David Sirlin has an oft-mentioned book called Playing to Win, available in its entirety for free online. It’s a fascinating read from the perspective of a highly competitive gamer. His disclaimer at the beginning is entirely apt—most people who don’t already have a handle on playing competitively probably won’t believe that he’s right, or will get angry at his writing. Some of it seems calculated to enrage; he doesn’t really pull any punches, and throws a few that may not be strictly necessary.
I was initially enraged upon reading it. Sirlin starts by calling any player who doesn’t play to win a “scrub”, a choice of term that seems hyper-elitist and calculated to alienate, and I’m still not convinced that it isn’t. The fact that he’s largely not wrong in the rest of the book only furthered my anger, because I was left without a lot to rail against.
In retrospect, some time later, Playing to Win put me in mind of one of my college professors, who taught game design and was absolutely crucial in me getting into the games industry. His first lecture was brutal, especially for a roomful of aspiring game developers who were still wide-eyed and optimistic. It went something like this:
“Alright, let’s get started. Who here has a game idea that they want to share, or better yet, make?”
<Pretty much everyone emphatically raises a hand.>
“Good. Forget that idea; it’s worthless. Come up with a new one. You have until the end of the class period.”
A Punch in the Face
It’s almost like a physical blow to deal with that sort of thing. I was reeling after his comment and I could tell that a lot of other people were as well, with different reactions. A lot of people got defensive, others looked like they might cry, other people were clearly gearing up to drop the course. It didn’t help that the crux of the first lecture was about implementation over theory, with quotes like “Ideas are a dime a dozen; they don’t mean anything unless you can build them,” and other things that make a budding designer’s stomach tighten with emotion.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I started to get perspective. We were introduced to the “tyrannosaurus in our minds”, described as a construct that attacks any new ideas that enter the mind, and destroys ones that are too weak to survive. It became part of a larger lesson about being your own harshest critic and not getting too attached to an idea. At the time, I’d spent several years on a lengthy game design doc, a sprawling magnum opus that I’d put almost three hundred pages of text into. I had been convinced that I was going to one day make it into a full-fledged game. The professor’s tyrannosaurus analogy had an interesting embedded lesson:
“I often have people describe their game ideas to me, and I can separate the good designers from the bad almost immediately, just by how well-fed their tyrannosaurus is. A bad designer’s tyrannosaurus will be lazy, or too weak to feed, and ideas that would never see the light of day end up in their mind, wasting their time. A lot of really bad ideas get made because someone’s tyrannosaurus wasn’t trained well enough to cull it before hundreds or thousands of hours had been spent on development, and by the time someone realized the idea really was simply terrible, too much money had been spent to abandon the project.”
“The first thing any responsible producer or publisher is going to do is try to poke holes in an idea. It has to be done, because when millions of dollars are on the line you need to nip bad ideas in the bud quickly. Good designers will have thought of this already, and have answers ready.”
Picking up the Pieces
A lot of people will rail against things like the above, saying things like “this is why games are all clones of one another nowadays” and “that kind of mentality means that there’s no innovation!”
It’s not true. The very best games are a product of this kind of mentality. It’s easy to lose sight of it, but there are shining examples all over the place. Team Fortress 2 is a game that really looked deeply at other games and culled even the best of those. Team-based shooters used to release with tons of guns and as many maps as they could build. Team Fortress 2 had a bare handful of weapons by comparison and released with only two maps, but those two maps had been extensively play-tested and polished until they shone.
Pokémon has an incredibly straightforward system, one that’s gone pretty much unchanged through fifteen years of releases, and is still incredibly popular. Worth noting is that nearly every mechanical addition they’ve made to the game has felt tacked-on and extraneous, from odd baking games to playing dress-up.
Building a Better Designer
The very first thing I was tasked with doing when I started working in the games industry was building a small section of map. I was excited and inspired and, even though I’d been given a week to do it, I turned it around in a day and a half. My lead looked at it and told me it was too complicated and that I should rebuild it from scratch. Around the third or fourth iteration it finally passed muster, and I’d taken the whole week doing it. It would have been devastating, except I quickly realized that I wasn’t culling ideas as well as I should. The end result was a tight, fun experience, something that the original, heavily-overdesigned version was not.
The whole thing has stuck with me, and I’m always on the lookout for how games implement their ideas, and which ideas shouldn’t have passed by the tyrannosaurus somewhere along the way.
I still have the two-hundred-and-eighty page game design concept I’d been working on, and I was too attached to it for a long time to turn the dinosaur on it. I finally did, and mentally shredded 99% of it.
Those three pages that are left, though? There’s a solid core for a game there, one that I might make eventually.
Next: What Players Want (Ugly Truths in Gaming, Part 2)
