This article was initially published on gamasutra.com on May 30th, 2012. 

You’ve done it all. You’ve moved up through the ranks of associate and junior designer, you have been through crunch to ship games, you’ve mastered the internal tools, pioneered new pipelines and techniques and trained other designers to use them. But now you are tired of waiting for that promotion to senior level and lead positions, it is getting on your nerves and it is starting to get old.

Or maybe you are a manager, lead designer, producer or HR rep., and you don’t understand why that highly skilled and very promising designer turned into a negativity beast. You know he’s good but you are at a loss to turn him back to the path of success and create the team pillar that you need.

Having been myself on both sides of this potential career dead-end, I want to share with you my recent study on what I called “The Old Grumpy Designer syndrome”.

OGD syndrome symptoms

An Old Grumpy Designer is generally quite experienced, has developed know-how and has achieved some status for it, owning some part of the tools or processes and being a reference on them. The problem is that instead of using this recognized knowledge to help the team and project move forward, he’s constantly showing how wrong others are and how doomed their efforts.

You’ll often find that the ideas the OGD is most likely to devote his knowledge and energy to burn down, are ideas that are not his, or that challenge what he has established himself. He has become resistant to change and evolution, he just doesn’t want to have to learn new tricks or to reconsider his current ones and he will do everything he can to prevent that from happening.

Not only is the team wasting valuable energy and insight interacting with him, but as long this toxic behaviour persists unchecked, creativity gradually goes down, as it can only exist in a positive environment where ideas are nurtured instead of shut out. A failing creative dynamic within a team is definitely a sign that should ring a bell and trigger further investigation.

Another trait that can appear in an OGD is extreme ambition that is disconnected from the realities of your project. An OGD can compare the current sprint with the actual end-results achieved by the reference blockbuster game and develop negativity as a result. They might think they need to win the Super Bowl in one play and get paralyzed from it, when all is asked is to gain a few yards.

The last frequent trait of ODGs is that they consistently ask for a higher position, either for a senior rank or lead. Because of their experience and skills, this is a perfectly valid progression, but as these designers usually don’t get promoted because of their attitude, it leads to a frustration build-up that of course worsens the other symptoms.

Establishing a diagnosis

When trying to identify if you are facing an OGD, it is important to look for the symptoms discussed earlier. Study the way a designer communicates with his peers, gives feedback and proposals. Generally, a grumpy designer will be trigger happy with the reply-all button and tend to be quite present in mail threads and flame wars. Brainstorms or group discussions are also opportunities to notice a tendency to shut down others’ ideas and try to impose his own.

Another thing to look for is career dynamic. Has the designer been at his level for some time now or has he been stuck for too long in the past? It is only natural that stagnating at a given level is bound to create a perpetual bad mood and can be a catalyst for the other issues, especially if no adapted growth path has been offered.

Ultimately, browsing all archived performance reviews is going to give perspective and help monitor the apparition and evolution of many of the issues that have most probably been already recorded and communicated to the grumpy designer. Often you will see a discrepancy between the self-evaluation scores and the marks given by the manager. I have found that this is often ignored, especially if the overall appreciation is that the designer gives satisfaction, but it is actually important to discuss the reason behind the divergence of opinion. I witnessed a case where a designer received high marks and was noted as exceeding expectation, his self-evaluation, though, was even higher than this. This shows that the praise is not perceived and this can lead to a dangerous and unnecessary self one-upmanship that will actually hamper designer performance and progression.

Of course, if this situation has been going on for too long and the same problems keep appearing in the report, you generally see the overall performance go down, sometimes to critical levels.

Treating the syndrome

So you think you’ve got an OGD. You now realize that one of your beloved designers in which you’ve put so much hope and given key tasks to is actually responsible for a drop in productivity within the team, bad mood and a general feeling that everyone is afraid to speak up. The consequence may be mild, but the bottom line is that things could be way better than they are if this designer turned his negative behaviour into an uplifting collaborative attitude and put his skills forward to help everyone.

First you need to do your homework, go back to all the symptoms you’ve noticed and write them down. Dig up the repeated mentions you’ve found in the performance reviews, list the emails or discussion outbreaks, run stats on how often personal evaluations were higher than those of his manager. Make sure you compile all the elements that demonstrate a problem. You’ll need a substantial round of bullets going into this because that’s how you’ll put your grumpy designer off-balance and bring down his mental fortress so he sees it from your perspective.

Book a one-on-one meeting and explain the situation, point out how it doesn’t live up to your expectations and try to have your grumpy designer acknowledge that he has a part in it. You will see him resist, argue and redirect the discussion to his successes, put the blame on external factors and so on. That is where your preparation should pay off. With concrete examples coming from different sources and different time periods, you should be able to get to him.

The main idea is to keep things positive though. The message that needs to come across is: “Yes, we know you are good and have skills, we recognize that and it’s the reason you’ve made it this far. Now, you are stuck in a behavior that holds you back and is toxic to the team, let’s work that out.” Having him realize that he has a negative impact on his teammates plays a big part in shaking the OGD out of it. I’ve seen several of them respond to the idea that they were hurting other people that they work with. “I don’t want to be toxic”, they’ll frequently say.

I don’t want to be toxic.

It is a delicate discussion to have and it can become quite heated and hard to get your point across, but it also can get pretty personal and emotional to receive such critical feedback, so be ready for a ride. I believe it is best to separate this effort from the official performance reviews so as to reduce the tension that comes with those formal processes and instead make it clear that this is a personal development initiative aimed at helping the designer out of a career pitfall and back on track. That is also why you don’t want to rush it. It is natural for them to resist what can be perceived as criticism and you might want to adjourn the session, let the feedback sink in and start the discussion afresh a few days later.

From my experience, a mix of preparation, good will and humor can get you through that process and secure incredible results. To my amazement, I have witnessed complete turnaround in a matter of days. The passion that defines people in the video game industry tends to amplify behaviours and reactions. Fail to provide proper direction and purpose, and you will witness confusion between consuming content as a player and creating content as a designer, in addition to personal focus instead of teamwork. Truth is that if you motivate our genetically engrained tendency to perform for the betterment of the group, you will see passion take over and turn OGDs into key players in your team within moments.

After having explained to designers that it served no purpose to keep grumbling about how the project will never truly compete with the game they respected so much when all that was asked from them was to do their best within existing constrains, arguments quickly stopped within the team. The very next day, their lead saw one of them pop his head away from his screen and say to him: “It feels so good just being professional!” and went on to blast through the tasks at hand. The very next day…

It feels so good just being professional!

Change can take some time though, and I recommend booking follow-up sessions to acknowledge the improvements and the areas that still could improve over time.

Preventing the syndrome

Designers have it so easy … Or do they?

I think that the root cause of the syndrome is a widely spread problem: low self-esteem. As detailed in my previous article, design is poorly defined and understood which even makes experienced designers feel like they need to protect their “phoney baloney jobs” and tends to makes them defensive. With the awkward task of “coming up with the fun,” limited authority, unclear processes, and inefficient metrics for success, it is understandable that with rising stakes, the OGD will resort to bringing people down around him, in a desperate attempt to shine by comparison.

Although it is on the designer to control his own grumpiness level, I believe that the responsibility lies with his manager and the company structure to provide the right environment to grow in as well as give timely feedback to adjust his behavior. It is safe to say that designers aren’t generally great managers, thus I would recommend that producing staff and HR assist and advise the lead designer facing a case of OGD in his team. Of course, it’s even better if you have a Design Director at studio level, as he can help designers grow without the pressure that comes with direct supervision.

But I also think that there are structural reasons that make the job of a designer quite difficult. The biggest offender being that elusive notion of “fun” that is so poorly defined that it ends up being very subjectively evaluated, if at all. It puts huge pressure on the designers while stripping them of much needed autonomy and sense of competency. Teams need to at least acknowledge that fun is by (lack of) definition hard to come up with and implement an extended conception phase to identify the desired modalities of fun and prototype its essence before the massive gears of production start spinning.

A better structure that recognizes the different specialties of design can also make the best of each designer. Looking at programming, which is actually explicitly segmented by functional role, like 3D engineering, AI or tools, you will also see positions that correspond to different levels of abstraction, like architect or manager. Art also brings a great top-down hierarchy between artistic vision, concept art and actual asset building. Furthermore, it incorporates critique as an established part of the creative process, which resonates with programming’s code review. Designers, on the other hand, are often … well … designers, a poorly defined title that doesn’t offer clear career paths.

Ultimately, I believe that the confusion between design and creative vision hurts projects immensely. Just like film studios need a director and a team of specialists of each field to make a movie, design and creative vision should be separated. All disciplines should become technical providers of solutions to support the vision and make it exist in the game. Putting design in charge of the vision leads to confusion between the means and the end and creates an unfair and unstable situation. Lastly, diluting the responsibility of vision between design, art and programming, this typically leads each to develop their own independent vision, and creates an unfocused experience.

Conclusion

I want to take the opportunity to thank the designers that remained good sports even though I was calling them old and grumpy. They showed a great lot of maturity and fortitude exploring that syndrome with me and I know first-hand that it made a difference for them. I also want to personally apologize to the colleagues I have been toxic to in my career, the pain I caused was uncalled-for and I am sorry for it.

What I detailed here may seem like basic management techniques and they probably are, but this article represents an effort I have very rarely seen done in the field of design. It is two-fold and should be taken from both the angle of the designers themselves and also from the perspective of studio structure. After all, our industry has been around for only about 30 years and even though its growth has been incredibly fast, we must remain on the lookout for improvements to our creative processes and theories, as they are still, on many accounts, not fully matured.

So please, if you are an experienced designer, don’t fall prey to complacency and try to be open to new ideas even if they go contrary to what got your past successes, and if you are a manager, be on the lookout for improvements in your processes to understand, shepherd and improve creativity.

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

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.