Are You a Technical or Creative Game Designer?
When The Question was first put to me, it was in a job interview, and I had no idea what they meant. I wasn’t sure if they meant if I can code or do art. They said that wasn’t it. “Here’s an example,” they said, “if you were making a survival game in a forest, and you think first about how hunger would work, then you’re more technical. A more creative designer thinks first about what kinds of food the player might eat in the forest.”
At the time, I construed it as whether I thought about systems first, or individual mechanics first. So I said I was probably more technical, and they seemed perfectly fine with that explanation.
It was a fun conversation, so sometime later, I asked The Question to one of my friends. He wasn’t sure if it meant to analyze mechanics, or to come up with new ones. I explained it to him, and he nodded. He said, after I was done, what I was really asking him was whether he thought top-down or bottom-up. And that was it. The question, technical vs creative, in a nutshell must have meant top-down vs bottom-up.
I thought this way for a while until I read Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Game mechanics are the “rules" of the game — the math, the systems, etc. Koster sometimes calls them ludemes in the book. But there is something else he talks about in conjunction with mechanics, and that is dressing. Roughly paraphrasing, dressing is the fiction that “dresses up” the mechanics of the game. The names of the chess pieces, for example, are dressing to make it feel like a medieval battle. Good fiction adds context and meaning to the game mechanics.
As an aside, I hate that Koster refers to the concept as “dressing", and will apply the other word he briefly uses instead. So here’s what The Question is really asking:
What do you think of first: the mechanic or the metaphor?
Technical designers think about the mechanic first — how rules create gameplay. Going back to the survival game example, they might think: “The player should have something that fills 15 points of the hunger meter. The hunger meter has 100 total points, so maybe a can of beans will do.”
Creative designers think about the metaphor first — how physical/emotional sensations create gameplay. For the same situation, they might think: “The player should be able to eat snacks. They’re in this forest, so maybe some berries will do.”
If the two were to playtest the game, their exchange might look something like this:
C: “What the heck! I should be more full after eating a can of beans.”
T: “Why does this berry only give 1 point?”
C: “I needed the player to feel like they’re snacking on something.”
T: “I needed an item that puts them just outside the hunger range.”
C: “The can of beans don’t really make sense in this forest, so how about the berry?”
T: “That’s fair, let’s use the berry. The problem though is that you have to find way too many of them. How about the berry fills you up by 5 instead, and you always find them in 3s so it comes out to 15?”
C: “OK, that still feels like a snack, but one berry filling you up that much doesn’t seem right. Instead of a single berry, how about a handful of them as a single item?”
T: “Sounds great!”
Creative Director: “It’s nice that I have something small to eat now, and it keeps me foraging at a good pace. Nice job!”
A rainbow appears in the sky, and they all shake hands.
It usually doesn’t go as smoothly as this, rainbow notwithstanding. If you have a penchant for one perspective, it’s easy to forget about the other. You get trapped arguing to keep the can of beans not because the can makes any sense, but because it gives 15 points. Or you get trapped arguing to keep the single berry not because it’s useful, but because it feels like a snack. Chances are, if you’ve worked with other designers, you’ve had this problem before (I know I have).
To have a great design, the solution requires both technical and creative thinking. It needs a good mechanic, or else the game gets boring, just as much as it requires a good metaphor, or else players become detached from it. One reinforces the other. When one fails, so does the other. Whenever I get stuck on a design, I ask myself, “Is the problem with the mechanic, or with the metaphor? Am I looking at this as a T or a C?”
All we care about in the end is that the game is engaging and players can connect with it. There is no reason one person can’t look at the issue both ways. It’s one of the powers of being human, but we have our default.
So. T or C. I think my normal is a T. How about you?
