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Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened to Game Design?)

blog.kylekukshtel.com

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Re: Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened to Game Design?)

#71

Post by drittich »

gilbetron wrote: post #51

What I'm tired of is articles like these that try to make out the video game development past as some artistic endeavor, when it was almost entirely geeks fucking around with things they found fun. There is far more "art" in games these days, which I think is cool. We have a lot more innovation and design exploration, it's just that the major categories have been explored heavily. Plus people that want innovation hav…

> it was almost entirely geeks fucking around with things they found fun

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think many artists would find this fits quite well as a definition of an artist, in process if not in intent.

Re: Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened to Game Design?)

#72

Post by cableshaft »

meheleventyone wrote: post #34
ajmurmann wrote: post #8

Sorry, I lost patience with the article and its premise about halfway through. Sure many AAA titles are cookie cutter and remakes now. I'd still claim that there hardly ever was a better time for video games. If you only focus on AAA that's your mistake. That said, Nintendo continues to produce innovative games. Breath of the Wild of course sticks out here. We continue to see other phenomenal games like Outer Wilds o…

The author is an indie game dev so I'm pretty sure they're aware of the segment and whilst it doesn't mention indie games until the footnotes I think he intends the critique to extend to that space as well. At least that was my reading of the whole thing from the perspective of being a game developer myself. Although I also know the broader context from the discussions on gamedev twitter over the past week or so. The…

We're visual creatures. Aesthetics sells games.

Games without good visuals/design can sell, but there's not a ton of games out there with ugly/sloppy graphics that become hits (they do exist, sometimes it's kind of the point of the game).

So if you don't place a high priority on aesthetics, you're taking a risk in your game not finding an audience. And I'm saying this as someone who designs games with a mechanics-first mindset.

The board game industry is very aware of this, and very few publishers skimp on game aesthetics nowadays.

When there's hundreds of thousands of both great and aesthetically pleasing games out there people could be playing, why should they waste time playing a game that doesn't look good to them?

Re: Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened to Game Design?)

#73

Post by meheleventyone »

ajmurmann wrote: post #57
meheleventyone wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is an indie game dev so I'm pretty sure they're aware of the segment and whilst it doesn't mention indie games until the footnotes I think he intends the critique to extend to that space as well. At least that was my reading of the whole thing from the perspective of being a game developer myself. Although I also know the broader context from the discussions on gamedev twitter over the past week or so. The…

> The author is an indie game dev I wonder if this where the different perspective comes from. As a consumer I don't care very much if 95% of what the industry producers it's boring, not innovative or otherwise bad as long as there are enough games that fill my needs. Right now there is a unbelievable amount of games being released. As an adult with a job who has a variety of interests, I can't even play a fraction o…

Part of the whole reason for the homogenization that comes with commodification is the goal of delivering something that maximizes the reach of the product. So you get these intense markets full of choice that is appealing broadly to consumers if not very differentiated. Hence things like competition based on aesthetics, branding and fandom versus core product differences. In games this leads there to be a niche for some innovation but it's not a very sustainable one for the developers and the market as a whole is oriented against it. Which is obviously okay for the average individual consumer but not necessarily great or health for the medium itself.

So in a long winded way I agree this is something that you'll care more about the more you care about the practice of game design itself.

Re: Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened to Game Design?)

#74

Post by meheleventyone »

cableshaft wrote: post #72
meheleventyone wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is an indie game dev so I'm pretty sure they're aware of the segment and whilst it doesn't mention indie games until the footnotes I think he intends the critique to extend to that space as well. At least that was my reading of the whole thing from the perspective of being a game developer myself. Although I also know the broader context from the discussions on gamedev twitter over the past week or so. The…

We're visual creatures. Aesthetics sells games. Games without good visuals/design can sell, but there's not a ton of games out there with ugly/sloppy graphics that become hits (they do exist, sometimes it's kind of the point of the game). So if you don't place a high priority on aesthetics, you're taking a risk in your game not finding an audience. And I'm saying this as someone who designs games with a mechanics-fir…

You're arguing against something that hasn't been said. Nothing in that statement says that aesthetic progressivism is a bad thing just that privileging it over design progressivism is. In particular you should look at the authors game Cantata because it's ludicrously obvious that they care about aesthetics.

Re: Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened to Game Design?)

#75

Post by kkukshtel »

dgb23 wrote: post #69
kkukshtel wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I'm an indie strategy game dev ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/690370/Cantata/ ) and am well aware of the full scope of the space of games (used to also be a game journo, and actively do a games podcast where we play most everything https://www.badendpodcast.com ). I want to be clear that my post isn't trying to be a Gamer and complain about "mOnEy gRUbbIng pUBLisheRs!!!!!!" — it's trying to look at the eco…

I had a quick look at your game and it is the type of thing I'm interested in. Also I like the aesthetics of it. Thank you for sharing! I also think it is perfectly OK to have strong opinions about games. It is incredibly subjective and a matter of taste and art. For example strategy games are my "first love" so to speak, think old Maxis games, WC1/2, StarCraft, Myth, Creatures, Startopia, NetStorm, Caesar2, Alpha Ce…

As I've gotten older I definitely gravitated towards strategy games because they are often fundamentally about "player creativity". You aren't so much churning through content all the time and instead are making lots of small decisions that affect larger outcomes.

Re: Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened to Game Design?)

#76

Post by AlexandrB »

drittich wrote: post #71
gilbetron wrote: post #51

What I'm tired of is articles like these that try to make out the video game development past as some artistic endeavor, when it was almost entirely geeks fucking around with things they found fun. There is far more "art" in games these days, which I think is cool. We have a lot more innovation and design exploration, it's just that the major categories have been explored heavily. Plus people that want innovation hav…

> it was almost entirely geeks fucking around with things they found fun I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think many artists would find this fits quite well as a definition of an artist, in process if not in intent.

Agreed. "Fucking around" with music/movies/games/images is where the new ideas come from. Once you have an audience you need to satisfy you're locked in to their existing pre-conceptions of what "good" is unless you're very brave.

Re: Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened to Game Design?)

#77

Post by AlexandrB »

gilbetron wrote: post #51

What I'm tired of is articles like these that try to make out the video game development past as some artistic endeavor, when it was almost entirely geeks fucking around with things they found fun. There is far more "art" in games these days, which I think is cool. We have a lot more innovation and design exploration, it's just that the major categories have been explored heavily. Plus people that want innovation hav…

> We have a lot more innovation and design exploration, it's just that the major categories have been explored heavily.

The RTS genre is a perfect counter-example because RTSes arguably peaked with Homeworld in 1999 and since then we have had nothing but sequels and re-treads of fundamentally the same concepts[1]. We went from a game that had fully three-dimensional battlefields and complex formations to, basically, rehashes of StarCraft/Warcraft with differing mixes of micro/macro. There have been a few[2] cool indie games, but the concepts they presented never gained traction in the mainstream.

With mobile gaming on the rise, the genre seems to be devolving to Clash Royale-likes.

[1] Honorable mentions for Company of Heroes (2006), which had a lot of cool ideas as well.

[2] http://www.achrongame.com/site/

Re: Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened to Game Design?)

#78

Post by michaelbuckbee »

kkukshtel wrote: post #67
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #35

The author and a lot of other people in this thread seem wistful for the days where game design was a lot more weird and experimental and are pointing to the indie game scene but I have an alternate suggestion: try Roblox. Roblox is (rightly considered) to be a gaming platform for young kids but its unique mix of: - portable identities/avatars/friends - easy to use dev tools - platform distribution - built in multi-p…

Someone else mentioned this on Twitter, but in my experience with Roblox, its easy-to-use creation tools lend themselves more to making copycat, free versions of top games rather than introducing new genres. Aka a kid wants to play a battle royale but can't buy PUBG / Apex / Cod (and ESRB rating stuff), they will instead channel that desire to something the Roblox dev community will happily leverage. What made things…

It's definitely a bit of a copy cat wild west with respect to copyright, but even there there's interesting things. Something I noticed is that almost ever big well known game title has a "tycoon" version of it created in Roblox. Ala "Among Us Tycoon", partially this is just for monetization but often times it's a fundamental change to the gameplay.

Re: Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened to Game Design?)

#79

Post by Aerroon »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #41
Aerroon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For instance, it's a truism that AAA studios that are dominating the market, like big Hollywood studios, must trend towards increasingly reliably safe blockbuster titles to make back their immense budgets. And yet there are still plenty of indie studios today. Indie gaming is stronger than ever. And yet why the consolidation into fewer and less innovative/interesting forms? I think the problem is the minimum cost o…

Making games has a very low cost. In fact, a lot of successes in the beginning of the game industry were people coding up things in basic on an 8-bit micro in their bedroom. As someone who started hobbyist gamedev in the DOS era, I can assure you that games are easier to make, and with much higher level of sophistication, than they ever have been. Even today we have notable 1-person successes: Undertale was basically…

>Making games has a very low cost.

Think about the skills required to create a presentable product, then think about the time you have to sink into it with no idea if you'll have any success at all. Just look at how ConcernedApe is described on Wikipedia:

>is an American video game developer, video game designer, artist, composer, and musician.

Imagine how difficult it would be to hire somebody who would be able to fulfill all of these roles at the same time and how much you would have to pay them. The 1-person successes are people who are on top of their game.

>Even today we have notable 1-person successes

And how many failures? How many people gave it everything they had and it went nowhere? Those failures have a cost too.

>When was the last time you saw a movie made by someone with a cell phone and adobe premier playing in a major theater?

But that's not where it starts. You can tell a story in a book that can be made into a movie, because they can overlap. Movies get a constant stream of new ideas from books that are written. Most of those books are failures too, but the barrier to entry there is much lower than making a game. You can't write a book and then turn it into a game, because the most important aspect of a game - gameplay - isn't something that a book can handle in any way.

Re: Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened to Game Design?)

#80

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

Aerroon wrote: post #79
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making games has a very low cost. In fact, a lot of successes in the beginning of the game industry were people coding up things in basic on an 8-bit micro in their bedroom. As someone who started hobbyist gamedev in the DOS era, I can assure you that games are easier to make, and with much higher level of sophistication, than they ever have been. Even today we have notable 1-person successes: Undertale was basically…

> Making games has a very low cost. Think about the skills required to create a presentable product, then think about the time you have to sink into it with no idea if you'll have any success at all. Just look at how ConcernedApe is described on Wikipedia: > is an American video game developer, video game designer, artist, composer, and musician. Imagine how difficult it would be to hire somebody who would be able to…

> Think about the skills required to create a presentable product, then think about the time you have to sink into it with no idea if you'll have any success at all.

You say these things like it isn't true of literally every creative endeavor including writing.

> But that's not where it starts. You can tell a story in a book that can be made into a movie, because they can overlap.

Many game developers of yesteryear took their inspiration from tabletop RPGs, board games, sports, and just regular real world activities that looked interesting. There are places to start other than diving in a making a game... and yet lots of people do, because it has a low barrier to entry.

> You can't write a book and then turn it into a game, because the most important aspect of a game - gameplay - isn't something that a book can handle in any way.

A strange thing to say considering how many games are incredibly linear stories with almost no gameplay whatsoever. Also strange considering how many books simply don't translate to film very well. Go on, write a screenplay for Gravity's Rainbow, I dare you.

But seriously, there are lots of ways to learn game design without ever touching electronics. Human beings have been designing all sorts of games since they've had enough free time to play games. A lot of those ideas can become video games.

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