“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
—CARL SAGAN
This Carl Sagan quote from Cosmos intends to cheekily point out that even a simple object like an apple pie contains a multitude of layers, depending on your level of analysis. Although the baker feels that the apples, sugar, and flour are the fundamental building blocks of an apple pie, the physicist sees down to the atoms and fundamental particles that make up the pie itself. It is a profound and long-lasting quotation because of the disconnect that the listener experiences. Making an apple pie is prosaic. Inventing the universe is deity-level stuff.
Teaching game design offers a similar conundrum. Making games is fairly easy, as is apparent from looking at the number of available games. For example, when you look at the games available for just a single platform (iOS) in a single country (the US) at the time of this writing, you’ll see that there are nearly 400,000 games available.1 In addition, Over 110,000 analog games are listed in the BoardGameGeek.com database.2 And, of course, the number of games children create every day on playgrounds all across the world is uncountable. With so many games coming out every day, games surely must be easy to make. As a result, teaching about games must be fairly straightforward and simple.
1 App Store Metrics. (n.d.). Retrieved July 13, 2015, from http://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/app-count/.
2 BoardGameGeek. (n.d.). Retrieved July 13, 2015, from https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame.
Unfortunately, that is not true.
The primary reason is that there is no reliable algorithm that we can use to create things as wildly disparate as Chess, Grand Theft Auto V, Red Rover, pole vaulting meets, and Jeopardy!. A cursory listing of the skills a game designer of any type will find useful includes mathematics, psychology, computer programming, composition, rhetoric, drafting, architecture, art history, philosophy, economics, business, history, education, mythology, and animation. I stopped the list not because it was complete, but because I think the list—as incomplete as it is—makes the point that game design is remarkably multidisciplinary.
Because no algorithm exists, we have to attempt to shoehorn the facts and methods of a universe of disparate disciplines to make game design heuristics. Meanwhile, the impatient student just wants to make a simple apple pie.
When I first left the world of full-time development of video games to teach game design, I faced this very problem of distilling a vast universe down to a few salient points. I voraciously consumed every book I could find about design or game design and found that they largely talked about the process from a descriptive perspective. That was useful in some aspects, but not useful when I was looking to teach a prescriptive method. Most game design books were ludicrously padded with obvious statements that were not at all helpful to aspiring or professional designers. Some books, like Schell’s Art of Game Design and Salen and Zimmerman’s Rules of Play did a great job of merging descriptive and prescriptive insights from numerous areas of study and then backed up these anecdotes with external best practices.3, 4 As my library expanded, I found more and more areas that I wanted to share with students, but unless I wanted to assign them hundreds of dollars worth of (sometimes overly academic, sometimes out-of-print) reading materials, I had no way to easily teach lessons that would have helped me professionally if someone had taught them to me in my apprentice years. This is the curse of a multidisciplinary field—the sources for insights are limitless, so collating knowledge into a curriculum eventually expands like a gas to fill whatever space you have.
3 Schell, J. (2008). The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann.
4 Zimmerman, E., & Salen, K. (2003). Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
I have created games professionally on over a dozen platforms. I have created large physical games for corporate retreats; I have created interactive books for tablets; and I have created free-to-play games in a brutally competitive market. These platforms seem like they share little in common. Some topics make sense only in terms of analog games, or single-player games, or multiplayer games. But some topics transcend platforms and are timeless. Less than ten years ago, mobile games had few established design patterns. Less than ten years ago, no digital social networks supported formal games. Less than thirty years ago, networked games in general were a quiet niche. What platforms will support the games ten years from now? Thirty years from now? What game design concepts will help support the game designers of the future? I cannot possibly claim to know the answer to those questions. But I can provide tools to support game designers today, and I can present them in the most evergreen way I know in order to sustain their relevance. In time, concepts in this book will be updated, expanded, or even retired as the industry gains greater understanding of how we game designers complete our magic.
Teaching has been incredibly challenging and rewarding. Just as my career in game design stemmed from a need to constantly learn about as many things as possible, my teaching career has reflected that as well. Research is enlightening, but it is students who provide me with unparalleled perspective into how to explain what game design actually is and how to do it well. This book is another well-disguised ploy for me to learn more, to pull insights from multiple disciplines, and to share new ideas with others.
Thank you for the opportunity,
—Zack Hiwiller
November 2015