Physician, Advise Thyself

Nice caricature. MMORPG.com is also a pretty nice platform, as I’m sure Sanya would attest, aside from the majority of the forum posters being F2P gaming tweens whose average post is a rehash of, “ths gam sux Im gong back 2 toontwn r mebee evn wow if I cleen my room.”

Levity aside, the article is awesome. Excellent contrast for me with my other major inspiration on getting into game design, The Education Of A Gamer Designer.

Thank you very much for sharing it, Mr. Jenning! A good article indeed, and it’s.. the fun sort of advice.

Sadly I don’t post comments on your blog very often at all – this may be the first I’ve left, in fact. While I’m here now though, I do want to wish you luck in finding a new project.

I couldn’t think of a way to explain this simply in the comments thread there but:

I don’t know how other companies do it, but I use a fairly aggressive series of design tests to filter out non-designers. There’s a written test, and then the interview also includes a ‘you’re on the spot, solve this design problem on a whiteboard’ section. Someone who aces the tests is generally hired regardless of experience; someone who flubs the test doesn’t get hired regardless of how long their resume is (and I’ve turned down resumes with a lot of pretty high-profile work on them at the interview-test step).

So I dunno how to phrase it as advice to your audience, but: if you don’t actually think about game design quite a bit, you’re probably not going to get the job. And ‘think about game design’ is not the same as ‘have cool ideas’, because ideas are cheap. If you can tell me what’s wrong with *my* idea, and why, and then tell me how to fix it… that’s more interesting.

“Not finished reading, but too many people read these and go, “wow, all you have to do is dress well, turn your cell phone off and be literate? The job will be mine!””

@J. I think that’s a flaw in those people rather than a flaw in the way Scott’s advice was phrased.

Those things are hurdles. You can trip up and fall on your face. Managing to not trip up doesn’t automatically equate to a win.

That’s a nice picture. Makes you look quirky, approachable and not nearly as insane as Sporkfire’s.

Informative read. At the risk of sounding crass and rude, is the guy you hired who didn’t like Nagrand still working?

After two disastrous occasions in which we hired people who called themselves designers but couldn’t design their way out of a paper bag, (despite years in the industry and decent recommendations) our entire design department has reevaluated how we interview new hires. We now issue a design test ahead of time, coordinate who will be asking what questions, then proceed to grill the candidate on a variety of topics intended to figure out how they much they actually think about design. We just implemented this, so we’ll see if it yields good results in the future.

I wish I knew how to interview people more effectively. It seems like an art form unto itself.

I am inclined to agree that design acumen is not something that can be properly ‘tested’.
Design can be as much an art as a science.
As an art – it depends on the audience too.
Exactly how much art is involved depends on your level too.

Then there is human psychology that factors in too. Another thing that is difficult to quantify in tests.

And exactly what you are designing and from what perspective also makes a huge difference.
For example – I believe my ‘hatred’ of Travian may have shown through in my earlier post? Why do I have issues with that game? Poor Design IMHO.
It commits what I consider to be a cardinal sin. It has the potential to leave a player with no possible moves. Their account remains active – but they can do nothing. Search for ‘crop locked’ on the Travian Forum.
Now, from the design point of view, a ‘designer’ coming to that game and trying to solve that specific problem (which could be done IMHO) is in a very different position to a designer being asked to ‘invent’ a 4th tribe for Travian for example.

The former is more a problem solver – the latter more a conceptualist.

The thing about being a game designer is you’re not just a designer, you’re an entertainer. Being creative and being able to relate to your audience, while important to any design job, is several magnitude more important than the usual design job.

For example, I’ve been reading a book from Jesse Schell on game design. Very high profile designer at Disney. What valuable experience did he leverage to supplement his design skills? “Writer, director, performer, juggler, comedian, and circus artist for both Freihofer’s Mime Circus and the Juggler’s Guild.”

Nice article, hope more will follow swiftly. mmorpg needs more good writers. (Drag Sanya back too! :p )

I second what Blackblade is saying. Not because I’d want to work in game design (too crowded), but because I’m curious about what the requirements are.

For instance, my perennial question: How much code should one be capable of writing to successfully work in game design? Would someone who once designed a board game but who knows next to nothing about computers be turned away?

@Gyrus

Hmm, so MMORPG.com has added both Travian and Evony. I love your attempt to have Farm Town added just to finally blast open the damned floodgates and bring the site to its knees.

The responses in that thread are even more fascinating, in that they are coming up with new, fanciful reasons for not adding the game, like “it’s a Flash game” (so what?) or “it’s not 3-D”. Sure, it’s not, but it definitely looks like old-fashioned isometric 3-D, so if it doesn’t count, what does that mean for Ultima Online? Addition: I wrote this before seeing you had raised the exact same point in the thread. And underneath it all, what concerns me is the revisionism this would involve, you know, that UO wasn’t really an MMORPG because it wasn’t in 3D, which is perfectly in line with that earlier discussion on this site about Wikipedia’s attempt to get rid of the MUD’s listed there using the notability argument.

But with Travian and, above all, Evony now listed there, what argument could they ever come up with to not include Farm Town and all its clones? Travian maybe, but is there a more reviled game out there than Evony, especially when you follow the developments that surrounded it — artwork from Age of Empires II and so on? What excuse could the MMORPG.com admins bring forth to say “no to Farm Town, yes to Evony”? Even worse, MMORPG.com has just legitimized Evony by listing it on the website.

I’ve been nowhere near Evony (not hard to see why), but I played Travian, very briefly, and I’m categorical in saying that’s not an MMORPG. I can accept a MMORPG being browser-based, but Travian does not even have an avatar, so shouldn’t that break the rule on “making use of persistent characters”?

I was not too sure what “crop locking” was, but after looking it up, I just realize it’s a Travian-specific term for someone being a larger player’s perpetual farm. I never saw that in Travian, but I did see it in Tribal Wars, Utopia, and so on. Same thing everywhere — the first to get in has an advantage, especially if he has a fully-formed group.

In Utopia, for example, the game resetted every few months, but you could choose to remain with the same kingdom round after round. So you had the “old” kingdoms, full of people who knew how to play the game and had played it for years, and the “new” kingdoms, made up of newcomers who didn’t really know how to play and more often than not wouldn’t stick around for long, and, occasionally, you’d get a player who knew what he was doing. The first evidence that such a player knew what he was doing would be his defection to another kingdom, hoping it would be more structured than yours. In fact, it would just be a vicious circle from which no escape was possible. I had the misfortune of being elected king of my loser kingdom once, and it was particularly bleak.

The same old kingdoms, with the same old people, who knew every trick, used every add-on (Utopia Angel and so on), and above all, coordinated on a regular basis, won round after round, and everyone else was considered a farm; why should those old kingdoms go at one another when what mattered most was the size of their land holdings? The big fish went after the medium fish, the medium fish went after the small fish, and so on. Which means you, and the kingdom of losers you are stuck with (even if you switched, the new one would probably be just as bad), would always be someone else’s farm. The official term for such a thing was “bottom-feeding”.

What’s your incentive for sticking around when the same guys win over and over again? Even worse was that the best strategy was always to go on the offensive. I remember choosing a race that had elite troops with a bonus to defence, so I was thinking this was an ideal race for defensive play, which I like best. But no, I was soon corrected that in fact the defensive bonus was in place to allow you to retain fewer troops at home while the rest were out attacking someone else… I wonder if they’d explain away the offensive bonus of other races by saying it’s an incentive to keep more troops guarding the homestead.

Tribal Wars? Same problem, and conceptually, it’s very close to Travian. I got into the game on a server already well under way, with three friends, and we formed our own clan. After a while, we merged with another small clan (what clinched it was that the other leader was polite and could spell). But soon enough, we were pretty much coerced into joining an even larger clan, that old “you join us or we invade you” spiel. The clan was actually split between three clans in the same family, all listed in the top-20 on the server, so, large enough to be competitive — or so you’d think, until you looked at the map, and realized that the number one clan controlled an entire quadrant, and the top part of another. They were at the other end, but they were already creating advance posts for their inevitable expansion.

The writing was on the wall, so I quit. (That was in May 2008, or somewhere around that, and what’s interesting now is that the large clan with one quadrant has vanished or changed names. However, the entire area where I was located, along with all the west of the map, is now part of some uberclan now #1 on the server. Unless the clan I was with merged with them, I suspect it would have been the same “join, or else” all over again. And I was not really interested in being one cog in some large machine anyway.)

It wasn’t the only reason; another had to do with the inferiority of the defensive playstyle in the game. I knew one guy who repeated the same pattern all over again. He would join a clan, and stick around for a while, then he would leave for a larger clan and back-stab his former clanmates. The problem was that there would always be a larger clan to welcome him, despite all indications that he would do the same to them one day. Eventually he ended up in one of our sister clans, and I warned them about him; naturally, they did nothing until he left. Anyway, this guy always invaded other fully developed villages, whereas I usually took over small abandoned villages next to my hub and developed them. We started playing at around the same time, but he outgrew me by three to seven times, I can’t recall too well. And the game mechanics encouraged it. It was ridiculously easy to strike down an opponent’s walls, just to leave whatever troops he had inside exposed to the following waves of attacks.

And in the end, it was just too time-consuming for what it was worth, what with coordinating attacks between villages, and making sure that reinforcements to a village arrived during the one-minute window between your opponent’s second and third wave. I decided to leave the game right after wasting an entire Saturday trying to fend off a mass attack against my villages by shuffling troops around.

Those games, however, are not MMORPG’s, and definitely not according to MMORPG.com’s regulations. I was planning to write a large diatribe there about the goings-on at the site (to be censored within minutes, I’d wager), so I’ll just add that latest thing with Evony and Travian.

The best way I could put it is that that site does not deserve a Scott Jennings writing for them.

I’m a designer and I have zero programming knowledge. My initial design experience came from writing miniature wargaming rules for Games Workshop. Nowadays I work for an FPS where I’m writing designs for social and massive systems in that context.

The interview process for me consisted of a written design test and then going to dinner with my prospective colleagues where we talked a lot about different games that we played and why we liked them. There was a more formal interview the next day but that was mostly to satisfy HR that I wasn’t a sociopathic axe murderer or something.

I think it helps to understand the capabilities of a system and programming language though.
In my current job I have to work with company software which, to be very very kind, is not very good.
Sadly though, many people simply ‘accept it’ and in most cases that is because the IT departments and teams tell then that this and that is ‘not possible’.
I started a huge row a couple of years ago by showing that something a customer requested was in fact possible (the programmers concerned were just being lazy – it was to do with alpha numeric inputs and sorting of that data).
So while I agree that a designer need not need to be a programmer – it certainly doesn’t hurt.

Hmm, so MMORPG.com has added both Travian and Evony.
[...]
And underneath it all, what concerns me is the revisionism this would involve, you know, that UO wasn’t really an MMORPG because it wasn’t in 3D
[...]
I was not too sure what “crop locking” was, but after looking it up, I just realize it’s a Travian-specific term for someone being a larger player’s perpetual farm. [...] In Utopia, for example, the game resetted every few months [...] it would just be a vicious circle from which no escape was possible. [...] The same old kingdoms, with the same old people, who knew every trick, used every add-on [...] The big fish went after the medium fish, the medium fish went after the small fish, and so on. [...] The official term for such a thing was “bottom-feeding”.
[...]
I got into the game on a server already well under way, with three friends, and we formed our own clan. [...] until you looked at the map, and realized that the number one clan controlled an entire quadrant[...]The writing was on the wall, so I quit.

I think you might have wandered a little off course there, buddy. The topic was what constitutes game designer qualifications.

Oh wait, I get it, you’re demonstrating you can indeed give your opinion about what was wrong with the past games you played in a verbose manner. Well, okay – one does what they’ve got to do to seem visible in this job market, I suppose.

Honestly, I couldn’t do that. Sure, I’ve got some 26 years of hardcore game-playing experience, but I started to clam up after I started to design games in my spare time. There something about discovering first hand that game design is hard that makes one a bit more forgiving.

Many of the issues you outlined here, for example, with crop-locking and so on – a better question is how to solve the problems at hand. In my current design, last entry I spoke about it, I mentioned that I want to keep the number of player numbers small in order to allow players to have an intimate, X-Com squaddie-like, connection to their units. However, that wasn’t the only reason – the other reason is because if you give players too much power – too many units or territory under control – all of the problems you just mentioned about “the writing being on the wall” will manifest because it snowballs. If you want fights to be fair, and players to have to perpetually work towards success, you have to limit them. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of disproportional time investment leading to imbalance, which you can bank on occurring.

So, yes, the best education of a game designer? The same as any other valued skill. Practice, practice, practice.

“I wish I knew how to interview people more effectively. It seems like an art form unto itself.”

It is.

I do a lot of technical hiring – programmers, DBAs, analysts and customer facing relationship management people. The most important advice I ever got on hiring is to use an experiential interview methodology. Don’t ask “how would you approach the design of the economic portion of this game?” Ask instead, “At your last job, how did you contribute to the design of the economic portion of the game?”

Because the fact is, 80% of the people who you interview can tell you what you want to hear about how to design games. Very few people have actually done it successfully, anywhere, and can back that up with articulate experienced-based stories about how they did that. Watch their body language when they’re telling these stories for clues they’re making it all up. If you find someone who is telling the truth and has complete, well-developed narratives about how the design process works, you hire them.

Scott, regarding your process, which seems to involve years of design in a vacuum followed by surprise that people don’t read what you developed while you were completely disconnected from the implementation team, have you ever considered implementing an Agile methodology for game design? Typically Agile is used when the requirements are poorly defined or the entire universe of requirements is unknown, and development must start before requirements can be frozen. Game design isn’t like that. But another nice benefit of Agile is that it delivers iterative demos of functionality that get the product closer and closer to perfect. This helps you actually ship a product, instead of spending two years in the design stage, you spend thirty day sprints defining requirements, designing, constructing, testing, and finally building and delivering a demo.

This gives your developers a chance to interact meaningfully with design people very early in the product lifecycle. You don’t waste a year designing something impractical that can never be implemented.

@gyrus
A difficult assertion to prove.