Eric Zimmerman - Being a Game Designer: Principles for a Thoughtful Practice - IndieCade 2012
Channel: IndieCade
Date: 2014-05-19

Most talks on games focus on how to make a better product -- a more successful game. This session frames what game designers do in a different way. I want to ask the question: What does it mean to be a good game designer? 

Apart from the problems and challenges of designing particular games, what are the attitudes and approaches that cut across all kinds of games that can connect us more deeply to what we do on a daily basis? For example, practitioners of Parkour see it not just as a series of techniques for jumping over walls, but as an attitude that can permeate every moment of a someone's life. Could we take a similar approach to game design? Is it possible to think about game design as a way or mode of being? 

The talk is structured as a series of "principles." The principles help describe games as a cultural form, and they also describe game design as a creative practice. The principles are meant to anchor a set of ideas around what being a game designer can mean. Each principle will be presented with examples from my own experience as a designer, player, and teacher. A few examples are below:

Interconnectedness. Games are about seeing relationships among parts. To design well, we become sensitive to how every part in a game is affecting every other part. Can this idea translate outside of games to help us see the world as an interconnected system?

Honesty. Every time we playtest a game, it is an occasion to confront the truth about what is and what is not working in our game. Learning to be honest and humble in these moments is part of our training as game designers.

Polyglot. There is no field of knowledge that is not relevant to being a game designer, from math and logic to aesthetics and psychology to social and cultural theory. Through our practice we gain insight into the ways that knowledge intersects across traditional boundaries.

Player as other. When we design, we must put ourselves in the place of another person and imagine their experience. In this way, game design is an intrinsically human endeavor that makes us more sensitive to other people and their experience of the world.

Humility. The iterative process of game design means that we collaborate not just with other developers on a game's dev team, but also with players themselves, as they react to a game in development. This expanded sense of authorship, where a designer is a facilitator of a process, rather than the author of an experience, helps keep us humble about our role.

This is not meant as a "theoretical" talk that focuses on abstract design concepts, but is intended as more of a personal meditation. Rather than thinking about how to make great games, and how those games can transform our players' lives, I'd like to ask how it is that making games can transform their designers. 

Follow IndieCade on Twitter: http://twitter.com/indiecade
Like IndieCade on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IndieCade

Subscribe to our channel: https://www.youtube.com/indiecadeofficial