setup with AAA game development in mind, and could probably be adapted for different needs.

Also read: Lifting the Designer’s Curse – The game designer’s job is largely misunderstood.

Game Design

• System design: Game rules, game systems, game theory, AI state machines, balancing, stuff that’s linked to logic/math. See Ernest Adam’s Preventing the Downward Spiral.

• Interaction design: Controlling how the game gives information to the player so he can make his decision, and how the player can input his decision back into the game. Ergonomics, cognitive science, and user interface are natural domains to take reference from. Check out Charles L Mauro’s Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience.

• Motivation design: Maximizing player engagement, reward systems, ensuring the player learns, balancing reward and frustration … Psychology and neuroscience are you friends here. Read John Hopson’s Behavioral game design.

Level Design

• Space creation: Creating game space, understanding the emergent player flow, directing player attention in a fluid fashion. Architecture, landscape design and urbanism are some academic fields of reference. More in Christopher Totten’s Designing Better Levels Through Human Survival Instincts.

• Gameplay implementation: Creation of encounters, understanding and balancing the nature of the challenge and the involved player skills. See the excellent Mike Stout’s Boss Battle Design and Structure.

• Theatrics: Creating moods in levels, environmental narrative, implementing narrative elements in the gameplay flow. Theater and cinematography are generally great fields to study here. You’ll find more info in GDC 2010: “What Happened Here?” – Environmental Storytelling.

Narrative Design

• Screenplay writing: Writing good lines and good stories. It is pretty much a discipline on its own that is very widely studied, with tons of literature on the subject.

• Narrative Interface: Designing the tools that will allow the story to be told, walk and talks, audiotapes, interruptible cinematics…

• Player-Centric plotting: Creating a story that the player can play and be part of, instead of just hearing/reading it. Don’t tell, don’t show, let play.

I’m really not the right person to recommend anything on the topics of narrative design, so I would rather point to different people that would be way better fitted to talk and write about it. See the blogs of guys like Clint Hocking and Patrick Redding for insight.

Once again, this is just a framework to propose actual skills to the different disciplines of design, don’t hesitate to adapt it to your need, and to share your opinion, findings, as well as links and references.

Practical Concerns

Most developers work in games because of their passion which is a source of motivation, but can also blur judgment as long as the pleasure of playing game and of making them stay intertwined. The beauty of a work of passion is that it is rewarding and fulfilling as it caters directly to one individual’s intrinsic needs, competency, autonomy and relatedness.

Because Game Design is such a young discipline, and also probably because it focuses on the generally viewed as “non-serious” field of games, its essence is not clearly established, making it a confusing path to follow, and grow in.

This article describes the difficult situation in which designers find themselves when not properly driven, offers a workable set of responsibilities and skills for them to own and develop, and defines a role for the game designer in the grand scheme of a project.

Design is misunderstood

Like most things related to creativity, Game Design has always suffered from a lack of understanding. Most of the public thinks game designers just play games all day long, executives tend to think they are the best game designers in the room or do not understand the designer role besides the fact that they need some on the payroll.  A game enthusiast even once asked me if I was designing clothing for characters in video games…

Designers or aspiring designers I have met and worked with are rarely at ease. Most of the time, they feel that they are not heard or taken seriously, that they don’t have the tools and support they need, that the complexity of their work is not acknowledged, nor the value of it understood.

Complexity of designer work isn’t acknowledged, supported or understood.

Part of the problem is that the job of Game Design is generally not well defined in terms of skills and function. Game Design is not as well established as programming and art. Its academic status is in its infancy which makes it difficult not only to execute, but also to discourse about since we lack a proper vocabulary to describe it.

This generally has two consequences. First, because no clear technical task is given to game designers, they tend to travel along the path of least resistance, as players also do in games, and embrace the role of “being creative”: Coming up with ideas, and trying to have them accepted and put into the game. After all, games designers must design the game, right? But as ideas are being proposed without any technical backing in terms of feasibility or relevance, and consequently no established authority, the ensuing discussions are generally just exchanges of opinions in which a producer, as the higher hierarchical decision taker, usually has the last say.

Streamlining Steel Battalion’s controls would divert from the intended experience.

It is only natural then, that a designer, whose main measure of success is how many of his decisions are being accepted, evolves towards the producer position, making the game designer job even more devoid of essence.

Second, in some teams, game design and product vision can be merged into one single entity. Saying that they are the same thing is missing the point that the former is a means to the latter. As with any creation, the form has to be subordinated to the function. Design has to be used to support the game’s intention, even at its own expense. Some games, for example, can propose awkward player controls just because they support the overall product intention, just as some music composers can use dissonance in order to create the desired effect.

Merging game design and product vision has, as a consequence, to limit the medium’s expression to the typical conventions of design, instead of challenging it to bring new solutions to the table. For instance, a designer working on controls will by default try to create the best, most efficient, easy-to-use input system, but if the intention commands it, controls may be done in a way to be less transparent and give a flavour to the experience. That’s the difference between Burnout and Project Gotham Racing, Quake III and Steel Battalion, God of War and Alone in the Dark. In these examples the way the controls are designed deeply impact the player experience even if they might not be optimal from a pure design perspective.

This shows the importance of the distinction between intention and technique. That’s why design or any other technical field should not be taken as an end in itself.

What is Game Design?

Can we deconstruct games and determine what skills can help design them? Making sure we regroup these skills orthogonally will allow for an easier way to learn and develop skill groups, and offer opportunities to specialize in them if required.

Rules, math and logic – System Design

In its most basic form, a game needs goals, rules, and general conditions that control the way the game unfolds, and establish processes for players to play and try to win. Because of the mathematical/logical nature of rules and conditions, it seems clear that analysis, logic and algorithmic will be relevant skills. As these skills will also help create systems, state machines, and AI trees, we will call this branch of game design, System Design, and we will be set to design most of the rules and mechanical parts of games.

A typical example of the use of mathematics for Game Design is found in all games that rely on randomness. It’s obvious that the calculation of probabilities is required in that case, either for payoffs or for odds of occurrences. In fact, an understanding of mathematics is going to help in most aspects of a designer’s job across the board.

Interface, controls and readability – Interaction Design

Now that our game has rules and that they are stated clearly so that our player can understand them, we need to communicate the game state to our player so he can make decisions based on his understanding of the rules, and then input his decision back into the game world, basically “play his move”. The discipline that studies these aspects is ergonomics, and while less absolute to grasp,  ergonomics is a well covered field that can help design interfaces, which give the right information to players, as well as controls that make it easy, even enjoyable, to input back into the game. Of course, depending on the type of interface considered, knowledge of biomechanics and cybernetics can also come in handy. For lack of a better word, let’s call this second branch Interaction Design, as it focuses on the output/input loop between the game and the player.

When dealing with human-machine interfaces, knowledge of the principles of human body operation at the mechanical and psychological level leads to efficiently designed interactions. It is key, not only when trying to adapt a mouse-based interface, like FPS controls, to a gamepad, but also now that we’re dealing with touch-based controls and gesture to full body movement interfaces. Ergonomics was created to focus on making work tools and environments as comfortable and as efficient as possible, now that we are applying its conclusions to entertainment, we have to learn to design enjoyable interfaces.. Working in conjunction with human expectations like inertia, gravity, rhythm, and the action-reaction loop can give more of a natural, thus enjoyable, experience, through what Steve Swink described as Virtual Sensation.

Reward, frustration and learning – Motivation Design

The last, but so essential, branch is the one that ensures that players are so engaged that they actually want to play. Our motivation is largely based on chemical neurotransmitters that reward our brains and body through pleasure, generally in response to behaviours that help develop our evolutionarily selected traits. Endorphins make us feel good after physical exercise, dopamine rewards us when we understand something new, or establish new social relationships and so on. Because we play games for the main benefit of entertainment and pleasure, understanding what is going to please our brains and bodies is essential to creating relevant experiences. Psychology, the neurosciences and cognitive sciences are obvious fields that will bring insights into these aspects and will strengthen an approach to the third branch of game design that I call Motivation Design.

Brain Age deals with issues that everybody can relate to.

The emergence of Casual Games was made possible by improving the perception of benefit to a type of player that was not motivated by the benefits of core games. Nintendo’s Brain Age series is definitely a typical example of this. First by advertising the benefit of mind youth, a real-life associated benefit that would resonate with customers beyond the core gamer audience, then by a mix of constant praise, slow difficulty progression, scheduled reward, even some tempering with guilt when the player would miss a session, these games really established a standard on how to motivate non-core players. This is obviously becoming of growing interest within the industry, especially through the growth of the social games market.

Now it is my belief that because the three branches of System Design, Interaction Design, and Motivation Design are quite orthogonal and also constituted of established and academically studied disciplines, it becomes possible to use existing literature to improve in each, establish a workable vocabulary and even establish a career path for designers that would want either to specialize or diversify in each.

I think this approach would go a long way for managers to help their understanding of the game design position. It would better integrate game designers in the development process and help them in the hiring process, as well as in task assignation, and ultimately, performance reviews.

Note: I’m leaving Level Design out of the scope of this paper, not because it is of less importance, but just for simplicity’s sake. Similarly to Mise-en-scène, Level Design can be argued to be of a higher level than Game Design as it aims to build a directed experience for the player, using elements of other technical fields in conjunction. Historically, Level Design has been considered as Game Design’s little brother, but recent blockbuster games have clearly showed the importance of thinking otherwise. A similar analysis could be done for that design discipline, leading to better specification and understanding.

Also read: Breakdown of the design disciplines – Specialties and technical skills of game design, level design and narrative design.

What is the role of game design on a project?

Even in the simplest games, Game Design should be subordinated to the product intention and it is very important to keep the distinction between the two very clear.

Game Design, just like all other disciplines on a project is here to help support the intention so it can be delivered to the final consumer. As a step between product vision and implementation through code, it reflects on the intended experience and proposes concrete rules and systems that are actually conveyed to the player, not only through the content presented, but also through the choices and challenges he will have to face in game situations. As Griesemer and Butcher stated in their 2002 GDC talk “The Illusion of Intelligence”, their intention in Halo was to make the player feel like Schwarzenegger. The conjunction of the low enemy accuracy that gradually improves with constant exposure of the player to foes, and the fact that player shields regenerate after some time away from combat favors the engage/cover routine that Predator’s Dutch uses during the outpost attack, thus ensuring that players will follow that routine.

In Halo, players want to feel like Schwarzenegger

In an industry, creation is always a top-down process that trickles down from intention to execution. Not only because it reassures the guys in suits, but also because it’s the most efficient way to ensure that a collaborative project focuses on a given experience instead of becoming a juxtaposition of inspirations aimed at different targets.

The vision holder has to clearly state his intentions, then turn towards his specialists and ask them to propose technical solutions for the intended experience to transpire through the game. For this, they have to be entrusted with ownership over their specialties so they can feel they have enough autonomy to be creative. It’s at that condition that they can feel safe enough to engage in creative thinking at their level of intervention and take part in building the whole structure. Maslow himself showed in his hierarchy of needs that the esteem level needs to be secured (self-esteem, respect by others …) before one can be at ease at the self-actualization level and tackle creative tasks.

Being recognized as a specialist and owner of a specific domain gives the designer the confidence to be responsible for a given part of the production. This is where the designer develops a sense of pride for what he/she does and naturally wants to improve, being rewarded at the intrinsic level. This is not to say that every discipline should be separated and keep their ideas for themselves. Quite the opposite, when someone is being respected for his skills, he’s more likely to freely share his ideas with the rest of the group, and see them taken care of by whoever has the most adapted skills to do so.

Conclusion

Game designers need to focus on identified technical tasks, and be given ownership over them. That’s the only way they can develop as individuals and as team members.

Once established as technical providers, game designers need to understand the overarching game vision, and come up with solutions in their area of expertise to support it and make it tangible to the player.

When that happens, on that day, we’ll have lifted the Designer’s Curse.

Three keys to a healthy game designer

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs image taken from Wikipedia, under Creative Commons license.