Richard Garriott on why “most game designers really just suck”

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/19/richard-garriott-game-designers-suck/

by Jare • 13 years ago

46 65 13 years ago

papsosouid10• 13 years ago

He's right except for the part where he paints himself and molyneux as being in the "not suck" camp. Being a head in the clouds idealist who produces impressive hype for poor games is still sucking.

roc6• 13 years ago

He's trading heavily on nostalgia and free press for his new game. Talking about Wright, Roberts and Molyneux is a way to stoke the nostalgia, and blanket blasting the industry with contentious quotes is just a way to get that free press. He doesn't have a "point" beyond that. He's not 'right' about anything of substance.

If you actually drilled into Garriott's argument here -- instead of just recording 'bombshells' and briefly trying to establish some room for him to backpedal later -- his argument would dissipate into a lot of hand-waving. Because the particulars are just going to identify exceptions and display a lack of concrete evidence for his view, beyond slinging arrows at designs that 1. he personally doesn't like 2. are beyond any designers' ability to influence (e.g. things handed down, or shortcuts taken due budget/scheduling issues, etc)

saraid2163• 13 years ago

Eh, he's not wrong about some things, but he's not saying anything new. It's been said before, and it's been said repeatedly for the last decade.

So yeah. PR stunt.

papsosouid10• 13 years ago

>He's not 'right' about anything of substance

He is right that most "game designers" suck, and that the core reason is because they were people who didn't cultivate a real skill, so went through the QA -> level designer -> designer path. A path which doesn't make any sense, and for which there is very little useful training or education available. There is so little analysis of what makes games fun and how to design fun games, and 99% of game designers never see or hear about the little that is available.

michaelochurch2• 13 years ago

I've done some game design, but the only thing anyone would have heard of is the card game, Ambition. ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH... )

To become a good game designer, one has to design games and-- here's the important part-- get feedback from human players. That seems tautological and obvious, but it's an important insight. What seems like a great game will be broken in ways a designer might not anticipate once it meets real players. Non-designers might find the brokenness of the earliest Magic cards to be laughable-- how could they not see that Ancestral Recall was broken?-- but designers get it. Balance is hard, man.

It's hard as hell to come up with a game worth playing. I probably designed a hundred crappy ones as a teenager before I got a hang of it and, even then, I only have one real success which is a card game-- a fairly closed system, not something continually expansive like Ultima Online or Magic: the Gathering. It takes a lot of trial and error to get good at it. It's easier to go through that process when you have access to other nerdy teenagers who'll be playtesters. For adults, it's much harder to get testers. That's a huge limiting factor.

Then, combine this with the big-budget corporate setting. Few game designers get to design a whole game. They work on pieces, not having responsibility for a whole. It's the same issue that we have in software engineering: most programmers never get good because so few ever work on real stuff in their paid gigs. I haven't worked in AAA game development, but it wouldn't surprise me to see the same principle in force: mediocre designers because most corporate work is mediocre and people never get the chance to get good.

I think Garriott has a point, though, in the assessment that it's rare for a "pure idea guy" to be anything but mediocre and passive. Curiosity is an important trait in a game designer. If you've got it, you'll code. That doesn't mean that you'll do it professionally or be able to write x86 assembly by hand, but you've no excuse not to fire up Codecademy and learn the basics of programming. Most of the great designers had other interests. You can see Garfield's CS and math backgrounds in the design of Magic. You can see Paul Graham's painting experience in his approach to programming and language design. The biggest hits require crossing wires.

doctorpangloss• 13 years ago

It's hard as hell to come up with a game worth playing.

It's really easy to come up with a game worth playing. Cloning is incredibly easy. While I admire that you went through the hard process of designing the game, what was learned?

Taste (and hence design) is completely arbitrary in videogames. There's no intuitive reason why pushing around sticks on a controller to move around guns is something people like, or that we use 52 cards instead of 60 or 40.

In other words, Richard Garriot is a bit contradictory: if there's nothing learnable about videogame design, the things that make a game good are arbitrary. If the things that make good games are arbitrary, isn't the idea of a game design guru (Lord British) absurd?

To hammer home the point that making a fun game is pretty easy, there are thirteen major MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) titles with more than one million players, and thousands of "endless running" games across all platforms. But the reason League of Legends and Temple Run reign supreme over the DoTA WarCraft 3 scenario and Canabalt is not superior design or balance.

The best games, the best in the genres really, are more like entertainment services, not just mathematical abstractions decorated with pictures and text.

Good games are about running servers; polishing user experience; providing customer support; maintaining a community; the art, the sound, the writing, etc.

While your card game looks interesting, I click on it and see a Google Document. Shouldn't the first link be a web app hosted in Facebook, complete with bots and achievements? All this engineering and craft is both hard and vital to making a game.

I'd say what makes a game different from a math problem is precisely everything outside the game design. Math problems aren't that much fun.

jiggy20112• 13 years ago

It seems a bit of a stretch to say that "the things that make good games are arbitrary".

I have played a lot of games in my time, good and bad. It's not too difficult to identify reasons that some games are better than others. Design and balance is pretty important, if a game feels "unfair" in some way for example or doesn't feel responsive and leaves me feeling detached from what is going on then I'm less likely to play it for long.

It's easy enough to "clone" a game, but even building something like a simple tower defence clone involves making a ton of decisions that affect playability quite a lot.

emiljbs• 13 years ago

>Taste (and hence design) is completely arbitrary in videogames.

Taste is definitely not completely arbitrary in video games.

What makes a video game good is however harder to operationalize - as it always is with mediums of art. Ask the average person why they like some song, an example of an answer would be something like "It's got a catchy hook", which the video game equivalent would be "It's got good controls and explosions."

I do not know what actually makes a game good, but I also have a very hard time believing that taste is completely arbitrary in video games and that video game design is useless.

>But the reason League of Legends and Temple Run reign supreme over the DoTA WarCraft 3 scenario and Canabalt is not superior design or balance.

Sure WC3 DOTA is less popular than LoL, but you'd be insane to say that people do not notice imbalanced stuff.

You seem to hold the view that the more popular a game is, the better. This is probably not true considering how popular Farmville is (or at least used to be) while not being a very good game at all.

Hm, I have a lot more to say overall but I think it's just gonna end with me ranting to a straw man, so I 'm gonna stop here.

shardling• 13 years ago

>It's really easy to come up with a game worth playing. Cloning is incredibly easy.

What a silly thing to say -- if you clone a game, you haven't "come up" with it.

Pretty much everything you say is important if you want to market a game to people, or you want people to enjoy it. But game design is something separate from that -- much like writing the script for a movie is separate from actually producing it. It just happens that scripts are protected by copyright law, while game design isn't.

saraid2163• 13 years ago

There's a huge difference between a commercial success and a design success. The market rewards quality if and only if all other things are equal. It's extremely telling that you think of games only as computerized artifacts and thus couldn't tell me what makes, say, Cosmic Encounter or Cards Against Humanity compelling.

I've spent about a third of my life going back and forth with game designer wannabes and game designers alike, and I think you'd be surprised at how many will recognize the merits of a game where the experience was wooden but the actual mechanics were transparently high quality despite that. Math problems are quite fun, if they're actual problems, and not contrived riddles that pretend to teach math.

You want mass appeal, then yes. You do have to have a high production budget. Or you just put on Doctor Who.

emddudley2• 13 years ago

I've been reading Designing Games by Tynan Sylvester (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026624.do, eBook is $10 if you use coupon code DEAL). It's been really interesting so far.

Game design is not about art, writing, or programming. Game design is about creating the rules that lead to emergent, interactive experiences.

There is an actual science to game design. It's not enough to just think of a story and move an avatar around on the screen. The game must create flow so the player is receptive to emotional arousal, then use game mechanics to invoke emotional arousal, and then add fiction/narrative so that the player labels the arousal as a particular emotion. A good game designer has to consider all of this and much more... strategies, equilibrium, balance, skill levels, and so on.

If you clone an existing game you basically get all of those design decisions for free, but you don't understand the background. This can lead to a case where you tweak or add something to your game which completely throws it off balance, without realizing it and without being able to fix it.

jamesjporter• 13 years ago

I'm continually impressed that Wizards manages to keep Magic as balanced and fun as they do, especially considering that they don't have the resources to really playtest formats other than standard. It always makes me angry seeing people in comment threads for previews/spoilers raging about how Wizards is "ruining the game" or some such nonsense. Making Magic is _hard_ and many players don't seem to understand this :( Of course the Magic community is anger-inducing for any number of reasons; but that's another can of worms entirely.

papsosouid10• 13 years ago

>You can see Paul Graham's painting experience in his approach to programming and language design.

Are you serious?

http://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

michaelochurch2• 13 years ago

His thesis seems to be that Graham isn't an expert on art history. I can't evaluate that. I know less about painting than either of them do.

How far one believes the metaphor goes is questionable. Visual art and software development have different goals and rules, but they use certain aesthetic skills that are common. That said, I think Graham is injecting some degree of personal bias. If his passion had been for music, he might have written "Hackers and Composers". Then again, I really don't know. I don't know how far-- beyond the principle (often overlooked in software) that source code is for humans and must be attractive enough to be comprehensible-- the analogy goes because I don't know enough about painting.

That essayist seems to be viewing software as a product, where source code need not be "appealing" to clients and is not read often enough to justify making it legible and attractive. That's not the world modern software lives in. Aesthetics matter.

ebbv• 13 years ago

Hilarious. The Ultima games were far from perfect, and it's not like they stood alone without any influences. They were heavily derivative of D&D, like any fantasy RPG.

Also, this idea that a person is infallible in any role (such as Game Designer) is absurd. He seems to believe that he posesses some special mojo or insight which means that any game he makes is a work of genius. This is obvious on the surface that it is not the case.

Just because a talented person is involved is no guarantee the work will turn out any good, games or otherwise. This is a simple truth. Creating something great is much more complicated than that.

martinced• 13 years ago

I totally disagree.

The Ultima series had that ability to transport you into these universes (or this universe) that Lord British (aka Richard Garriott) created.

When there are threads on forums about one game to pick if you had to choose only one (which is very hard to do, but that's the game: pick one and only), if you had to choose "the best game ever", well very often people will cite an Ultima.

I played III, IV and V like crazy. The Commodore Amiga port of Ultima V really sucked. I was so sad that I paid for that crap. So what did I do? I went back to the Commodore 64 to be able to play Ultima V.

Yes, you read correctly: dodging the Amiga which has a way superior machine than the C64 (they're not even comparable feature-wise, these are two different eras of computers) to go back to an old C64 to spend countless hours / days playing Ultima V.

The crappy graphics didn't matter: it was all about the experience.

The only game which did something similar to me is FTL's "Sundog: The Frozen Legacy". FTL then made Dungeon Master which is considered to be one of the most influencial game ever.

Lord British is full of it? Yes. Totally deserved. There are no two game designers like him on this planet.

potatolicious• 13 years ago

I disagree - I regard Garriott much like Chris Roberts: incredibly influential, certainly talented, early pioneers of their field, but whose relevance in modern gaming is in doubt.

I for one have more faith in Roberts than Garriott, who reminds me a bit of Molyneux in his focus on personal branding and professional fame.

Before we fall all over ourselves painting Garriott as some kind of infallible game design ubermensch, let's look at his track record.

His career pre-2000 is dominated by Ultima games, which were doubtlessly groundbreaking, iconic, and by almost all accounts, great games.

His career post-2000 is limited. He produced Lineage II, City of Heroes, City of Villains, and Tabula Rasa. City of Heroes gained a cult, if small, following, and both Tabula Rasa and Lineage II were commercial failures. Lineage II in particular was savaged by both gamers and the gaming press - 6.7/10 by IGN, 6.0/10 by GameSpot, 62% on Metacritic.

But don't take my word for it, this is lifted from the Wikipedia article:

"Scott Stahl of the The Daily Orange praised the game's graphics and design, though he also mentioned that the game "quickly degrades into an incredibly tedious and monotonous process of killing the same monster a thousand different times", and that the character creation options are "incredibly shallow, with maybe two or three different faces and hair styles for each type of character." Andrew Park of Gamespot said that the game "offers either a repetitive grind or a stiff challenge""

By all accounts, Garriott's seemingly unquestionable sense of game design seems to fall apart when he left the Ultima series. I very gladly accept that he was/is one of the top game designers the industry has seen, but treating like "there's no one else like him on this planet" is unreasonable.

Secondly,

> "When there are threads on forums about one game to pick if you had to choose only one (which is very hard to do, but that's the game: pick one and only), if you had to choose "the best game ever", well very often people will cite an Ultima."

Citation sorely needed. If you went solely to a RPG forum, and specifically excluded JRPG aficionados, then you'd probably get a lot of answers to the tune of "Ultima". There have been many "top video games evar" lists made both by the gaming press and by vote participation, and I've yet to see Ultima top any of them.

There's a lot more to video gaming than "old school RPGs".

yolesaber• 13 years ago

Just because the setting was derivative does not necessarily imply that the game mechanics were. Ultima was one of the first RPGs available for the computer and set the standard for years to come - standards which it continually refined. Ultima IV, for instance, required the player not to defeat some looming, final evil but rather to ascend to the status of Avatar by doing good deeds, meditating at shrines, and adhering to a moral system. Revolutionary for 1985. Seven years later, Ultima VII is released and is one of the first games to feature full-fledged scheduling for NPCs and the ability to interact with almost every single item in the game world.

njharman• 13 years ago

He said in fact just the opposite. Not that he was great, but (most) other game designers suck.

He also listed exactly what he considers is needed to not suck, and why it's lacking in most of industry. No "special mojo".

Did you even read the article?

seivan4• 13 years ago

Because "game designers" are "idea guys". I rather have a gamer graphics artist or gamer game developer, than an "idea guy".

seivan4• 13 years ago

“If you’re not a good artist and not a good programmer, but you still like games, you become a designer.”

This is what I have been preaching all along. I apply this to UX monkeys and other scum too.

Game Designers are basically just idea guys - get a gamer game developer or a gamer graphics artist you'll get a better job, leaner too.

Thanks for getting some validation here, Richard.

codesuela• 13 years ago

what are UX monkeys?

saucetenuto• 13 years ago

I basically agree, but those who made Tabula Rasa shouldn't throw stones.

jiggy20112• 13 years ago

"If you’re not a good artist and not a good programmer, but you still like games, you become a designer."

Is this true?

I thought that actual "game design" jobs in terms of creative direction were like gold dust and something you could only get by either starting your own studio or rising through the ranks.

All of the game jobs I see advertised are either art,programming or testing.

seivan4• 13 years ago

It is true.

That's because the management have tricked people into getting the game design jobs - the easiest (in terms of stress and problem solving) job there is with most often the highest pay check.

Lotta' ass kissin'.

coffeeaddicted2• 13 years ago

That depends a lot on the company. I've seen game-designers which took it easy, but I've also worked with good ones which took their job extremely serious.

The good ones are able to catch problems before stuff is coded or modeled. A good designer manages to describe every object needed (including rough sketches what they should look like and describing needed animations), every mission condition (which is very close to coding and needs good understanding what is technically possible). A good designer can describe the GUI pretty much ahead in a way that coders don't have to rework it over and over until it fits (including describing stuff like left-click/right-click/drag&drop/selection box behavior which can get very tricky pretty fast in games). A really good designer might even know excel good enough to calculate all kind of stuff through before even approaching any coders.

A bad designer thinks it's all just about some great idea and throwing in lots of stuff and the team will do the rest. A good designer knows it's 90% about describing details and about removing as much stuff as possible.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

I don't believe its true, I believe it should have ended with, "you become a player, enjoy the game". People that believe otherwise are just deluding themselves. I believe that good designers can be good programmers and/or good artists. They may not be the best in those categories but to design what they want they have to know how it can be accomplished.

The number of water cooler game designers is immeasurable.

I would agree on his assessment of Chris Roberts though, of himself I do think he was truly innovative when the media was young but I am not so sure now.

TwistedWeasel• 13 years ago

I worked in the games industry for 12 years and I know a lot of designers that fit this criteria. They had no programming or art skills so they became testers, after that it seems the career path for a tester is either QA lead, or designer.

Probably 75% of the designers I know had a background in QA. Some of them were good designers, most were not. The ones who did have an art or tech background tended to be more grounded in their designs because they had a better idea of what is really achievable with the current tech.

dyselon2• 13 years ago

It's sort of true. If you get your foot in the door (almost always test), and you don't have the relevant skills for tech or art, you're pretty much left with design and production as career paths. This leaves both those disciplines with a number of career-minded individuals who don't really have much passion for game design or product management, respectively.

Honestly, though, I don't think it's that bad. Design is kind of hard to get in, so most testers that aren't passionate about it end in production, and most designers spend their time implementing content. endianswap's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5408304 mirrors my own experience in the industry.

kevingadd• 13 years ago

Back when I was working for one of NCSoft's studios, Richard Garriott came out and took a giant steaming dump on us in the press - and at the time he still worked for NCSoft. Needless to say, we were all pretty offended. He apologized, of course - but it looks like he's still up to the same old tricks.

Why speak your mind tactfully when you can call everyone else bad at their jobs and get more buzz as a result?

Karunamon• 13 years ago

Garriott always struck me as a bit of an attention whore. There's the author self inserts in just about every game (Including Tabula Rasa, a failed MMO where he took the title as General British), the random lashing out at various people with what seems like no intent other than to stir the pot..

Taylorious• 13 years ago

I saw him speak at SXSW... he didn't strike me a terribly humble man... On top of that, there was a band that did video game music covers and they covered some Ultima song. He gave a presentation on his new game, cut into the bands set time, and then left before they were able to play their cover for him. Not very classy for a guy who refers to himself as Lord British.

I'm not sure why people talk about him as being especially brilliant or creative, he hasn't exactly branched out much in the type of games he makes.

no_wave• 13 years ago

What has this guy done for anyone lately? I get that he might have made something good decades ago, but why does that mean his advice is relevant now? The entire landscape is different now.

Look at someone like Ed McMillen if you want to learn about current game design. I get the feeling that Garriott hasn't even PLAYED a video game in ages.

lutze• 13 years ago

What he's done lately is launch a kickstarter for a new game, this is just marketing.

Or in less polite terms, bullshit hype from a man who needed to come back to Earth long long before he went into fucking space.

dougk16• 13 years ago

I don't know, some fluffy arguments and self-back-patting here, but I have to tentatively agree on one point. Out of the 11 designers that I've worked with, 7 were rock solid and came from a programming or art background, with the artists doing some scripting now and again. The other 4 were pure designers, and only one of them was good (although damn good)...the others fit Richard's stereotypes pretty well. This doesn't include the few games I've worked on that didn't have a designer at all, and didn't seem the worse for it.

Not exactly huge sample sizes here, I know, but his argument is plausible to me. It behooves designers to at least be ankle deep in the technical cesspool of game development.

neverm0re• 13 years ago

This really has been my experience at several game studios, including the current one I am at. Often enough, the 'game designer' tends to be someone who exists mostly as a political organism in the company. Without fail, none of the designers I've worked with know much about the history of video games and will usually be rather dismissive about the subject.

The current game designer I'm with could not tell you anything regarding various character creation tools and strategies that have been used in various games (APB, City of Heroes, Skyrim, etc. being good relatively recent examples), yet his job is to spec out that very thing for one of our products. The result has not been very good, but this person outranks the rest of the team on these decisions.

Currently this guy is so bereft of anything to do design-wise, he's decided to read some books on Agile and has moved into pushing the artists and programmers around as if he's the project manager as well, which upper management collectively shrugged at and allowed. Management is where every 'designer' I've worked with has wound up and this guy will be no exception.

At the end of the day, I no longer have much faith in the average game studio because I know these people are out calling the shots on creative decisions. If you aren't a coder or an artist, for the love of fuck, please at least be a genuine gamer with a working understanding of game design history. There's been tens of thousands of video games produced now and some are very much worth remembering when considering a new design, both what to do and what to avoid. Your products will be better for it.

functionality• 13 years ago

Hold on, how do these people get to the role of a designer in the first place? Where do they come from?

BSousa• 13 years ago

For some reason, testing graduates a lot of designers.

What I found in various game companies is that game designers usually graduate from other positions in the company and rarely hired as designers from the start.

papsosouid10• 13 years ago

QA is basically a lottery for designer jobs. You get a job doing QA (which is a terrible job) in the hopes that you will be one of the 0.1% who get chosen to become a designer. This makes no sense at all, but that is how it works.

endianswap2• 13 years ago

At the AAA game studios I have been an engineer at, the core/systems/lead designers have all been very familiar with game history, are avid gamers across genres, and always have, for any idea, examples of how that idea has been done in other games or that it has been promised in upcoming game X, etc.. The junior designers I've worked with have lacked that skill, which is probably why they are mostly just a cog in the content pipeline. Much as there's a difference between a real engineer who can build up systems and an enterprise UI programmer, there's a difference between content "designers" and systems designers.

Hands down, though, the best systems designers I've worked with have had programming backgrounds.

zeidrich• 13 years ago

I think the reason that the people he credits as being as good designers are from his generation is because that was back in the day that a designer could make a top quality game with a team of 5-10 people.

I don't think that it's because designers suck, but that when you are working with AAA games with 100 million dollar budgets, you often don't get a single designer whose focused vision can drive the project. You have multiple designers working on multiple systems, and then you have a layer of management who wants to hold some of your feature ideas for their DLC monetization strategy down the line, and you need to maybe break some of your systems in order to add social media integration options or compromise on your core ideas in order to create some integration that can justify the always online DRM that you need to put in place.

When Richard was making Ultima, he could just say no. Well, up to a point anyways. By Ultima 7 and origin's acquisition by EA, references to difficulties with EA even bubbled into the game. I mean the main antagonists were named Elizabeth and Abraham. Origin's tagline was "We create worlds" the evil force in the game was known as the destroyer of worlds.

Even if you're skeptical about that, nobody can doubt that the quality of Ultima 8 and 9 were, at least in terms of game design, quite poor. Was that because Richard all of a sudden became one of those bad game designers? Or was that because the design of the game became more committee based and had to cater to focus groups and demographics determined from on high.

Maybe Richard had to work with other bad designers. But that's just how things work now. It's just that because you can't work by yourself so much any more, the quality of management and other designers directly influence people's perception of you. I mean, if Richard were to be judged, instead of by his work on Ultima 1-7 but by his work on games like Ultima 8-9, Lineage 2, CoH/CoV, Tabula Rasa, his highly anticipated "Ultimate Collector" someone might consider him a designer who sucks.

It's not the designers who necessarily sucks, it's the ecosystem that allows sucky design to persevere. In the 80s if you had a designer who sucked, they made a game who sucked. Today if you have a designer who sucks, you have one more bad system in an otherwise good game. That becomes tolerated and users are willing to get yet another bad system in a good game, until the games become a mass of "could have been nice" features that end up poorly realized, rushed, or retooled to appeal to a wide audience.

nhoven• 13 years ago

Pretty self-centered. For a world with only a couple great game designers, there's an awful lot of excellent games out there.

snake_plissken• 13 years ago

Ultima VII still reigns supreme.

calhoun137• 13 years ago

Game design is NOT easy, and it's just as much an art form as painting or writing music. Asking what makes a game fun is sort of like asking what makes a certain song "good"; it boils down to a question of personal preference, and everyone has different tastes. You can't please everyone at once, but if you dumb down the game enough you can appeal to a very wide audience. That's what happens with formula movies, pop music, and increasingly, video games as well.

Maybe the problem isn't that most game designers suck, but that the major studio's have calculated that they can be more profitable if they don't bother spending the time and money it takes to make games that are actually well designed.

badloginagain• 13 years ago

The core of his argument centers around that compared to the other disciplines, it's harder to find a "good" game designer than it is to find a "good" programmer/artist etc.

But that makes sense- as he says, it's hard to go to school for it. It is a non-linear discipline. You need to be knowledgeable of all the other disciplines (how the game is technically built to understand scope of design), you have to be able to work from a systems scale all the way down to individual variables, you have to be able to talk the language of engineers, artists, and producers/business/marketing.

What I find offensive is that Garriot is saying "If you don't hit all those points, you really just suck as a designer."

Well thanks for the input, Lord British. Your flamebait has really elevated the state of the industry.

Richard Garriott on why “most game designers really just suck”

Related Stories