Good Ideas make for Bad Designers — (Part 3 of 3)
A love letter to the team and to heist movies (it’s related, I promise).
Game development is highly collaborative and requires the work of many people. As the industry grows, it is no longer rare to see flagship projects combining the efforts of thousands of people. Despite this, we still have a tendency to see those creations as the work of just one or a few persons.
I’ve already discussed why I think this perception is both false and harmful to the people in the industry (in part 1 and part 2). And while I think neglecting people’s contribution is a big problem, overestimating the contribution of a few, no matter how skilled and experienced they might be, is just as problematic.
And it often ends up being bad for the game and the player experience as well.
Stories about lone geniuses do not end well.
As I previously explained, Warren Spector is often considered the father of Immersive Sim genre, just like Peter Molyneux is considered the father of God Games. Similarly, Cliff Bleszinski, while not considered its father, is recognized for the immense influence he had on the shooter genre due to his work on the Unreal and Gears of War series.
I take the time to reinstate those facts because despite being seen as living legends in their respective domains, they also have another point in common: Their latest additions to those very genres were all massive failures.
Godus is a god game developed by 22Cans, a studio founded by Peter Molyneux. Initially teased by Molyneux himself as “the ultimate god game”, the project launched to disastrous reviews from players and critics alike. In this extensive article, Kotaku journalist Nathan Grayson talked with the designer and many members of the team and cites a lack of communication and a rebuttal of feedback provided both by players and the team as a reason for the project’s failure.
Underworld Ascendent is an Immersive Sim game greenlit on Kickstarter, led by several industry veterans, among which Warren Spector has been one of the most celebrated. But despite those obviously talented people’s presence on the project, it has, for lack of kinder words, been a mess (with all due love and respect). While we have no specific insights into how development went, the game’s bizarre decisions and lack of clarity in its features seem to indicate that it didn’t benefit from much room to receive feedback and iterate on its many problems.
LawBreakers is the latest and final creation of the studio Boss Key Production before it closed its doors in 2018. The studio was co-founded by Cliff Bleszinski and developed the game as a shooter game designed to offer a more gritty and realistic competitor on the hero shooter market. Despite being quite aggressively marketed by Cliff himself during its development, the game wasn’t met with the expected success, leading to the retirement of Cliff from the game industry and the closure of the studio.
While many still consider the game good if quite generic, it didn’t convince the majority of players. And while I do not have any insights on the development on this project, I can’t help but wonder in what measure the project leaders were ready to acknowledge problems, regarding statements made after the game failure claiming the players rooted for the game to fail, or that it was too progressist to succeed (???).
So what’s happening here? If the success of those games relied exclusively on the genius of those designers and the quality of their ideas, they should have worked here as well, right? Well, those games have another thing in common, I believe: they were all promoted for the personalities they were the product of rather than for their process, teams, or proven concepts. Ignoring problems is about the only truly unforgiving mistake you can make in this industry.
As many heroes as there are stories.
In his video Bloodborne is Genius, and here’s why, HBomberGuy talks about the gameplay improvements between Dark Souls and Bloodborne. And when talking about a specific point, he describes how he envisions the creative process, saying: “Can you imagine being in the room when Hidetaka Miyazaki was looking at playtest footage from the previous games and coming up with the concept for Bloodborne, and he was like — take out the shields”. In the video (which is otherwise fantastic, and you should watch it), this is just a way to illustrate a point. But it depicts the identification of the problem and the proposition made to solve it, all made by one man: Game Director Hidetaka Miyazaki. It also imagines the solution as instantly functional without requiring tests, iterations, and adjustments.
And this is indeed how we often imagine game creations. This falls in the availability heuristic, I believe. When we imagine creation, the famous faces and names we associate with it are the first to come to mind. And so we imagine those people being responsible for the most decisive inputs of the project. But like any other bias, just because it comes intuitively doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t challenge this intuition or that this is an accurate representation.
Directors are responsible for defining the vision for the game and its global direction, but because of this, they have to be aware of the design, the art direction, the engine limitations, testers’ availability, budget, time, and so much more. Simply put, they just do not have the time or mind resources to micro-manage each design problem. And it’s fine because it’s not their role. On the other hand, testers, designers, and other specialized roles can focus entirely on their tasks; therefore, they are, in fact, often the ones coming up with the solutions. But they are not the ones we tend to think about.
And this can go pretty far. I’ve heard people argue that Dark Souls 2 shouldn’t be considered as part of the Dark Souls series because Hidetaka Miyazaki did not direct it, and some even went as far as to say it shouldn’t be played for this exact reason. Dismissing in the process the work of the many people who gave all they had to the game as nothing more than worthless.
One of the more accurate and insightful talks I’ve seen on this process is a GDC conference given by different members of Santa Monica Studio on their work on the latest God of War games. In his conference, Game Director Cory Barlog describes his own job as “pitching and doubting”, and explains how he defined the direction he wanted to take the game in. You can then see how the combat designers, level designers, animators, and others, had to work together to make those ideas work. This conference by Jason McDonald, Lead Gameplay Designer on the project, is particularly explicit on how challenging those ideas were and how the team had to iterate and rethink their approach to find a working formula.
This is also echoed by Warren Spector. In his GDC speech, he also talks about the importance of the team, saying of the team leads on Deus Ex: “Those guys do not get enough credits for the creative aspects of the game, and the fact that we shipped at all”. He says Deus Ex was based on the idea of both Immersive Simulation and Shared Authorship as a collaboration between developers and players. But this idea of Shared Authorship also goes for the team, as he explains that the project evolved directly because of the persons involved: “Why did things change? Well, we had new people join the team; they had new ideas”. He explains how his work was more about driving the direction the different teams and individuals worked toward and balancing their different inputs.
Warren Spector has been one of the most outspoken people in the industry about this, in a 2001 interview with IGN, he famously declared: “There’s a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person”. As the article proceeds to credit him as sole creator of both Thief, and Deus Ex… in order to prove his point, I assume.
This shared vision and direction is something he experienced firsthand as Producer on Thief when he asked the teams to change the game to make a viable alternative to sneaking, and they refused because it went against the direction of the game. And he says: “For this game, I believe they were right to tell me no”.
One of my lead designers once described the process of iterating on the game as diamond polishing. It is just a shiny rock until you remove imperfections and smooth its edges, one face at a time, so only the best parts remain. And this takes many people with many skills, not just those who own the mines.
Also, just like ideas, diamonds are not that rare or special, in fact. Their value and rarity have been artificially inflated by companies to make fortunes out of the work of people barely paid for it.
But isn’t it a compelling metaphor?
And it might be what’s missing here, right? A compelling narrative.
What’s the lesson here? No one is a genius; you will inevitably fail and need to ask for help because success is never entirely in your hands. It depends on the team, on the time and budget you have, and somehow on luck, too.
This just doesn’t make for a great story.
Or does it?
Because there’s a type of story that is at least as celebrated as the ones about lone geniuses. One that shares many similarities with what we’ve discussed so far and still manages to be inspiring and move people. And I’m now going to argue that this is the type of narrative we should aspire to (as well as trying to justify spending so much time consuming those stories).
This was a Heist story all along.
I might not be able to kill this myth outright, but I can propose another narrative to try and replace it! So I’m now gonna argue that stories such as the Ocean’s Eleven, La Casa de Papel, Mission Impossible, or the Fast and Furious series all give interesting lessons for how we should think about game development.
Side note — You might be arguing that Mission Impossible or Fast and Furious movies are not heist movies, as they are not about heists, and it’s okay, but you’re wrong.
1. It’s about the team
The first step of all good heist movies is about one thing: Bringing together the right team for the right job.
We do not just follow one lone wolf who doesn’t need anyone and can solve every situation; instead, we follow a diverse cast of characters who all have different skills and have to rely on each other to survive and succeed.
And you might note that even in heist movies, among all those different characters, the leading one is often still the archetype of a genius who comes up with the plan. And while it’s sometimes true, yes, those stories still have some major differences.
The first one is the plan is often decided or at least challenged by the team; they all have a role to play in it, and it is their combined skill and trust for each other abilities that bring success.
And the reason why the team and the trust they put in one another is so important is the second difference:
2. The plan always fails
Failure, unpredictability, and overcoming challenges are a part of every good heist.
Improvisation, compromises, relying on each other expertise to identify new options as the problems arise, one after another. You won’t have the time nor the resources to make the plan work as it is without changes, so there’s only one way to go about it:
3. Grab what you can before time runs out
There is no such thing as a perfect heist. Just like there is no such thing as a perfect design or a perfect game. You set an objective for your team, and you make the most of the time and budget you have to bring the project to as much quality as possible until it is released.
If you set your expectations on only releasing a “perfect” project, one that matches exactly the ideas you had for it, you’ll never release anything, or worse, you’ll be forced to release something in a stage that is far from complete. And there is simply no going back from that.
So keep what you need, cut what is slowing you down, and make sure you move forward.
Conclusion
It’s been a long journey (way too long — I’m sorry, I swear I tried), and at the end of it all, I want to remember and leave you with this:
Anyone can have ideas. Not just designers. And it is not the job of the designer to have ideas.
A good designer sees those ideas as what they are: tools. To solve problems. Facing the problems and failures posed by those ideas does not make us bad designers; it is what makes us designers.
Because in the end, it’s not about being a lone genius, and it’s not about being better than the others or being the one whose idea works. In the end, only one thing matters…
Credits here
(because of course, and like everything, I couldn’t have done this without the work and help of many other people)
