[game_edu] Brenda Braithwaite's game_edu rant at GDC

[Anthony Hart-Jones]

On 04/03/11 05:41, pawlicki at cs.rochester.edu wrote:

> If you don't understand a compression ratio or

> the concept of a torque converter, then can you really design sports

> cars? If you don't understand how a camera works, can you really be a

> director? Similarly, if you don't understand how the digital information

> machine works, then can you really design a digital game? (Or any

> useful application?) I honestly  don't think so

   Well...  As a former artistic director in the theatre...  Knowing how 
a camera works is useful, but I was always told that having a decent 
Director of Photography is better.  Theatre directing gives many skills 
transferable to film, but there are people whose entire purpose is to 
help you realise your vision.  I was a dabbler, a dilettante, but that 
never held me back when talking to film directors.
   Even working in the games industry, I found that I never had to talk 
to the artists in terms of explicit camera-angles, merely in themes and 
broad strokes because they knew their jobs well enough to advise me on 
what they felt would work best.  I say 'peep-hole' and they already have 
'fish-eye lens, appropriate colour distortion, 1.5m camera-height' 
running through their minds.


On 04/03/11 07:27, Stephen Jacobs wrote:

> Any member of a multidisciplinary team is a stronger member if they've walked a mile in the other members' shoes.  Ideally game designers will have had some programming, writing, art/modeling/animation experience so they have an experiential understanding of the needs, processes, constraints, roles, etc of the   other team members and can " sketch" what they want from the other members using their vocabulary and/or tools.

    This, I will give you.  The primary role of a games designer is that 
of a technical-writer / translator.  Forget 'bright ideas' and 
'game-mechanics' - unless you are Peter Molyneux, you might spend about 
10% of a development cycle working on the creative stuff and the rest 
either explaining it to other people or implementing it yourself with 
whatever scripting language the Head of Tech has implemented.

   There will be top-level (dumbed down for management) overviews of 
every system and mechanic with pretty pictures.  There will be explicit 
documentation for the external designers and more technically-minded 
producers.  There will be asset-lists for the artists.  There will be at 
least one TDD that explains how the systems work, often with UML and 
other technical details.  There will be walkthroughs for each major 
build (one simple one for the publisher, one in-depth for the testers) 
and every single testing-phase build.  There will be instruction manuals 
explaining all controls, every customisable feature, every mechanic.

   Oh, and after that, there is the GDD...

   I don't know about other designers, but I studied a dedicated 
games-development Software Engineering degree.  By the end of it, I 
could make art assets, create a DirectX-based engine from scratch and 
design games.  In fact, that was what half of us did; we built a game 
from scratch on our own.
   Even with that degree, I struggled at times to communicate ideas to 
the programmers.  Quite often, I would see them 'improving' the design 
on their own initiative to match the engine's limitations and then 
getting the lead designer to 'fix' the GDD so it matched the current 
build.  Some of it was the design team's lack of technical knowledge, 
but I think there are also issues with programmers being unable to 
communicate technical constraints to the designers.

   Yes, I think teaching programming helps, but half of what a 
programmer knows about making games, they learn in the first few months 
with a development studio.  Yes, it will help you to pick up scripting 
languages if you already have programming experience, but I have also 
seen what happens when you try teaching Python to a C++ user.

   My big issue, and the rant that started this doesn't seem to help 
much, is that too many people think games-design is easy.

   When was the last time you saw a CEO edit the art-team's models?

   When did you last catch a producer editing the source code?

   On the other hand, how many of us have ever worked on a game where 
they didn't have half a dozen people from outside the design team trying 
to 'help' with the design?  As a writer, it is even worse; there seems 
to be no member of a development team who does not think they can 
improve a script.

   Designers would benefit from seeing how the other teams work, but the 
other teams would probably benefit from a crash-course in design theory too.