[Jagex lead designer Claire Blackshaw looks at why it can be difficult for game designers to earn their co-workers' respect and communicate their value, in this #altdevblogaday-reprinted opinion piece.]
I’ve got a question: “Do you respect your designers?”
Growing up, I always wanted to make games, and gravitated to programming as the means to achieve this. I entered the industry as a programmer and had a blast, though I found myself more and more attracted to this strange thing called “Games Design”. Eventually I made the very tough personal decision to switch from a programming role to a design role.
So often hopeful “designers” choose it as a path because they can’t be a programmer or artist, and not because they respect or understand the profession.
Now I still code, and try to stay current as a programmer because I haven’t ruled out the possibility of switching back. The hardest thing for me to deal with was the lack of respect design has as a profession. Truly proving to your non-design peers your profession requires study, diligence and commitment is a tough nut to crack. So where is the source of the problem?
"Given enough time and resource a bad designer can make a good design."
Accidental design, or advancing a design through experimentation, requires very little design skill but a lot of resource. Most people can tell if A feels better than B once implemented, so given the ability to try both options they can compare and then make a choice.
Now this is horribly in-optimal but is the root of the problem in many ways. In most respected professions a vast amount of research, basis of knowledge, or method of thinking is required to advance in professional grade problems.
As a designer I respect once put it, your job description is to “Achieve the most with the least”.
"No one will ever tell a programmer how to code, but everyone will tell you how to design."
Once a design is implemented and tangible, most people can see if A is better than B. Now because of the above factor and the fact most design problems can be explained easily to a laymen because communication is a key design skill, well it means everyone can stick their nose in. Including senior members of the company who should know better.
Honestly, the biggest problem the lack of respect causes is this high level of interference from every Tom, Dick and Harry.
In most high skill professions the execution is the simple part, it’s the diagnosis and formulation of a solution which is the hard part. Now most people could inject medicine with a syringe, finding a vein is not that hard, but knowing when or what to inject is tough. Likewise, the result of a complex design problem seems trivial, and once explained obvious to all involved.
It should be pointed out that artists have this problem to a lesser extent as well. The advantage is that an artist executes the idea without needing to communicate, while most times a designer needs to communicate the solution. So the execution is removed from the diagnosis and formulation, meaning that it can be separated easily and appears trivial.
"Proving a good design premise is like trying to convince someone a song is good only with sheet music."
That being said, trying to convince someone without design knowledge of a complex problem and solution without implementation is tough. Though the onus to convince people is on us as designers. Sadly many bad designers, instead of solving this, use this as camouflage to hide their incompetence.
Now I don’t know the perfect solution, but I would suggest as an industry we need to learn sheet music and conventions by which we can discuss problems. A process that is already happening but slowly. The problem is many poor designers keep rallying against these conventions or building of hard theory basis.
They keep rallying against conventions and theory, expressing their “individuality” or “creativity” or some other fluffy concept as a defense. It’s because “bad” designers, “lazy” designers who are not willing to put in the work, find it easier to have things fluffy. This fog and lack of clarity is the shield they use to hide behind and we need to rally behind the hard theory and science to gain respect as a profession.
I’ve met more bad designers than I would care to admit, and I’ve only ever once worked with a designer I strongly respected.
"Do you respect your designers?"
It all comes back to this question. As a programmer I could see my development, and my peers could see it. I could advance my career and have a clear skill progression path. As a designer I often feel lost, and fear that most my “value” is from the trust I’ve earned from colleagues and is non-transferable to a new company. I study hard, work hard, and know I’m a better designer today than I was yesterday, but I struggle to communicate or measure this development.
Finally my question for my fellow designers, “How do we build up design as a profession?”
[This piece was reprinted from #AltDevBlogADay, a shared blog initiative started by @mike_acton devoted to giving game developers of all disciplines a place to motivate each other to write regularly about their personal game development passions.]
Thanks so much, Claire. I couldn't say it better. In my work as a designer, I keep struggling against the exact same set of issues.
There isn't much I could add, but here's my two cents.
Firstly, I think a big problem with design (and art) is that there really are no truly objective criteria. You can say a pirate ship fits a given game better than a castle, but you can't say pirate ships are prettier than castles. This becomes an issue when there is a technical problem, such as balancing, and rather than keeping the solution focused on balancing, some idiot insists on changing the pace (which cannot be argued about, because it's a matter of taste). You cannot talk them out of it. You could talk them out of poor balancing changes, which is exactly why they avoid the topic.
Secondly, I think it's going to get better. The market is becoming more egalitarian and less focused on blockbusters. This has two results: good production values are getting cheaper (at least in the indie and mobile segments), and the market has become oversaturated. In order to succeed, you're going to have to differentiate yourself from the other 100.000 games in your virtual store, and it's only going to be possible with unique design. The good thing is, bad designers can get all fluffy, but they cannot innovate, even by accident. That is: you can have a "good idea" accidentally, but innovation takes a dozen "good ideas" in a row, which is statistically unlikely.
I've had similar thoughts about the portability of design skills and respect. I've found one way to distinguish myself in a more global (outside of the current company) way is to have specialised skills and to approach some design problems in a very analytical way.
This is great, Claire. Jacek's right, this couldn't be said better. Thank you.
Other design fields, like production design, struggle with the exact same issue. Design Thinking was proposed a little while back as the means to educate the culture designer's work with; the idea being that with a culture that was steeped in thinking about design in similar ways as designers, it would allow for more transparency, greater understanding across the board and more collaborative input from all parties working with the designer. Things move in cycles, and by now, many in those design professions have begun to reject Design Thinking, even rebelling against the idea entirely, due to the way Design Thinking was touted as a panacea to business types; as a means to replace designers. :
But, the philosophy still holds merit. Design Thinking is a way of communicating to those the designer works with which is primarily inclusive. When you include people with what you're doing, even if you stick to your guns in the end, you're engaged in an exchange that serves to dispel the myths that design is arbitrary, irrelevant or synonymous with opinion. This tactic is valuable in terms of gaining understanding, respect and ultimately, trust. And as you allude to, without the trust (that design is a profession/field of study, that the designer understands that profession/field of study, that design work can improve value, etc.) the designer's job can be diffused, distracted or derailed.
I agree, there's been overall progress in this, but as you point out, there are so many reasons for the layman to assume the worst when working with us. I believe it's best to keep including those who are the most suspicious, let them work out some of the problems themselves, share solutions, apply best practices and keep it collaborative.
Another word of praise -- it's nice to see design given more of its due than the usual dismissive "ideas are a dime a dozen."
The trouble with design, as Claire points out, is that -- unlike other skilled creative activities -- there's no clear tangible implementation component to a design. Art has images; audio has sounds; programming has code; design has... what? That lack of a tangible implementation component means there's no simple/obvious way to determine whether a design is good or bad. And that is what allows non-designers to perceive design as subjective, as merely a matter of personal taste that anyone can express.
For design (and designers) to be able to earn the same level of respect as programmers and audio/art specialists, design needs a visible form of representation that allows a skilled practitioner to create effective designs and to determine the level of effectiveness of competing designs.
As long as design evaluation is an abstract matter of someone asserting that one design is good while another is not, then even if that person is a naturally gifted and professionally experienced designer of complex systems, their output is indistinguishable (at that time) from "I just like this one better."
I don't presume to know what tangible form game design concepts might or should take. But I'm pretty sure that without some such representational system gaining general acceptance, designers will continue to be perceived as people taking money for doing something that anyone can do.
This is understandable. Other disciples have very tangible results, although just the same as design, some of those take longer than others to develop, develop fully or see in light of the coordinated production. In a sense, this is a problem for designers to illustrate, but this can also be seen as a call for non-designers to either gain more of a design perspective and imagine how it will play out, or simply trust.
Design has a few milestones that creep toward the design result. Practically speaking, the concept documents, or the GDD is the first stop in making design apparent to others. It's still rough, very difficult to evaluate and rather abstract when compared to the final product, but it should be a simplistic idea of the design result. The next stop is the prototype, where some of the rubber has met road, and you get something that's more accessible to others. It's not the same as the final result; still a rough representation of the design, but it should convey the intended feel by that point. And still, one has to 'see through' the prototype to get a sense of the final implementation.
What I'm getting at, as you allude to, is that the only thing that's most representative of the design is the final product, due to the sum of course corrections, input from all parties, the troubleshooting, tweaks, fixes, etc. all taking the final shape. But even then, one can look back and see the original design as only being the aim, while the final product is where the arrow landed.
And let's not forget the importance of thoughtful, comprehensive and consistent justification for design decisions; the key results of design work. "I like blue", pales in comparison to, "Blue against this orange backing makes this symbol pop out, which is what we need the player to notice as they ...".
I think this is true of all disciplines to some extent: it's hard to see an individual team member's true contribution in isolation. It takes some imagination (and helpful communication from the designer) to see what a design contribution means in the final result.
Depends on the type of game.... if your game counts on fidelity the skills of your artists and animators matter a heck of a lot. Design matters, generally speaking... but few games have excellent game designers and even fewer developers can develop hit games consistently. Take Epic games, the high point of their games design was UT2004 in terms of game mechanics/adding new interesting things to the genre.
Ever since they moved over to console they put out a lot of nice art but fresh stuff is lacking.
one solution is to learn how to rapidly prototype your ideas. never depend on a write-up to convey your idea. i've had a lot more success getting people on board with a hands on prototype than with a Word doc.
Superb article, agree 100% in your solution. We need to built communication and standards for the craft of design, and reject the idea that there's anything magical about it.
A tangential point: the *least* important part of design is coming up with good ideas. Strictly speaking it's not design at all, and as a lead designer myself I always include staff from other disciplines in brain-storming. You never know where the good idea will come from. But that's still not design. To design is, well, to design ... to craft something, given certain constraints, for an optimal purpose for a particular function or audience.
If you want to be a designer I strongly encourage youngsters to get *design* training, be it in user interface design, architecture, or even clothing design. There is plenty of great design training out there, just not at "game design" schools and courses.
As a designer, I think of my interactions with the other disciplines akin to a safari guide... you wouldn't think of traipsing through the jungle without one. Its my job to take you to all the best sites while keeping you away from the dangers.
Also, to aspiring designers, I encourage you to READ, and not just a handful of subjects... go outside your knowledge base and comfort zone... I've seen too many who know much about a couple of subjects, and nothing about the rest. The best thing you can have in your designer's tool kit is knowledge.
I couldn't agree more. I have been doing Game design for nearly 2 decades now and have seen the exact same lack of respect for game designers. I always use the line "Not everyone can code and not everyone can draw, but EVERYONE thinks they can design.". In fact I believe that game design is a natural skill just as much as coding or art is. Sure people can be taught programming or art, but they will never be as good as those who have a natural gift at those - Game design is no different. I have even learned through the years that like art, design has multiple disciplines as well. In art some are better at modeling, or texturing or animating. With design you have to core fields - Technical designers and Artistic designers. If you want a project to really shine pair an artistic designer with a technical designer. You will find they are able to collaborate well as they can feed off of each others strengths without conflicting as much as two same skilled designers.
At eRepublik lately we're doing our best to involve a lot the devs in the decisions and to encourage them to participate at finding solutions to the player's problems. With some help from us (communicating a lot) they are guided towards projects and together we analyze the results.
Sure that this works only for smaller changes and UI improvements and less on big changes or emergency situations.
An interesting read which I generally agree with but I have some points of difference:
"So often hopeful “designers” choose it as a path because they can’t be a programmer or artist, and not because they respect or understand the profession."
I can't but help taking that as an attack of sorts upon designers. I'm a designer, I started out as a designer not because I couldn't do art or code -- I actually have the aptitude for both -- but because I wanted to DESIGN.
"Given enough time and resource a bad designer can make a good design."
I think that is wrong. Given enough time and resources a GOOD designer can make a good design. A bad designer will get the project canned if no one else is willing and has the know how to keep it alive, and if it is a fee-for-service project, then it is usually the publisher that will drive the design anyway -- the designer is more of a documentist.
"Once a design is implemented and tangible, most people can see if A is better than B."
Not really, most people can see how their current favorite game they are playing is better than B, but, not how B fails to deliver on the vision (A) of the title. Which I think is part of the point the author was trying to make.
"Accidental design, or advancing a design through experimentation, requires very little design skill but a lot of resource."
Yes and no. I does require a lot of resources, money and time. But whether anything of quality is delivered in the end is still dependent on other factors, like design know-how -- being able to tell that what you have is worth releasing and not a pile of...
A good example of this is probably Duke Nukem Forever. Also, in most if not all cases -- even if it sells well -- they could have developed a higher quality title for less and sooner with a competent design lead who had a strong vision that they were confident in.
"'Proving a good design premise is like trying to convince someone a song is good only with sheet music.' That being said, trying to convince someone without design knowledge of a complex problem and solution without implementation is tough. Though the onus to convince people is on us as designers. Sadly many bad designers, instead of solving this, use this as camouflage to hide their incompetence."
I'm just going to agree with that, however, I'd like to stress that it's not only the "designers" that use this tactic, but also designers with a coding and art background -- then there are the "producer" types who have their own short comings.
"Now I don’t know the perfect solution, but I would suggest as an industry we need to learn sheet music and conventions by which we can discuss problems. A process that is already happening but slowly. The problem is many poor designers keep rallying against these conventions or building of hard theory basis. They keep rallying against conventions and theory, expressing their “individuality” or “creativity” or some other fluffy concept as a defense."
I kind of agree, however, by "sheet music" and based on the background of the author of this post, I'm assuming this has to do more with software engineering / methodologies. Specifically the current silver bullet: Agile.
My problem with this approach is not that it can't help, it just fails to realize that software development is not game development. Software requires functional / usable features to allow users to be productive so that they can get their work done. Games require more than this as game development is actually an entertainment industry. As an example Stormrise can be functionally used but is a real pain to play.
The quality levels required from each "experience" are quite different and the scope of what they need and cover is also different -- one is more "creative" than the other in an artistic sense. Put simply, what I will put up with in order to get my job done is not what I would put up with from a game I just spent A$110 (U$60) on. More likely, I'll take it back to EBGames and get my money back if I actually bothered to buy it in the first place.
Getting back to the article's point of "lack of respect" for designers, I can't help but feel that designers are more often than not a scapegoat for when a project goes wrong. Whether anyone says it aloud or not. At the end of the day, games are always going to be interactive, and interactivity is going to need to be coded. And when I look at some failed projects, I can't help but suspect that the problem doesn't necessarily always lie with the design team and their ability to design and communicate that design.
There isn't much I could add, but here's my two cents.
Firstly, I think a big problem with design (and art) is that there really are no truly objective criteria. You can say a pirate ship fits a given game better than a castle, but you can't say pirate ships are prettier than castles. This becomes an issue when there is a technical problem, such as balancing, and rather than keeping the solution focused on balancing, some idiot insists on changing the pace (which cannot be argued about, because it's a matter of taste). You cannot talk them out of it. You could talk them out of poor balancing changes, which is exactly why they avoid the topic.
Secondly, I think it's going to get better. The market is becoming more egalitarian and less focused on blockbusters. This has two results: good production values are getting cheaper (at least in the indie and mobile segments), and the market has become oversaturated. In order to succeed, you're going to have to differentiate yourself from the other 100.000 games in your virtual store, and it's only going to be possible with unique design. The good thing is, bad designers can get all fluffy, but they cannot innovate, even by accident. That is: you can have a "good idea" accidentally, but innovation takes a dozen "good ideas" in a row, which is statistically unlikely.
Other design fields, like production design, struggle with the exact same issue. Design Thinking was proposed a little while back as the means to educate the culture designer's work with; the idea being that with a culture that was steeped in thinking about design in similar ways as designers, it would allow for more transparency, greater understanding across the board and more collaborative input from all parties working with the designer. Things move in cycles, and by now, many in those design professions have begun to reject Design Thinking, even rebelling against the idea entirely, due to the way Design Thinking was touted as a panacea to business types; as a means to replace designers. :
But, the philosophy still holds merit. Design Thinking is a way of communicating to those the designer works with which is primarily inclusive. When you include people with what you're doing, even if you stick to your guns in the end, you're engaged in an exchange that serves to dispel the myths that design is arbitrary, irrelevant or synonymous with opinion. This tactic is valuable in terms of gaining understanding, respect and ultimately, trust. And as you allude to, without the trust (that design is a profession/field of study, that the designer understands that profession/field of study, that design work can improve value, etc.) the designer's job can be diffused, distracted or derailed.
I agree, there's been overall progress in this, but as you point out, there are so many reasons for the layman to assume the worst when working with us. I believe it's best to keep including those who are the most suspicious, let them work out some of the problems themselves, share solutions, apply best practices and keep it collaborative.
The trouble with design, as Claire points out, is that -- unlike other skilled creative activities -- there's no clear tangible implementation component to a design. Art has images; audio has sounds; programming has code; design has... what? That lack of a tangible implementation component means there's no simple/obvious way to determine whether a design is good or bad. And that is what allows non-designers to perceive design as subjective, as merely a matter of personal taste that anyone can express.
For design (and designers) to be able to earn the same level of respect as programmers and audio/art specialists, design needs a visible form of representation that allows a skilled practitioner to create effective designs and to determine the level of effectiveness of competing designs.
As long as design evaluation is an abstract matter of someone asserting that one design is good while another is not, then even if that person is a naturally gifted and professionally experienced designer of complex systems, their output is indistinguishable (at that time) from "I just like this one better."
I don't presume to know what tangible form game design concepts might or should take. But I'm pretty sure that without some such representational system gaining general acceptance, designers will continue to be perceived as people taking money for doing something that anyone can do.
Design has a few milestones that creep toward the design result. Practically speaking, the concept documents, or the GDD is the first stop in making design apparent to others. It's still rough, very difficult to evaluate and rather abstract when compared to the final product, but it should be a simplistic idea of the design result. The next stop is the prototype, where some of the rubber has met road, and you get something that's more accessible to others. It's not the same as the final result; still a rough representation of the design, but it should convey the intended feel by that point. And still, one has to 'see through' the prototype to get a sense of the final implementation.
What I'm getting at, as you allude to, is that the only thing that's most representative of the design is the final product, due to the sum of course corrections, input from all parties, the troubleshooting, tweaks, fixes, etc. all taking the final shape. But even then, one can look back and see the original design as only being the aim, while the final product is where the arrow landed.
And let's not forget the importance of thoughtful, comprehensive and consistent justification for design decisions; the key results of design work. "I like blue", pales in comparison to, "Blue against this orange backing makes this symbol pop out, which is what we need the player to notice as they ...".
I think this is true of all disciplines to some extent: it's hard to see an individual team member's true contribution in isolation. It takes some imagination (and helpful communication from the designer) to see what a design contribution means in the final result.
Excellent contributions. Thank you very much, guys! :)
Ever since they moved over to console they put out a lot of nice art but fresh stuff is lacking.
A tangential point: the *least* important part of design is coming up with good ideas. Strictly speaking it's not design at all, and as a lead designer myself I always include staff from other disciplines in brain-storming. You never know where the good idea will come from. But that's still not design. To design is, well, to design ... to craft something, given certain constraints, for an optimal purpose for a particular function or audience.
If you want to be a designer I strongly encourage youngsters to get *design* training, be it in user interface design, architecture, or even clothing design. There is plenty of great design training out there, just not at "game design" schools and courses.
Also, to aspiring designers, I encourage you to READ, and not just a handful of subjects... go outside your knowledge base and comfort zone... I've seen too many who know much about a couple of subjects, and nothing about the rest. The best thing you can have in your designer's tool kit is knowledge.
Sure that this works only for smaller changes and UI improvements and less on big changes or emergency situations.
"So often hopeful “designers” choose it as a path because they can’t be a programmer or artist, and not because they respect or understand the profession."
I can't but help taking that as an attack of sorts upon designers. I'm a designer, I started out as a designer not because I couldn't do art or code -- I actually have the aptitude for both -- but because I wanted to DESIGN.
"Given enough time and resource a bad designer can make a good design."
I think that is wrong. Given enough time and resources a GOOD designer can make a good design. A bad designer will get the project canned if no one else is willing and has the know how to keep it alive, and if it is a fee-for-service project, then it is usually the publisher that will drive the design anyway -- the designer is more of a documentist.
"Once a design is implemented and tangible, most people can see if A is better than B."
Not really, most people can see how their current favorite game they are playing is better than B, but, not how B fails to deliver on the vision (A) of the title. Which I think is part of the point the author was trying to make.
"Accidental design, or advancing a design through experimentation, requires very little design skill but a lot of resource."
Yes and no. I does require a lot of resources, money and time. But whether anything of quality is delivered in the end is still dependent on other factors, like design know-how -- being able to tell that what you have is worth releasing and not a pile of...
A good example of this is probably Duke Nukem Forever. Also, in most if not all cases -- even if it sells well -- they could have developed a higher quality title for less and sooner with a competent design lead who had a strong vision that they were confident in.
"'Proving a good design premise is like trying to convince someone a song is good only with sheet music.' That being said, trying to convince someone without design knowledge of a complex problem and solution without implementation is tough. Though the onus to convince people is on us as designers. Sadly many bad designers, instead of solving this, use this as camouflage to hide their incompetence."
I'm just going to agree with that, however, I'd like to stress that it's not only the "designers" that use this tactic, but also designers with a coding and art background -- then there are the "producer" types who have their own short comings.
"Now I don’t know the perfect solution, but I would suggest as an industry we need to learn sheet music and conventions by which we can discuss problems. A process that is already happening but slowly. The problem is many poor designers keep rallying against these conventions or building of hard theory basis. They keep rallying against conventions and theory, expressing their “individuality” or “creativity” or some other fluffy concept as a defense."
I kind of agree, however, by "sheet music" and based on the background of the author of this post, I'm assuming this has to do more with software engineering / methodologies. Specifically the current silver bullet: Agile.
My problem with this approach is not that it can't help, it just fails to realize that software development is not game development. Software requires functional / usable features to allow users to be productive so that they can get their work done. Games require more than this as game development is actually an entertainment industry. As an example Stormrise can be functionally used but is a real pain to play.
The quality levels required from each "experience" are quite different and the scope of what they need and cover is also different -- one is more "creative" than the other in an artistic sense. Put simply, what I will put up with in order to get my job done is not what I would put up with from a game I just spent A$110 (U$60) on. More likely, I'll take it back to EBGames and get my money back if I actually bothered to buy it in the first place.
Getting back to the article's point of "lack of respect" for designers, I can't help but feel that designers are more often than not a scapegoat for when a project goes wrong. Whether anyone says it aloud or not. At the end of the day, games are always going to be interactive, and interactivity is going to need to be coded. And when I look at some failed projects, I can't help but suspect that the problem doesn't necessarily always lie with the design team and their ability to design and communicate that design.