RafaelFajardo

However I think the other side of the coin is that most programmers – and, I would sadly argue, designers too – don’t really know how to improve the abstract thing that is ‘game play’. There are many who’d love to create better stories, emotions, AI, and so on, but don’t have the knowledge or skills to do so, which means they resort to making the improvements in areas they do understand. You can throw more polygons at a 3D mesh to make it look better, but you can’t just throw more materials at a rock/paper/scissors conflict model and expect to magically have a better game. You can make a game run more smoothly or make it more colourful-looking or write one of those amazing everything-is-brown-or-grey-so-it-must-be-a-gritty-game shaders because these are techniques we know about (and saw at SIGGRAPH 15 years ago), but there isn’t much resembling a science for designing the abstract game features, or at least not one that is well-known and accepted. Even some of the better-known designers such as Daniel Cook and Raph Koster seem to consider their work to be more about casting an enlightened eye over trial-and-error, relying on play-testers to tell them what is fun. While nobody would seriously argue that you don’t need some sort of play-testing – just like graphics programming requires the programmer to actually look at what is being rendered – it seems a bit defeatist to assume that it’s not theoretically possible for a knowledgeable enough designer to be able to create a compelling game experience without needing to have others try it first. In particular I can’t agree with the suggestion that emotions, experiences, and personality in games “cannot be systematically engineered no matter how many design articles anyone reads“. I can’t imagine making such a claim about film, or books. It seems even more invalid for games, where the player is a participant: so if we’re not there yet, we just have more work to do, more knowledge to acquire.