[munificent]

Game design (whether computer or even board games) is a valuable topic to learn even if you never make a real game. If you make any kind of thing that people use, learning a little about how to think like a game designer can help you make things that are more rewarding and pleasant to use.

One way to think of videogames is that they are useless software. Imagine a word processor that couldn't save or print files. Or a compiler that didn't generate executables that ran on any machine but your own. Why would anyone ever use such a pointless thing?

Well, games are in many ways exactly that. They don't really touch any part of the outside world or produce anything materially useful. They're self contained. So why do people sink time into them even though they can't get anything tangible in return? It's because the process of using the software itself—playing the game—is so intrinsically enjoyable.

If you can learn a little bit of that and apply it to software that does do something useful, you can end up with the kind of programs that build devoted fanbases.

[Danieru]

Incredible how many posters are missing your point!

As a gamedev I 100% agree with your assertion that games are useless. An expression I use in game design is "fictional friction". Nothing in my game is real. None of the struggle is essential. Every mouse click or decision was a fiction I designed for players.

Nothing prevents me from giving players infitnite money, in fact there is a dev cheat menu which does just that. Instead all my effort revolves around crafting fake value for otherwise meaningless bits.

Thus games are the peak of software design: people put up with other software to pay for chances to play mine.

[juanuys]

While we have the gamedevs here, and we're talking about game design, I would very much love and appreciate if you could upload a picture of your bookshelf and share it here.

I'm almost done with the Coursera CalArts game design specialisation, and they have cited a few resources, but I want to know what the industry recommend amongst themselves.

(That said, I've found the peer assessments on Coursera utterly lacking, some of the videos hard to understand and badly captioned, and will be starting a master's in game design in September...)

[Danieru]

That's a fun question. Personally we do not have more than a couple dozen books in total at our house. This is more the product of my generation plus living in Japan where no one can afford the dead space for a book shelf.

For the subject matter I would say your best set of resources is GDC presentations. Our industry's great minds never write books, or even web articles for that matter. Best they give are the occasional GDC presentation. Even then Miyamoto has maybe given a couple hours of publicly accessible teaching material in his entire career.

If you are interested in Rendering that fields has a good number of useful books written. Design itself is more about "theories of games". Everyone has their own theories, mine might be more influenced by Sid Meier than anything.

My experience has been with a couple western designers, but more so stalwart japanese designers. On the Japanese side you'd be surprise how "personal" the design philosophies are. Westerners tend to be more rule driven, and thus if you want a systems driven understanding of design that needs to come from the west.

The training system in Japan is more apprenticeship driven. What the west would call designers first start as planners. Planner being a rather low level job with lots of manual grunt work. Then within a company the senior designers will couch the juniors on the subject of game design.

Thus there indeed does exist tomes on Nintendo's game design: but no one outside Nintendo has ever seen it and no one Ex-Nintendo can talk about it. Just look at how Ojiro (https://twitter.com/moppin_) designer of Downwell went silent after joining Nintendo, then after leaving has remained silent.

Off the top of my head I know for sure Nintendo & Bandai use this "in-company learning" structure. Square Enix being a collection of fiefdoms tends more towards hiring a designer they like then putting them in charge of a team. Hence how you got Tokyo RPG Factory.

Note I'm approaching this with the understanding that a good game only has 1 lead designer. In Japan this is the game's director. It might be that in the west game's have a more group driven approach.

[juanuys]

Thank you for highlighting the West's rules/systems-driven approach vs the mentoring approach in Japan.

I an indeed infinitely curious about the personal design philosophies of all the secretive greats. I guess there's something special inside all of us (game designers), and we just need to find it and nurture it. Books are good for starters, and up to a point.

PS good luck with Railgrade!

[scollet]

Am I missing these wieldings of "useless"? Aren't there intangible experiences like morality, logic, therapy, etc.?

[meheleventyone]

I take serious issue with the description of games as useless. They don’t do anything in the same way as reading a book doesn’t do anything. Or playing chess doesn’t do anything. You absolutely get something tangible in return. Whether it’s a new perspective, new friends or utter humiliation.

The idea we should capture the way games build tangible experiences and apply them to “useful software” is to misunderstand both what makes games useful and software that achieves a task. Gamification is swimming in the shallow end of game design. Swimming in the deeper end is beyond what most productive software should be doing design wise. The goals are different, the results are different and more importantly building software that fuses games and learning is different than either.

[munificent]

> I take serious issue with the description of games as useless.

I figured some might. Try to charitably understand why I chose to emphasize with that word. Yes, obviously, playing games provides all sorts of meaningful things to the player. As I said, playing games is intrinsically rewarding.

But what most games don't do is provide extrinsic utility. Playing a videogame does not pay your mortgage, fix your leaky sink, cure your halitosis, or get you an A in class. (Ignoring professional game playing for money, of course.)

Your electricity company's website can be a slow, bug-ridden heap of PHP 1.0 garbage and you will still use it because it lets you pay their bill and keep your lights on. A videogame has no such luxury. If using the game itself is not enjoyable, you have no users. That means good game designers are very well trained in making things people want to use. That's a great skill for anyone who wants to design beloved things.

> The idea we should capture the way games build tangible experiences and apply them to “useful software” is to misunderstand both what makes games useful and software that achieves a task.

There is definitely an important aspect of games that cannot be harnessed by useful software. A key, perhaps the fundamental thing that makes play play is safety. There is a lower bound to how much harm playing a game poorly can do. That keeps the stakes low, which allows you to get into a freer, more exploratory mindset.

Obviously, the app you use to pay your mortgage cannot offer that freeing sense of delight. While that safety is what makes games games, that is not all that makes games enjoyable.

> Gamification is swimming in the shallow end of game design.

Oh dear, I certainly didn't have "gamification" and all the sleazy things that has been used for in mind, though I can see how what I said was ambiguous regarding that.

Maybe a more direct way of stating what I was getting at is that game designers have a greater appreciation of usability than many others. Every tool has some mixture of utility (what it can do) and usability (what it makes easy/enjoyable to do). If a tool has important utility, users will suffer using regardless of its usability. If a university's slow automated phone system is the only way to register classes, well, I guess you're gonna sit on hold for three hours. But you won't like it.

Since games have no utility, they must have usability. Usability ("fun") is foundational in a way that it isn't in other fields. And I think there's a lot to be learned from game designers about how they approach that.

[grugagag]

How about logic/puzzle games? They train our brains in finding patterns and that built ‘muscle’ can be applied in non gaming areas. They also serve as a springboard into software development for many. I think the danger is overindulging and the gamification of everything, but in small to moderate amounts games could provide some value. Leavig aside computer games, I think playing in general has a very good value in learning.

[MaulingMonkey]

> But what most games don't do is provide extrinsic utility. Playing a videogame does not pay your mortgage, fix your leaky sink, cure your halitosis, or get you an A in class. (Ignoring professional game playing for money, of course.)

Games can help you practice interpersonal communication skills, teamwork and coordination, problem solving, and fine motor skills. These may very well help you with your work or leaky sink in the future. Games can also help inure you to failure, and provide some perhaps necessary escapeism to improve your mental health (perhaps more important to work on than your halitosis!). Or help provide that social connection that turns into a job offer.

Playing cow clicker all day - sure, that's probably not all that extrinsicly useful. But you're painting with an overly large brush IMO. And there's perhaps a reason you'll have a damn difficult time finding anyone playing cow clicker all day ;).

> Your electricity company's website can be a slow, bug-ridden heap of PHP 1.0 garbage and you will still use it because it lets you pay their bill and keep your lights on.

Or I might pay by mail or phone instead. Or use my bank's auto-pay setup. It's less a matter of utility, and more a matter of competition.

Games have a huge entertainment industry they're competing with - lots of choice. It wasn't always this competitive - people enjoyed playing Pong on the Atari back in the day. There's plenty of "extrinsicly useful" software I avoid - yes, even when I'm earning $$$ to pay that mortgage - in favor of better alternatives. Your electricity company's website probably has few alternatives, but even then there might be some.

[meheleventyone]

Oh yes absolutely UX design can learn a lot from games.

VR applications are riddled with games folks both because the tech requirements are the same. And also because the interaction design really benefits from the way games use space and deal with limited control input.

I still fundamentally disagree that games don’t provide people with external utility. It’s a popular assumption because they don’t necessarily do anything obvious or provide you with something tangible to others. There are plenty of emotional journeys you can take, creativity to engage in and skills you can learn. My younger brother for example was really helped in learning to read by playing Monkey Island.

An ephemeral word processor actually sounds like something that could provide cathartic release. It might not be as useless as you think.

[Jugurtha]

Can you give a few examples of some products that get this right? Not just in terms of what's commonly referred to as "gamification", and not talking about badges and things that dance around, but a deeper, less obvious, more subtle and refined connection with to that analogy?

I remember I liked a game and I started writing code to play it for me so I could do other things while still having the feeling that an extension of myself was playing.

As a side note, the company had one of the coolest recruiting tactics. I had to examine HTTP responses to be able to send in requests that triggered actions, and they included a call to application in the HTTP response headers "If you're reading this, please apply".

[seangp]

My company was asked to make some health and safety induction software. Visitors to the client company would have to self complete the induction process in the reception area whilst waiting for their host to collect them. Client wanted us to present 38 slides worth of information and have them ‘acknowledge’ each point. Instead of doing this we turned it into a game whereby the user has to explore a simplified 3D version of the building and identify the health and safety risks themselves. Graphics were well designed, it had elements of humour and it worked. Our analytics showed that 94% of people who started interacting with the software completed the entire induction process.

[Jugurtha]

Could you write more about this? What have you used to develop that game? Was it the core competency of your team? I'm wondering because the client did not expect to receive a game, so didn't come to you for the game-dev ability. Am I wrong? I'd love to know more.

[munificent]

> Can you give a few examples of some products that get this right?

The latest one for me is Ableton Live. It is just a beautiful piece of software. Everything feels smooth, immediate, expressive. It gets out of my way whenever it can but is right there at my fingertips when I want it to be. It's just a lovely, lovely program.

[Jugurtha]

Nice! You probably know of this link "Get started making music"[0] and I found it pretty cool.

What do you think of "The Sims Game Design Documents"[1]? Could you recommend other similar resources?

I guess what really strikes a chord with me is the arc, not only "in" the game, but of the journey to make the game. One book I enjoyed on an emotional level was "The Making of Prince of Persia"[2] by Jordan Mechner. I also enjoyed "Masters of Doom"[3] by David Kushner, but more on the merit of good research, which I really respect. I don't want a montage, I want the story with the suffering and tribulations.

Do you know of similar content?

[0]: https://learningmusic.ableton.com/

[1]: https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments/

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Journals-1985-19...

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cult...

[meddlin]

I'm asking because you seem to speak with experience...

Why do we make video games? I've been programming for 10 years, I love games; wanted to make them. But I went into infosec because it felt...justified? Like it's more noble? But that doesn't seem to make sense saying it out loud.

But your points on understanding game design because of that human-software-machine connection, that just feels like it makes sense.

I'm sorry, this question has just been bugging me for over a year now.

[rayalez]

There might not be a deep philosophical answer. Making games is fun, playing games is fun, that's all there is to it. If you can make money doing something you enjoy - why wouldn't you?

To try to go for a philosophical answer - why do we do anything? Cooking, writing, building shelter, sending spaceships to mars. I think generally, the purpose is to make human brains feel good. Ultimately, we all are going to die and nothing we do will have a lasting impact, but as long as we're here - we spend our time making ourselves and each other feel good. Games are one of the ways to make people feel good.

A more cynical answer - we make games for no good reason. Games feel good in the moment, but feel like a waste of time and energy afterwards, making a net negative impact on people's lives, like junk food or addiction. People play them against their best interests, because it feels good in the moment, and because people aren't rational creatures. People make games because making games is fun and makes them money.

One more answer - making games is art. Art is cool. Making games is an art that can be beautiful, interactive, engaging. It's a combination of multiple art forms (painting, sculpting, storytelling, music, etc). It's also way more fun than most kinds of art, people don't get addicted to paintings or books the way they get addicted to video games. I doubt that people got as much joy out of looking at Mona Lisa as they did out of playing Minecraft.

One more related thought - the real world is overrated. We have the power to make imaginary worlds that are far more engaging and satisfying than the one where we live. Better ones. So we make them.

These are different possible perspectives, pick yours. There can be a bunch more I'm not considering.

[meddlin]

Thank you for this.

What I left out of my question is my desire and admiration for automotive sports. It's so strange to me that I have no problem admiring to one day build a track car, and waste tires, fuel, and endless hours of amateur manufacturing effort all in the name of "fun". Sure, I'll learn many skills, but it's primarily for fun.

So I'm left with--how do I resolve the cognitive dissonance that "cars" are okay, but "games" need to be justified? I think there's something deeper going on for myself.

Thank you for taking the time to walk through this.

[ido]

Why do we paint? Sculpt? Write? Film? Play or compose music?

Both art and entertainment are important.

[roudaki]

No game is David's Michelangelo in talent or effect.

When people say we need entertainment they are thinking in a sense of dessert like of course you deserve a dessert sometimes. But that is not how we got 67% obesity rates.

And now with companies aggressively stealing attention and average person spending 5 hours a day on entertainment while reading one book a year you do feel little guilty for creating one more app to steal you attention and sell you microtransactions.

but this pressure is a positive thing as now when we make games in free time or talk about games we focus on more artsy indie stuff. it is weird how quickly most of my friends dropping Call of Duty or Halo after decade of obsessing. this pressure will create more artistic games.

[drops]

> No game is David's Michelangelo in talent or effect.

Yet. How long has sculpting been an art form and how long has it taken for Michelangelo to surface?

How long have video games been an art form?

[scollet]

Also games think on more dimensions. I get sculpting, painting, performance, literature... and just enough magic to make it fresh. Only certain vectors can be described by other mediums and often not combinatorialy.

[dkersten]

I think you just haven't played the right games. There are some incredible games which, to me, have the same appeal as Michelangelo's David is to some (personally, to me, its just a sculpture, nothing too interesting -- my point is, the art that some people find meaningful and interesting is completely subjective and depends on the person).

[dkersten]

Why do we write books, make movies, music or art?

[cross_wiber]

This sounds very similar to my perspective, which is that most applications try to provide a nice user experience in order to assist in doing something: creating a document, communicating with friends, reading the news, etc. With a game, though, the user experience is what it is trying to do. There's nothing other than UX. That makes game development good practice for focusing on UX in general.

[XCSme]

Weren't there multiple studies showing that games gained experience is useful for the real world?

* Social - How many people have learned to trade and avoid scams IRL by playing RuneScape? No RuneScape player would have falled for the recent "double your BTC" Twitter scam. * Strategy- From all kinds of games (chess, strategy, fighting games, shooters, etc.) * Working in teams - MOBAs, Rocket League, Shooters. You start flaming your team, you lose. * Health - I know people that hate doing exercise, yet they played hundreds of hours of Table Tennis in VR and losing weight. * Self-esteem - Games allow people to clearly know when they are really good at something. They also make it easy to see progress. So, you might feel like you suck at everything IRL, but you find that one game that you are good at and then people even respect you for that and look up to you. * Mental health - Might be for escapism but also could help you express your anger or other feelings in a game instead of the real world This list could go on forever.

> They're self contained This is so, so wrong. I don't know if you are a gamer or not, but gaming communities are huge. Once you start playing a game, you will want to discuss it with others, learn from others, share your experience with others. Not only that, but through a game, the game developers communicate to you in a sense that no other experience can (books, movies). Yes, the "bits" that make up a game are self-contained as any other physical object, but the story behind them and what they express spreads way further than themselves. I think "real" software is a lot more self-contained, plus most of it is created to hinder value creation, not to actually create value.

[munificent]

> Social - How many people have learned to trade and avoid scams IRL by playing RuneScape?

This may be true, but RuneScape players do not seek out the game to improve that skill. They don't think, "well, I'm pretty crappy at trading and dealing with scammers. I guess I'll go play RuneScape, even though it's not fun at all, to improve that skill."

The other examples in your paragraph are in the same vein. I am not saying that playing games does not have positive benefits. I'm saying that most players do not choose to play games primarily for those benefits.

> I know people that hate doing exercise, yet they played hundreds of hours of Table Tennis in VR and losing weight.

My point exactly. If all they cared about was losing weight, they would exercise and play Table Tennis at the same rate. The reason they play VR tennis is because it's more usable.

> I don't know if you are a gamer or not, but gaming communities are huge.

Not much of a gamer these days, but I worked at EA for eight years.

You're taking umbrage at what I said because games are clearly close to your heart, but read a little closer. I'm not attacking games. I'm doing the opposite. I'm pointing out that games must be fantastically designed because people will choose to sink hours into them regardless of whether they provide practical benefit or not.

Let's say a study came out that showed that RuneScape actually did not improve your real-life trading skills. Do you think that would significantly affect how much people played it?

[XCSme]

Hmm, so your point is that the main reason play games is for entertainment and not to improve a specific skill. But, does it matter? If it was not for games, they wouldn't have improved those skills at all, as they were not actively looking to improve them, or are doing deliberate practices is too boring or intense for some.

> If all they cared about was losing weight, they would exercise and play Table Tennis at the same rate.

They did care about losing weight, but going to the gym or exercising was not something that they did before or were ever planning to do, simply because they didn't consider it to be an enjoyable activity. My point is, if it was not for VR Table Tennis, they wouldn't have lost that weight. Same with other skills, if it was not for the games that were facilitating the development of certain skills, most likely most would never aquire those skills, which, for the most part have clear real-life applicability and benefits.

I think it's the same like saying tracking steps taken using mobile's device gamification feature has no real-world benefit. Yet, my dad actively started walking more just to reach the daily steps goal. If it was not for that goal, he wouldn't have started walking more.

> Let's say a study came out that showed that RuneScape actually did not improve your real-life trading skills. Do you think that would significantly affect how much people played it?

There are certainly games and gamification features that make it really easy to learn a specific skill. That being said, most people play games because they like it, not to actively improve a skill. In this RuneScape example, no, I wouldn't care about the studies, but while playing the game I would definitely be happy to see me getting better are trading (eg. selling fish next to the fishing spot at a cheap price, or travelling a long way to the bank and sell it at a higher price, or even creating huge stocks of fish and then waiting for a price increase before selling). I think games are really good at making people find new skills and things they are good at, without them actively looking to improve in any way. Once you find a skill that you enjoy (eg. trading), you can go further, outside the gaming world, and actively look to improve that skill or use it in the real world.

> I'm pointing out that games must be fantastically designed because people will choose to sink hours into them regardless of whether they provide practical benefit or not.

People sink hours in anything regardless they provide a practical benefit or not: games, books, netflix, hobbies in general. There are many different type of games, from those that directly play with your dopamine system and have the dreaded in-app-purchases monetizaton, to those that tell a good story or are highly competitive and make you feel good for defeating others. People have various reasons to play games, and one of them could be the well-designed game loop, but this one is usually the most relevant part in the addictive pay-to-win games mentioned before.

[kumarvvr]

>useless

Well, they are not exactly useless. Even discounting for educational games, pointless games like Borderlands / Grand Theft Auto have great value. That value lies in providing entertainment in an interactive way, something that was never possible for most of human existence.

There is something magical about highly interactive games, like say Far Cry. GTA, etc, where the player knows his game, while being the same product, is unique to him/her. Services like Twitch have created whole new ecosystems of micro-economies, where a section of population is replacing movies with watching others playing games. There is great fun in watching an expert gamer playing a game. Part of the experience is in unexpected humor through mistakes, wrong decisions, distractions, etc. Part of the experience is in knowing that none of it is scripted and everything is happening in real time.

As an evolution of the entertainment industry, it's not useless.

There are many negative aspects of gaming as well. If played in excess, at the cost of childhood related activities, like playing with friends outside, etc, it can be detrimental to social development.

But those sorts of problems are there in many areas of life. Anything done in excess is detrimental.

[gcpwnd]

You missed the point. He said games do not generate anything materially useful. His intend here was to trivialize the true value of games and still giving them the honor of being worthwhile. Read between the lines or just don't at all.

[scollet]

> Read between the lines or just don't at all.

Not OP, but I take umbridge with this last bit.

That aside, I fail to see how exercising grey matter and fine motor control is not materially useful.

[60654]

It's going to be grating for any gamedev to hear games described as "useless", as if players' enjoyment was somehow not valuable.

But I think you're basically making the argument that games are art. That they exist for the aesthetic experience, and for no utilitarian purpose.

And I'm very much okay with that. :)

[nightcracker]

I would argue that there's a big class of games that have an educational purpose. E.g. Minecraft, TIS-100, and many more. Even an arbitrary game that's not in your native language is helpful, I learned English mostly from gaming.

[andai]

I immediately thought of music software as something I find intrinsically rewarding, but of course it produces music. Then again, games produce let's plays :)