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.
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.
>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.
>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.
> 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."
While an individual's taste may be particular to him or her, it is possible to group and classify visual art styles. This is applicable to other aspects of game design as well, like genre and specific game mechanics.
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.
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.
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.