So, every so often, I wonder about what it is that I actually do. That is, if you ask someone ‘What is a doctor?’ they will have a relatively straightforward answer. If you ask someone, ‘What does a mechanical engineer do?’ they will generally have an answer. ‘What does a game designer do?’ is tricky for two reasons. First, it’s not a profession that’s been around particularly long, and even throughout its existance, it’s been somewhat amorphous. Second, to define what a game designer does, first you must define what a game actually is.

On the surface of things, a game designer’s job is to come up with cool ideas for games. Great. But as pretty well everyone knows, coming up with cool ideas for games is pretty trivial. That’s basically the process of ‘Wouldn’t that be cool?’ where you sit around and think of awesome things to do. Wouldn’t it be cool if you made a game where the world was ruled by sentient stand mixers, and humans had to overthrow them using only aluminum foil and a spatula? Stuff like that. Come up with ten of those scenarios. It’ll probably take you what, half a second?

That’s what it seems a lot of people think game design is all about. It’s certainly the image they pitch on those Westwood College commercials where they’ve gotta ‘tighten up the graphics on level 3.’ Whatever. Let me just dispel that notion. That part of game design is maybe the initial .5% of the work. Doing it well, and coming up with compelling concepts has great worth – don’t get me wrong. It’s genuinely difficult to come up with innovative, compelling ideas that are actually even marginally feasible, even in a blue-sky style brainstorming session.

So, yeah, it’s a skill. But it’s a skill a lot of people have, at least in some degree.

So… about what a game actually *is*. I had to think about this a great deal while writing my NaNoWriMo project this year, because it deals with someone who’s thinking about exactly that, and I needed to have a plausble, realistic conclusion for this guy to come to. As you might know, if you’ve ever written a book, sometimes, your characters say unexpected things. It’s like exploring some bit of your subconscious that you’ve allowed to speak for the first time.

The essential conclusion was that a game was a series of choices that allow the player to make choices *better* as the game progresses.

It’s a relatively nonstandard definition of what a game is. In ‘A Theory of Fun for Games,’ Raph Koster solicits definitions from several famous game designers, and it turns out that that definition appears to align most closely with Sid Meier’s definition of what a game is. That’s not surprising, to me, because as much as I love action games, I’m a system-based designer, and Sid Meier makes a lot of system-heavy games.

But then, what does the game designer actually *do*? This was another thing that I had to tackle for NaNoWriMo, because in the context of a novel, you can literally make anything you please. I had to figure out some concept for a plausible game for this character to design in a fantasy world I’d created. One of the challenges he faced was the notion of creating anything you wanted without restriction.

A game, without restrictions, is essentially meaningless, given the previous definition. How do you determine what the consequences of an action are, if you can actually be doing *anything*? I could say, I’d like to design a game where the game world is the whole world, augmented by my imagination. I can have any or all powers I can dream of, and I can do anything, go anywhere, be anyone. If it’s not something that occurs in the real world, I can change it so that it does. I can open doors to dimensions that are defined only by my imagination.

So, what I’ve come to is that being a game designer is fundamentally about creating an efficient, compelling representation of a limited space, and providing situations where a player has to make meaningful choices, in a way that augments their ability to continue to make those choices.

Which is about as academic, and dry a definition as you can get. But let’s take a game like Gears of War. It’s a limited space. You play as a human. The physics that govern the game world are largely Earth-like. You possess no real ‘powers’ save for a largely superhuman durability. These are all limitations on the player’s experience, and they were *created* specifically by a game designer who was working within another set of restrictions – time, budget, manpower, technology. A good designer creates an efficient, compelling representation of a limited space *because* all games are fundamentally limited by time, budget, manpower and technology.

The difference between a good game designer and a bad game designer come down to basically how well they can create a compelling experience (the X factor), and how efficiently they can translate the resources at their disposal into that compelling experience.

This, I think, is a *very* system-focused view of what game design is, but I think it still works. For me, a lot of my work is utilizing existing tools to produce unexpected results. Flexing systems to do things they weren’t necessarily designed to do, but are capable of. Taking two systems that work independently, and finding the capabilities of the intersections of the two systems to produce something new. I know that sounds sort of obvious, but this is where a lot of the most interesting stuff I’ve created has resided.

Because all resources are limited, finding places where you can create things essentially out of nothing, and then understanding what makes something compelling are pretty core skills, IMO, to being a successful designer.

But what *is* compelling? What makes something interesting? What makes something fun? Something I read about the Wii, and its control scheme, talked about the concept of ‘input magnification’ and how the Wii magnified a user’s input *less* than other consoles. That is, if I hit a button in Gears of War, I can kill someone in a giant fountain of blood. To bowl, in Wii Sports, I have to make a much grander, and more importantly, *less abstract* motion. The input has a higher corelation to the output.

While the less magnified input is clearly compelling, I like the notion of ‘input magnification,’ and not just in terms of press button -> things go boom. In the food creation system for the Sims, for instance, the point was that you could take a system that’s quite simple – you have a palette of thirty-some odd ingredients. In previous games, you had maybe five different ‘ingredients’ that you could use to create five different meals. With the combinatorial system in Sims 2, those thirty ingredients could be combined in dozens of different ways, resulting in millions of unique results.

But, millions of unique results doesn’t mean anything, unless there’s some consequence to what result you generate. So, the stats for the food *matter* – they affect your character. Some combinations create powerups that can be used for a limited time. Because the stats are then tied to the ingredients, you give the player the tools to understand how the system works, and make better decisions in the future. You not only give them a large space to explore, but you give them the tools to begin to understand it.

Not only that, but in-game, their avatar can use that information to become more efficient, giving them more time to explore the space before they go hungry, or need to attend another need. The consquence of the system applied both to the player’s knowledge, and their avatar’s ability to use that knowledge.

That magnifies the input of not only the player, who can make very simple choices and achieve powerful results, but it also magnifies the input of the designer, who can create a huge amount of gameplay with relatively little input. That’s where the efficiency comes in. That system was created by probably only 1.5 person-months worth of effort, whereas other features in the game took several person-years, with less compelling results.

I’m not really sure if this is the best way to describe my job, but it’s something that’s been rattling around in my head for a while, and it’s certainly less arbitrary than many other definitions I’ve heard.