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Ask the Experts: 31 Games Students Should Play
by Jill Duffy
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December 15, 2008
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In the latest advice column from Gamasutra sister website GameCareerGuide, a reader asks what games students of game development, as well as other kinds of aspiring game developers, should have played at least once in their lifetimes. (The quick list is available here.)
Jill Duffy, editor of GameCareerGuide, sought the opinion of three developers to cobble together a list of 31 suggestions. By no means a complete canon, the list emphasizes playing across a wide variety of genres, as well as playing non-electronic games, too.
Gamasutra, which is affiliated with GameCareerGuide, is running this exclusive game industry career advice column in full. For more advice about breaking into the game development industry, visit GameCareerGuide’s Getting Started section.
Dear Experts,
This seems like a pretty simple question: What games should students play?
There are some games like Grim Fandango, World of Warcraft, and Ico that are discussed in articles and at conferences all the time. In order to learn to make games, a student sometimes needs to actually play them -- but are there games that should top every student's list, games that do certain things well or everything well? Should students play terrible games just to see what not to do?
It seems a great question to ask at the peak of video game season.
Thanks,
All Work and No Games
Dear All Work,
Absolutely. Students of game development -- not to mention professional game developers themselves -- have to play games. All the pros I’ve ever talked to about this topic have agreed that developers (I’ll use the word developers in this column to mean students, professionals, and aspiring developers alike) need to play as many games as possible in as many genres as possible.
It’s important to play both critically acclaimed games and games that are overlooked by the media. It’s important to play games that you know you will enjoy and that you think you specifically will not enjoy. It’s important to play games that reviewers score a 9 out of 10, as well as those that are rated at the very bottom.
Why? It’s important to know what’s out there.
It’s important to know what’s out there, first of all, because of the way developers talk about games and game ideas. While the world of video game development certainly does have some specialized language, the vocabulary is not all that extensive. Developers tend to talk about games and game ideas by referencing existing games, both what the new thing will be like and not like.
Second, it’s important to know what’s out there so as to not replicate an existing game without knowing it. On the other hand, sometimes it’s useful to reinvent a good idea that was executed poorly in the past -- but you still have to know what that idea is and why it failed the first time around.
Third, as you implied, developers play games to know what works and what doesn’t. For the same reason, developers write (and hopefully read) postmortems of other game development projects. Why would any developer choose to learn something the hard way (the hard way is expensive and can make you go gray early) when they have the option to learn from the mistakes and successes of others instead?
One really helpful hint: You don’t need to play games to completion to learn from them. It’s perfectly acceptable, if not down right common, to have some kind of subscription rental account for video games so you can try all the major titles that are released on disc. Just fiddle with them long enough to get a sense of what the player does and anything else that stands out, both good and bad. You should also play the demo or free trial period for online games, casual titles, and the like. Done in this manner, you could easily spend less than 15 minutes a day a few times a week familiarizing yourself with all the major releases in a month.
Top Games Developers Should Play
While there’s no way to make a truly canonical list of all games that all developers should have played in their lifetimes, I did want to pull together some suggestions from a few experts out there.
Games programming expert Lee Winder (technical manager at Blitz Arcade, part of Blitz Games Studio in the U.K., and unabashed Nintendo fan-boy) categorized his suggestions, not by genre, but by the reason one should play them. For example, he named Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and PuzzleQuest as “games that show how solid and fun entire games can be.”
Final Fantasy VII topped his list for purposes of story and character development. Beyond Good and Evil and Mirror’s Edge are games that are under-rated but should be played, says Winder. And last but not least, a terrible game that students and aspiring developers should play to see why things just sometimes don't work: Daikatana.
David Sushil, who teaches game and simulation programming at DeVry, says to play the “oldest games possible,” namely go and chess, and think about why they have such longevity. It’s also notable, he says, that these games have mechanics that are accessible immediately. “Their mechanics are also incredibly simple to utilize, as opposed to modern video games, which can often require a dozen different controller buttons to operate. Of all the games created in the past 30 or 40 years, I would say only a handful have the chance to survive as long as chess or go. Sudoku, Tetris, and Bejeweled are a few examples.”
He adds, “My advice is to take 50 bucks to your local hobby store and pick out a few obscure card or board games, ones you've never heard of before. You'd be surprised how many fantastic games are out there! My students and I have been playing a game called Incan Gold, which they discovered at a recent conference. It incorporates some classic game theory games, and the entertaining result feels kind of like a multiplayer version of [television game show] Deal or No Deal.”
Sushil rounds out his list with these video games, which he thinks are largely overlooked: Psychonauts, for its wonderful level designs and outrageous sense of humor; Okami, for its seamless blend of function and form - recreating a sumi-e watercolor painting in a game where painting is a primary mechanic (brilliant!); Coign of Vantage, a simple Flash game developed by Bobblebrook that demonstrates how games don't have to be incredibly complicated to be enjoyable; and Pocketful of Stars by Ferry Halim, another Flash game that shows us how games can (and should) be beautiful works of art.
Game designer and occasional writer for GameCareerGuide.com, James Portnow, had a few suggestions specifically for designers, starting with playing “classic board games and arcade games, games that can be reduced to a few simple rules”: Settlers of Catan, Magic: The Gathering, the card game Texas Hold ’em, Dungeons & Dragons, go, chess, Missile Command, Galaga, Tetris, and Pac-man. He adds to this list Rogue, any multi-user dungeon (MUD), Wolfenstien/Doom 1, Herzog Zwei, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Chrono Trigger.
Happy playing!
Jill Duffy is editor-in-chief of GameCareerGuide.com, senior contributing editor of Game Developer magazine, and content manager of the Game Career Seminar series of live events. Send her your questions about game development careers and education at theexperts@gamecareerguide.com.
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Tetris and Columns
Galaga and Galaxian
Doom and Quake
Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past and Beyond Oasis
Super Mario Brothers 3 and Adventure Island
Jak 3 and Ratchet and Clank
Fallout 1,2 and Fallout 3
Heroes of Might and Magic and Civilization
and of course, we should go with:
Runescape (or any free-to-play MMORPG) and World of Warcraft
I'm sure there are some other great ideas out there, but those are from the top of my head.
pokemon (any rpg) and mario rpg
starcraft and age of empires 2
comando for nes and any other top-view action game
nascar racing games and gtr2
Especially the runescape suggestion. For a filler i feel Diablo 3 could would be a good play.
Note to the author. Why was no RTS's mentioned. Starcraft and Warcraft both are mentions. One is mass units with fast gameplay and strategy (starcraft food cap is 200) while warcraft is all Micro and trying to focus fire on one unit at a time with only a handful of units(warcraft food cap is 99). I understand these are all blizzard games but its great to pick a company and compare there games and see whats different and what makes them stand out from the rest. Usually great games of a specific genre will lead the player to other games of that genre because they crave that experience again. And let me tell you all of blizzard's games are great. It led me to play MMORPG's, RTS's, and standard rpg's that I would have never played.
Dues Ex and Morrowind
Final Fantasy 1,2 and Super Mario RPG
"By no means a complete cannon, the list..."
While I certainly won't argue that the list is indeed, not a "cannon," I think that the point is that it is not a "canon"
No game on this list should be made later than 2000 and probably no later than 1995.
Also, any expert's list will include location-based games, such as tabletop titles. Concepts such as roleplaying, dungeons, levels, units, health points, stealth, experience, and on and on, don't come from Pong and it's children - they come from tabletop games.
It is true that tabletop games hold a lot of concepts we would be wise to learn from. It is also true that the beginning of video games, come from the 80s and early 90s, also hold treasures of game design innovations. Newer games, however, offer us a vision of how we have built on top of these ideas, what we have added (for better or worse), and where these ideas are taking us. Researching games from beginning AND modern times gives us a fuller picture of where games are headed and what game play models truly last and resonate with players.
Golden Eye N64 "took fps on console to the next level"
Wii sports Bowling -Wii "next gen isn't just more polys and shaders"
Half Life 2 - PC "Immersion is important"
Daxter - PSP "build for the platform you're targeting"
Superman 64 - "This is what NOT to do"
...and then have the players move in a completely different direction throwing everything you thought out so well out of the window, forcing you to basically do it on the fly and re-think your planning process for the next time.
Anyone who hasn't tried to run a table-top game is seriously missing out.
You could move to C&C and Starcraft. Naturally you'd want to check out Age of Empires and Total Annihilation, as well as the later Warcraft and C&C titles.
From there you can look at the attempts to change the fundamentals, Blood and Magic and Seven Kingdoms are excellent examples, as is Ground Control.
Genre mixups like Battlezone and to a lesser extent Ceasar would be recommended. Fragile Allegiance would be a good pick too.
So right there you have at least a dozen titles which explore both the foundations and variations on the RTS theme. The same could be done of any genre, from arcade classics to puzzle solvers. This, I believe, would be far more sensible than trying to create a list that picks from all over. A general list like this is better served to display fundamental theories in games, which is why long surviving card and board games would probably best fill out the list.
@Tim Carter: I'm going to have to agree with Jake Romigh; having an understanding of what worked before and what now works gives developers a better vision of what will work tomorrow. Also, the games industry in general is way too young to rely on viewing only old examples for what works, which is especially true when the quality and/or complexity of all areas in game development are constantly being pushed and pulled.
@John-Paul Clifton: Be wary of Limbo of the Lost?..
Most people nowadays have never heard of the tabletop games, even less played them.
McDonough touches on something important. The people involved in makiong this article were trying to keep things simple but for a serious student/developer, simple is not what they need. Each category of game type deserves it's own list, thus we should have a list of list and each should have multiple DO NOT examples in addition to the DO examples. As little repetition as possible in these lists is desirable.
Brian
You must have misunderstood my comment. The fast that the Thief series was my favourite does not mean that it wasn't innovative.
Try beating those games without killing anyone.
Play many games and learn from them all; it's disrespectful to the craft not to do so.
My comments weren't specifically aimed at you. It appeared to me that it was an overall theme of most of the comments. I guess I expected more comments to show why they should be included in the MUST plays for aspiring developers. I do point at Joeseph's comments as something that I thought was useful, though there are others.
Brian
These have a lot to teach about game theory.