What is ‘Video Game Design’?

Over the past 20 years or so I have taught game development and design in around a half a dozen tertiary institutions across Australia. The topics I have covered range from low level graphics programming, game programming and scripting, up to high-level game design. The types of students have included ‘hard core’ coders with a passion for mathematics and shader programs, ‘run of the mill’ IT students who can write code when they need to but avoid it if possible, and largely non-technical creative/design students who react with the same relish to the possibility of coding as they would if you offered them an open container of venomous spiders.

For each of these cohorts of students I have taught a subject called ‘Game Design’. From the name you would reasonably assume this subject was to teach students how to ‘design’ video games. Presumably this would look at video games from a big picture perspective and provide ways of thinking about and modelling games as well as tools that could be used in the design process. This is in contrast to the other more detailed, lower level subjects such as games programming, graphics programming, animation, 3D modelling and game art. ‘Game design’ should stand above these hands-on topics that focus on specific skills in building video games.

The problem I have found is that the delineation between video game design and video game making is often unclear. In fact I would go as far to say that video game design has no clear identity, and this is where the real problem lies. Video games originally sprung, by necessity, from the minds and fingers of coders, and for a long time a game designer had to have solid programming skills. The legacy of this history is that many games design courses (including the one I am currently teaching) are found in computing faculties. These faculties have a lot of knowledge about how to teaching technical skills and programming, but is this really the place where the highly creative discipline of video game design can flourish?

To answer this question we need to look at a couple of other questions. Firstly and importantly, what is a video game? If it is merely a computer program then perhaps video game design should remain within the computing discipline. Secondly, but as importantly, what is design? If design is simply the process of making things then, again, the computing discipline also has a lot of knowledge to offer and perhaps we should leave it there.

So the first question: What is a video game? I should point out that I am going to focus on 3D video games played from a first or third-person perspective. There are those who claim that ‘a game is a game is a game’ and equate board games with first-person 3D games. I am sceptical of this claim and my reasoning is fairly simple: if a board game is equal to a 3D video game, why can I recreate a board game in my 3D game, while there is no way you can recreate my 3D game in your board game? This may upset some people.

Back to the question: What is a video game?

One possible answer is that a video game is simply a computer program that incorporates creative art assets. A video game is built on top of a collection of software libraries that make up a Game Engine which provides functionality for graphics, audio, physics, AI, networking etc. Video games are also composed of art assets such 3D models, animations, textures, sounds, music etc. It is the game programming that ties all these game elements together into a cohesive whole.

There is no doubt this is true and that seen from this perspective a video game can be classified as software. But how useful is this understanding of video games when it comes to designing them? It is like understanding that a building is comprised of bricks, mortar, wood, plaster etc. Yes, these things are important in the construction of a building, but they don’t necessarily tell us anything about the human experience of existing in a building. In the same way viewing a video game as a collection of assets and code doesn’t tell us anything about the player’s experience of the game.

That last sentence points us toward a different definition. If you asked a player who loved a game to describe that game, how would they describe it? As an amazing collection of assets tied together with some truly elegant programming? Probably not. They would describe to you their subjective experience of the game and how the different aspects of the game made them feel, whether that is a great story, amazing graphics, challenging gameplay, fulfilling social interactions or any of the other experiences they can have in the game. From the player’s point of view a game is the sum of their subjective experiences with the game.

Seen from this perspective, video game design is the design of player experience, and video game designers are not designing computer programs, but rather are designing subjective player experiences.

Coming up next… What is Design?