Good Ideas make for Bad Designers — (Part 1 or 3)
A love letter to mistakes.
A few years ago, when testing a prototype made during a jam by a group of coworkers, I noted the game was cool but had some pacing issues. One of the programmers then noted that he wished they had a designer on the team. To which another instantly interjected, «I don’t see why; we had a lot of ideas by ourselves.»
Okay, so, first of all, ouch, obviously. Surely designers do more for a project than just having ideas and writing them down into documents that no one wants to read, right? …right?
This perception of the designer's role (having ideas) is quite common, even among aspiring and young designers. As a matter of fact, it is one I have held for years. One that made my job more difficult every time I did. And yet, I still happen to be drawn to it, to doubt myself and others around me based on this belief. So I’m writing this to convince myself. Convince myself that this belief is indeed false, misguided, and counterproductive. And if I’m lucky, this might convince a few people who might need to hear it, too.
In this writing, I’ll discuss my experience as a Game Designer, but I believe this applies to all forms of design and creation more generally. Ideas are a part of every creative activity and are commonly perceived as complementary to execution. And it is most generally accepted that execution is the most determinant part of every creation.
And yet, the notion of good and bad ideas and their role in design is still as present as ever. So why do we still believe this?
Every story needs a hero.
Games are great (very controversial statement, I know). When we play a game, especially one that moves us, one that makes us want to become a designer ourselves even, we see the final product, the destination. We do not see the challenges, changes, compromises, and failures that happened during the execution. The best experiences feel complete, polished, and made of organically connected systems and features. Everything is as it should be, and you wouldn’t want it any other way. You couldn’t even imagine it any differently, in fact.
So it makes sense to see the final product as the embodiment of an idea, as the final form of a concept that was as organically connected. But I think there is another reason for this belief: Those games are often presented as the materialization of one man’s genius plan.
And honestly, it is a compelling narrative.
Miyamoto, Miyazaki, Kojima, Spector, Notch, Ueda, Bleszinski, Molyneux… we all have different references, but I'm sure you're familiar with at least some of those names, if not all. They’re often celebrated as geniuses, superstars, or both. The one person who defines a game, imagines it, and whose ideas can make or break a project. They are role models for aspiring designers.
Although those people's titles are more often Game Director, or Creative Director than Designer, design is indeed at least part of their job, and it is how we see it anyway. We see them as the people who pitch, who have THE ideas, who envision what the game should be about and how it should be. We see the game as the materialization of their vision and their vision only.
Of course, this is not unique to games; the lone genius archetype is a common and celebrated trope in science and in popular media: Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Sherlock Holmes, Tony Stark, Rick Sanchez… fictitious or not, they set an example for what skilled persons look and act like.
- This might become problematic later.
And that’s for this exact reason that it might come as a shock to some to learn that it’s entirely bullshit :)
This story is bullshit.
During my many years as a game designer, even during my three years as lead game designer, I never had ideas so great that they worked on the first try. I never came up with concepts that had exactly the impact I thought they’d have. Things never clicked as I thought they would.
Even more revealing, the most successful gameplays I’ve worked on are generally the ones I had fewer ideas for, the ones that had the most input from other team members, designers, as well as programmers, artists, and testers alike.
But maybe that’s just me, right? Maybe I’m not the best designer; maybe I’m the odd one out here. Again, ouch, but it’s an entirely fair point to make. But if it is all about the subject and not execution… how do we explain Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars?
SARPBC vs. Rocket League
If I were to ask you if “A soccer game with cars” is a good idea, most people today would answer yes, I’m sure, because Rocket League exists and exposed to the world how fun it can be. But it wasn’t always the case.
Sometime in 2009, SARPBC (I’m not saying the name in its entirety again), a game based on the exact same idea released and was met with… not that much positive attention. Gamespot, in their review of the game, gave it a 6/10 and declared: “Playing soccer with cars isn’t all that fun”.
Of course, it became clear six years later that the problem wasn’t the idea of playing soccer with cars but its execution, when Gamespot would then report “the promising concept of combining two wonderful things — cars and soccer — is equally magnificent in execution” and give Rocket League a 9/10.
Oh, and just so we’re clear that it is indeed the exact same idea being executed on both attempts, Psyonix, the studio behind Rocket League, is also responsible for SARPBC six years earlier. They executed the idea, failed, learned from their mistakes, and tried again, this time to great success.
Okay, so this doesn’t seem to be just me. Execution is indeed a big part of it. But this is the work of an entire team; maybe the idea wasn’t as well formed the first time they tried. And the studio doesn’t have any genius superstar at its head, so this doesn’t say anything about the famous designers we cited earlier. Yet.
Warren Spector and Deus Ex
Warren Spector is often considered the father of Immersive Sim games. A genre that is, without a doubt, my favorite. No need then to say how highly I regard the work of Mr. Spector, especially for the game that pushed the genre to where it is today: Deus Ex.
Immersive Simulation is a genre centered entirely around player agency, and Deus Ex is the game that first drafted the current formula combining gameplays for Sneaking, Shooting, or Talking your way through most situations the game throws at you (as well as box stacking, a whole lot of box stacking).
The combination of gameplay and systems in the game is something Warren Spector seemingly always believed in, and yet he makes no secret about the fact that it took several iterations to bring the game to where it is now. He talked extensively about the process of bringing the game to life at a GDC Conference he gave in 2017.
“By September, we were done. Except we weren’t. The game was not good enough; it wasn’t ready to ship. […] We brought real people to play the game; I call this particular milestone the wow those missions suck milestone. We had a lot of work to do.”
He really hammers this point, saying:
“Be open to change. Anybody who tells you that when you get off pre-production, you’ve got a script and nothing changes has never made a game, right?”
The team remained focused on their objectives and the ideas the game was based on but used it as a compass and not as strict guidelines. The designer says of the final product: “Three years later, here it was! Every single detail had changed, but in spirit, it was exactly the game I was hoping to make.”
Yet again, it was a work that took many iterations to make the idea it was based on viable and satisfying to engage with. But video games are demanding productions; they require an entire team, a serious budget, and operate on tight planning. So obviously, compromises have to be made, and with several people participating in the game creation, the final product naturally reflects those different points of view even slightly. What about designers who work alone? What about board game designers?
Donald X. Vaccarino and Dominion
Apart from the artists who often join the project, usually after the game is already proven to work, board game designers often work alone on their project. Therefore, the success of their game must surely reflect the quality of their ideas.
And talking about success, even among board game designers, Donald X. Vaccarino is an anomaly. He designed two games, Kingdom Builder and Dominion, both of which received the highly regarded Spiele Des Jahres price (for best game of the year), and the latter of which did nothing less than summon the entire deck-building genre into existence.
Released in 2008, Dominion is minimalist, has depth, and entirely relies on its deck-building mechanic: using card effects to obtain new cards, thus gaining new options, to obtain more cards again, and this each turn. This bite-size complexity addition to the game as it goes on is so brilliant and self-contained that it has appeared in hundreds if not thousands of other games since its release. The fact that no one seemingly thought of it before its inception and it has since been declined and used in so many games surely means the designer had this brilliant idea of a mechanic as it is. True lightning in a bottle.
This is exactly what Gabe Barett tries to find out in his book Board Game Design Advice from the Best in the World. In the interview with Mr. Vaccarino, he opens with this simple question: What is the favorite mistake the designer ever made?
And predictably, the answer is… Dominion… wait, what?
So apparently, while designing a game called Spirit Warriors II, he imagined a combat system in which a deck of cards represented each hero's actions. He iterated on the system, wanting the heroes to get better with time. So he changed it so that when the heroes leveled up, they could add better cards to their decks. However, playtests showed the game was too slow and complex for the players to enjoy, but the leveling part was fun. So that’s the only part he kept and reworked it into the game we know today as Dominion.
So not only was the initial idea not that brilliant or special, it wasn’t even… fun. Again, what turned it into the amazing experience we know and love today was making a mistake, having people test it, acknowledging it, and working to fix it and make it the best it could be.
Ultimately, this seems to be the real connection between all those games rather than the type of idea they’re based on.
Ideas are easy.
And it makes sense when we think about it. Because that’s what ideas are; they’re goals, destinations we ought to reach, objectives we set for ourselves and the game, but they do say nothing about how to get there. They’re very basic and vague concepts, and they only lead to what can be described as first drafts. And to quote Ernest Hemingway: “The first draft of anything is shit.”
Ernest Hemingway might not have been a game designer (that we know of), but he‘s not the only one to express this opinion. Just to throw more authoritative arguments, Jamey Stegmaier, designer of Scythe and Viticulture, said (still in Board Game Design Advice ): “Don’t consider a game designed until you’ve playtested and iterated dozens of times. […] I thought that “designing a game” was thinking of an idea, writing out the rules, [and] creating a prototype […] I wish I had realized that the real work in designing a game is what follows that first prototype.”
To circle back around, during the conference, Warren Spector declared about having to shelve his initial ideas for Deus Ex that “Ideas are easy. Anybody that tells you that ideas are hard or you should hold on to your ideas because they’re so amazing and valuable is kinda nuts.”
Ideas are tools; they can be helpful by giving the designer and the team a direction they’re working toward, but they carry no intrinsic values on their own. Some ideas will inevitably be easier to turn into functional products than others, but the goal is never to have the idea work! It is to create the intended experience for the players, no matter how, no matter based on what ideas. Ideas are expendables; they’re just insights for potential solutions that might work and might have the expected effect. It makes no sense to value them more than the final experience, to give them more attention than the problems they come with.
It’s based on those reasons and looking at those examples, among others, that I am today absolutely convinced that this story is indeed nothing more than a myth. That a designer's role is not to have ideas and that ideas are not responsible for the success of a project.
And it doesn’t surprise me this much, to be perfectly honest. Myths are everywhere, in all parts of our lives, and especially around activities that summon the kind of passion and fantasies games do. As we said, they make for good stories. And they can still carry meaning, lessons, and useful insights.
But not this myth, unfortunately. I am convinced this belief is actually harmful. Harmful to designers, the other team members, the project, and even the industry and all the people who are a part of it.
And I’ll explain more specifically why in part 2 of this essay.
