Last winter, I read Justin Gary's Think Like a Game Designer. I know Gary from his work on Ascension, although I cannot remember now where I first heard about his book. I took quite a few notes while reading and considered writing a formal review here on my blog. I discussed it with some people on Discord but never assembled those notes and stories into a review.
I will be teaching Introduction to Game Design again this Fall, and so I am going through my notes from last year and figuring out what I want to change. I pulled out my notebook and reviewed my notes from Gary's book, marking particular exercises from it for possible inclusion in my class.
One of the exercises that interested me comes from Chapter 5. Gary frames game design as a six-step iterative process of inspiring, framing, brainstorming, prototyping, testing, and iterating, and Chapter 5 describes the inspiring step. Incidentally, his model is not bad, and using "iterating" to describe a constituent step of an iterative model reflects the informal nature of the book. The exercise itself is described as having six parts, each of which should be given twenty minutes to complete.
Today, I decided to try the exercise for myself, and in this post, I will give an overview of my experience. I gave each step a full twenty minutes except the last, but we'll cover that when we get there.
The first step is to "review the games you love." The task is to list your favorite games. I set my timer for twenty minutes, and I came up with a list of 123 games. My list includes board games, card games, sports, role-playing games, and video games. The video games represent titles released on the C64, NES, SNES, and PC. One of the strangest ones that came to mind was 1982's Aztec. I could not remember its name, and when I found it, I discovered it doesn't have an entry at Lemon64.
I decided to list games I enjoyed, although I wouldn't call everything on it a "favorite." They are all memorable games. There are even a few that I found frustrating for various reasons but still enjoyable. As I continued through the exercise, I realized that I had missed some of my actual favorites, but I did not go back and amend the list.
The next step is to "review the games you hate," which is a clear complement to the first step. The instructions are a bit vague here, asking you to "spend a few minutes" making this list, despite earlier having said that each step should be twenty minutes. My list ended up including only 40 items, and I was stuck at around half that for a while. Some of the things in the list are board games I have gotten rid of, and there is a section of bad mass-market kid and family games. There are relatively few video games on the list, most of these being competitive ones that I played with groups who were much more experienced than I was. I have a few sports and classic games on here as well.
The third step is to "find the gems," to look at the lists of games and identify mechanics and themes that you enjoyed. I appreciate that Gary encourages the reader to try to find the good parts in the disliked games as well. My list included 65 items. Most of the items on my list are mechanisms, but some deal with theme, narrative, emotion, and production quality. I tried to avoid designer jargon, but items like juiciness and game feel still made it to the list. I realize also that some items on my list subsume others, such my listing of "legacy," which includes many other ideas such as campaign play and unlocking content.
I missed a part of the instructions for this step. He encourages you to highlight the items on the list that are the most meaningful to you as you are making the list. In my focus on the list itself, I completely forgot about this. The whole of the exercise is to be done in spirit of avoiding self-censorship, and so I found myself trying to avoid metacognition entirely: just putting down things that came into my mind without judging them. If I were to assign this to students, I might encourage taking a little break here to read the list and then to highlight important items.
The fourth step is to "find the crud," which again presents a counterpoint to its previous step. My list includes 41 things I do not like about games on my lists. Interestingly, almost everything on this list is explained in longer phrases than those on my "gems" list. Whereas the previous list was made in two columns on a sheet of looseleaf paper, this one had to be done on two separate sheets since there was no room for a second column.
Step five is the culmination of all the previous steps. Here, you are to "look for patterns," going through all the other lists to construct a new list of game ideas. The instructions are to summarize a game concept in one or two sentences, and he is explicit about not self-censoring here. I know it was supposed to be inspiring, but I found myself anxious about his admonition, "If you stop moving your pen for more than thirty seconds, you are doing it wrong." Whether this speaks to my emotional state or my need to do more unstructured creativity is up for grabs.
My list here included 21 items. As I wrote it, I found myself looking almost exclusively at my "gems" list for ideas. His instructions invite you to consider modifying games you did not enjoy by removing the bits you didn't like, but in practice, this felt like it took more mental effort—possibly more than thirty seconds worth, and so I avoided this path.
Several items on the list are unclear mashups of words, but there's nothing here that I couldn't use as a seed. I kept everything on the list tied to the other lists, and it took effort to force out of my mind those things that have been occupying it. One item is a concept I recently discussed with a friend, but it also reflected the lists, so I kept it. There were a few times where I looked at the list of games I like and then had to stop myself from just writing down a riff on that with no new ideas, but I took this as an inspiration to then turn to the "gems" list to see what could be modified. This didn't happen often, though, and mostly I felt like I kept swimming in the handful of ideas that my eyes kept returning to.
The items on my list emphasize systems and mechanisms over themes and stories, and this is very much in keeping with the ethos of Gary's approach. It is practical, however, since "players form cards to form a whip or chain to grab a resource from the center of the table" is something you can start tinkering with, whereas "a game about hope in the face of desperate circumstances" still has to be refined into something the player actually does.
The sixth step in Gary's list is to "pick your favorite concept and start working on it." That's not a twenty-minute step at all: that's the rest of the book. Perhaps he just needed a better editor.
Note that what I have described here is only the inspiration step of Gary's design model. It is followed by framing, which considers the audience and constraints, and then by brainstorming, whereby specific ideas for the game are considered before prototyping. Perhaps I will return and try these steps in the coming days.
I enjoyed the exercise, and I will be sure to find a way to put it into my class for Fall. I think it would work well as preparation for students' pitching their final projects. There are inevitably students who struggle with finding a starting point for their designs. It may even benefit those who think they already know what they want to do, since such students often find themselves choosing paths that are really out of scope.
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