Month: May 2008

A version of this article first appeared in the May 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Getting your first design gig is often a combination of luck and who-you-know.  But once you’re there, moving up the ranks is typically entirely based on merit.  The junior designers who contribute rock star quality on the small projects they are given will quickly be granted larger responsibilities on bigger systems and more important parts of the game.  Leads love being able to hand off design projects to capable, reliable, low-maintenance designers.  So for those designers who feel they are banging their head against a glass ceiling, there is a clear path to move up – stop making game designs that suck.

The path to do so isn’t immediately intuitive, because it takes an entirely different way of thinking.  Too many junior designers have a habit of hoarding their ideas like precious gems, not collaborating with others, and avoiding showing design documents until they’re absolutely perfect.  They think that their job is all about idea generation, and this perspective lends them all sorts of bad habits.  They’re overprotective of their ideas.  They’re obsessed with getting credit and, at the same time, utterly terrified that their ideas will be rejected, feeling that it reflects poorly on them in the highly competitive field of game design.  The end result of all this self-consciousness all too often is designs that are too big, too safe, or too weird.

The best senior designers I’ve worked with have a different mindset.  They understand, inherently, that most ideas are bad – even their own.  They have less investment in getting their ideas into the game, and more in being sure the game rocks, no matter whose idea gets in.  Consciously or not, they focus on idea synthesis, a term I use to describe the informal game design philosophy that focuses heavily on collaboration, mass idea generation, and focused execution as the pathway to design success.  Continue reading