So, I have a question. And it might start some negative reaction, and while that’s not my intent – I just want to hear what you all to say on the subject: Industry Game Design Bloggers.
We all know that professional video game designers who blog are a freaking dime a dozen on the internet. Often times, game design bloggers are the most prevalent in the industry among fans. They often have a lot of respect in social circles and game development conferences and are the ones you think of when you think of “famous designers”. It seems like a decent amount of people who design games for a living want to blog and share that knowledge with others.
My question is: Do they know what they’re talking about? Are they even good designers?
Why do I ask? Mostly because I know a lot of talented game designers in the industry that most people have never heard of in their life. They don’t read blogs, they don’t read design theory novels, they don’t analyze the psychological reasons why people interact how they do. They simply know how to make good games, and don’t use theories behind it. They’ve never heard of schaedenfreud or fiero, and they might not even know who Richard Bartle even is.
Secondly, because I find myself spending a ton of time reading these giant walls of text about design ideas, and when I analyze my takeaway – some times I wonder if I should even trust the takeaway. Of course, it’s going to vary – there will be knowledgable game designers who are good bloggers and then poor writers who make no sense…but sometimes I wonder what the signal-to-noise ratio actually is. Some people are really really good at sounding like they know what they’re talking about, even when they don’t.
Keep in mind this post is only about professional game design bloggers, who hold a position at a game studio and speak from experience – not game design theory blogs from people who’ve never worked on a game. (The latter are another blog post entirely…)
What do you all think? Keep in mind that I do like to pose questions provocatively to start conversation, and I’m not pointing fingers in any particular direction.
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
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I think that weather the theories end up working or not they give you a framework to guide the start of your thought process and ideas for approaching things that will be kicking around in your head for when you are designing your projects. They may not all be valuable ideas and there may be somethings you utterly disagree with but they will help you chose directions to _not_ go with your own projects in those cases.
sort of a corollary here, but something i discovered about 7 years ago — ideas and theories are a dime a dozen.
who's the good game designer worth listening? the one who puts foot-to-ass. pen-to-paper. rubber-to-road. the one who gets it done and actually ships. everybody's got ideas. everybody's got plans. and theirs are always better than the next guy's.
if they haven't shipped product — no matter how big or small — they're not worth listening to. period. if they haven't put their ass on the line, stepped up, taken responsibility for their ideas and put it all out there? meh. they're worth just about a fart noise. maybe less.
10% inspiration and 90% perspiration isn't just an edison quote. it's a truism.
m3mnoch.
Bad ideas are fine as long as they don't rise to the top, right?
If some designers are talking nonsense, I'd think it's only a problem if the opinions of gamers who pick up on that nonsense are given to much weight by companies… that is, if those companies ignore their own sense, experience, and design aptitudes. Bad ideas can inspire good ideas.
So so many thoughts here.
I was unsure to post, as one of those who DOES write game design books, and discuss the psychology and math of it all.
1. There didn't use to be so many professional designers blogging. It's a relatively recent phenomenon.
2. Even today, most designers DON'T think in terms of design theory, psychology, emotions, etc. It's even more recent than blogging.
3. There are a lot of designers who make good games of a given sort, but can't make great ones.
4. There are a lot of designers who make good games of a given sort, but it's the only sort they can make.
5. There are a lot of designers who can talk about theory but can't develop new theory.
6. There are a lot of designers who talk about theory but can't apply it.
7. There are a lot of great designers who don't know how to express what they do.
8. There are a lot of good academics and yes, other designers, who can express what great designers do in language that others can understand.
9. There are a lot of really terrible game design blogs. But there are also lots of really good ones. A lot of the good ones are not by “professional game designers.”
10. Often, because of points 3-8, it can be very hard to tell a good game design blog from a bad one.
11. Experience is often worth listening to, even when it's wrong.
By the way, I can't think of very many truly “famous” game designers in game design circles who DO blog. Sid doesn't. Will doesn't. Warren doesn't. Reiner Knizia doesn't. There are a lot of well-known professional game designers but many of them are famous in a sort of product-driven way, or famous FOR their blogs. But when you go asking other game designers about game designers they admire, not that many names come up — and a lot of them aren't very well known, even.
I think it's all about how much you respect/trust the designer and what the topics of discussion are.
Like all knowledge based on abstract concepts like “fun” you'll have to weight it against what you think you know yourself. Designing remains, in my opinion, a fairly abstract job and not an exact science.
does the take away inspire you?
You know, this is an interesting post. I do read a number of blogs from game designer, some of whom put up blog posts about game design and theory. Yet, really, there's only two that I follow that talk about game design theory to any great length. One of them I find myself rarely interested in and usually the only thing discussed is game design theory – I don't pay a lot of attention to that blog. The other one discusses a lot of game theory, but poses plenty of questions, brings up a lot of other topics, and some interesting links. I read it for all of those reasons, and I remain more interested in it.
Other than that, the other blogs I read from professional game designers rarely talk about game design theory at all. I very rarely see Scott Jennings bring up anything about game design – but he talks a lot about the game industry and gaming in general, for example. I find these sorts of blogs much more interesting/entertaining.
Then again, my interest in game design largely died a few years ago, even if I am doing it a bit on the indie side these days. Rather, I just find I relate to designers more than other groups, so I follow their blogs. (And Community people – but community stuff I am quite interested in)
Hopefully that was off-topically-on-topic.
Answer: Some know what they are talking about, and some are good designers. Those two parts aren't necessarily related. Blogs are full of opinions, so take everything you read with a grain of salt. Don't believe anything any designer says–no matter how good they are–wholesale. You have to analyze the person's opinion and decide if you agree with it.
No matter how good or successful a designer is, their blog is only worth reading if you're getting something out of it. I love reading, and read quickly enough to sample a lot of blogs, but there are many I'll never visit again. My criteria for continuing to read a blog are:
a) It presents ideas that I can put into practice to create something fun or to make an existing idea more fun.
b) It has real scientific results on human psychology (just because it's interesting, it doesn't necessarily help me create a better game).
c) I find inspiration either from agreeing or disagreeing with what they say.
Obviously you don't need to read blogs to be a good designer. People all learn in different ways, and some people can get a lot more out of reading blogs than others. I think people who aren't getting anything out of blogs shouldn't waste their time reading them. That said, I certainly appreciate the people who take their time to share their thoughts, especially the ones that inspire and educate me.
I guess it didn't end up getting as controversial as I thought. I pretty much assumed people would assume I'm pointing fingers and start naming names. (Naming your own name doesn't count!)
I think more controversial could be how (I think) there are three distinct kind of bloggers:
1) The academics who do their research on perpendicular topics and relate them to design.
2) The game design bloggers who've never shipped a game or designed something fun, but like to talk about design anyway.
3) Design bloggers who have some proof in their pudding, and consistently say good things with real world examples of their own work.
I like paying attention to #1, because the psychology and academia of it all is intriguing. #2 I tend to roll my eyes at and move along, and #3 is the most rare and valuable.
2) can be fun. I've had some interesting and flamey posts borne from those.
I aspire to 3) (although I haven't technically actually SHIPPED anything yet, so really anything I say design-wise is fully deserving of eye-roll fury) but really I suspect I end up in either 2) or 4) Bitter veteran of MMO live team(s) who hates everyone and spews that hatred in amusing ways and directions. (I am fully aware the Category 4 posts are more fun to read than the Category 2 ones.)
Category 2 can be fun when the author has clearly been touched in a bad place by his particular brand of digital crack and has sworn a MIGHTY OATH to never allow this to happen to anyone else.
Well the first post is usually entertaining but your sanity will shrivel if you stick around to read Nuggets of Divine Wisdom 2 through five hundred and thirty-six.
As for my own blog I aspire to 3. I 'd prefer to do 4 but I don't have the employment security required for that kind of stuff.
It depends on what you're looking for.
If you're trolling the internet looking for the next American Design Idol to latch your star onto, you're wasting time. If you're prowling around looking for feedback on existing design, interesting questions or ideas that spark something useful, or just another viewpoint (so you don't fall into the trap of thinking your ideas are the only ones that matter, which is something that even professionals should learn), blogs are just as valuable as any other internet resource. For better or worse.
It is a mistake to think that there's nothing useful out there in blogs. Good game design isn't a meritocracy, and thinking that “only the big boys” know what they are doing is a dangerous assumption.
I suppose there's also a tangent to be run there: Does “good design” equate to “successful sales”? I don't think that they map 1:1, or even close to it… but perhaps that's another discussion.
I'd actually break it into the following, in order of probability of something they say actually being useful:
1) People who have a good idea and implement it, and can show it (your #3). Requires being an actual game designer, and some kind of degree.
2) People who recognise a good idea in a game they've already played, and write about that. Anyone can do this, but the quality depends on many factors – including general intelligence and communication skills, experience with the game genre being analysed and being able to analyse objectively (recognising that different people like different aspects of games to varying degrees, and that what is fun for you may not necessarily be fun for someone else)
3) Academics (your #1)
4) People who come up with their own ideas, but never back them up.
5) People who blog about the same game 5 days a week, and bitch incessantly about all the things they would change.
I don't bother with reading #3 (game design is more of an art than a science to me) or #4-5 (they fail). I read a few interesting bloggers who fulfill item #1. I read several more who fulfill #2, and aspire to be a #2 myself. Every so often I will offer up one of my 'own' ideas, but it's almost always borrowed or extrapolated from some other game.
The good news is that if you know what you're talking about, you will be able to distinguish the good bloggers from the drivel. Which is why I always scour the blog-roll of new designers that I stumble across and like. If you don't know what you're talking about, well, you'll probably soak up a lot of drivel.
Disclaimer: I make no assertion that my blog is not filled with meaningless drivel :p
Warren blogs. Just not so much about design.
As someone who hasn't shipped a AAA title but has worked on MUDs and a half dozen or so flash based games, I find myself between the has never shipped crowd and the backs it up with a shipped game crowd. Cuppycake, I'm afraid that you'll miss out on lots of good ideas and experience by only listening to the blogs from “professional game designers”. There's more than a few people out there with years or decades of MUD experience that have never sold a single box that could school a few of the professional MMO designers out there today. If that weren't true then there would be no posts about how Blizzard didn't learn a thing from MUDs or EQ just did this that was done years ago or what have you. Even now you can look back on the early MMO days and think of a few people that got their start blogging as a way in to the industry.
In the end, I don't think it is all cut and dry as you're making it out to be. In the end, the next great designer isn't a known name today. That means that the next designer might have a blog today while lacking somewhere else to see it through to a product. (team, cash, artists, programmers, …) A lot has to go right to ship a product these days and most of it is outside of the designer's sphere of influence.
I read game design theory (more books than blogs, because I find the organization easier to follow, and becasue I can take a book with me) because I like to learn. I can learn from any of these four categories, though certainly 1 and 3 are most consistently worthwhile. However, when it comes to 2) and 4), I actually find more millage with 2).
Learning for me is a reflective process. It doesn't matter if what the person is saying is true, so much as it gives me a different way to think about a problem. When looking at design from a different perspective than I normally do, I will see new things which are true for me, even if the perspective from which I am looking at design from is bat shit crazy.
Bitter veterans generally have something interesting to say, but their view is clouded. They aren't willing to look at new things, because they've been burned so many times that they don't think anything trully can be new. And so to put on their hat is to purposelly remove many other hats. Possibly interesting to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.
Fuck Sirlin, he hasn't made shit
The only requirement I have of a Blog is that it's well-written. Whether or not it's either accurate or useful is neither here nor there. Reading good prose on a topic of interest is a pleasure in itself.