Game Balance Concepts

So, for those of you who recall, I ran a free online class last summer. (If you missed it, all of the content is still there, and you can feel free to look through it at your own pace.)

Well, I'm doing it again this summer. Game Balance Concepts is a ten-week course that will go in depth in the topic of game balance.

Why do this again? Because I'm clearly insane. Also, I'm hoping to actually get paid for my time. But mostly, it's because game balance has always been an interest of mine, and it's the kind of niche class that I would never be able to teach (or even propose as a Special Topics course) as an adjunct. So, this is the best method I have of creating an experimental course with original content, just to see what happens.

At any rate, the class starts on July 5, so come and join me.

Game Design Tech Tree, version 0.1 (beta)

I put this together today and thought I'd share. I've attempted to list every major skill or task that falls under the broad field of "game design." I then tried to create a kind of progression, based on which skills are desired prerequisites before learning or performing others.

This is very much a work in progress (I haven't even added any icons yet), so your comments are welcome. Click on the image for a large version.

Since this is mostly a graphical version of notes to myself, some explanations might be required. I'm not sure how much is obvious to the casual observer, however, so rather than write a lengthy essay explaining every last detail, I'll simply answer any questions you have in the comments here. Enjoy!

Report from Game Education Summit

I'm just catching up from the excellent Game Education Summit earlier this week. Here are my notes:

Donald Marinelli, keynote:

• Much of today's educational system is obsolete. Summer vacation exists to let young people go home and help their families with farm chores. How many K-12 students do you know that are planting wheat right now?
• If you are building a game for a class, build it for someone. Give it a purpose.
• ETC's "secret sauce" is that they let students teach each other.

Terrence Masson, on building Northeastern University's curriculum:

• Interesting way to structure a Capstone course with 10 people: first day people give their project pitches (most students pitch several alternative projects). Second day, students narrow the pitch list down to the two projects that the class will work on; students choose their teams (split into two teams of 5); each team assigns roles and chooses their project lead. Essentially, the students drive everything.
• Another interesting thing about this program is the requirement of two non-adjacent semesters in internships/co-ops. The benefit is that students keep the faculty honest: "What do you mean we don't have Zbrush on campus? That's what everyone is using now!"
• Note to prospective students: at this particular institution, the program is called "game design" but it is actually "game development". This points to the importance of schools and industry using a unified set of terminology.

Jessica Hammer, on how to teach creativity:

• First, you have to define what "creativity" is, because it is an overloaded term, and there are different kinds of creativity. She defined it as "appropriate novelty" -- something that is new, but within a given context/domain. (If you ask students to design a game and they write an essay instead, and try to define an essay as an innovative new type of linear-narrative game, this is not what we are looking for.)
• Creativity happens within a context or domain (i.e. within a set of constraints). There is a virtuous cycle within a field, where the domain influences individuals; the individuals produce creative work within the domain; and the gatekeepers who see this work then influence and redefine the boundaries of the domain to compensate. In the case of teachers, the classroom is the domain.
• One problem in practice is that we often measure creativity after the fact: we look at the final product and decide if it is creative. Unfortunately, this tells us nothing about the process used to create it... and if we want to teach creativity, we want to teach the process!
  There are three aspects to the creative process that students need to understand: the generation of novel ideas, the ability to decide what ideas to pursue (since ideas are a dime a dozen, once you learn how to generate them), and the motivation to follow through on your chosen idea and do the work to turn it into a final product. The class should focus on these.

Jessica's hints for course design:

• Begin with outcomes. "The goal of a course is not to deliver content, but to transform your students."
• Consider the length and pacing of the class. If there is not enough time to generate ideas, fail many times, and still finish, students will take fewer creative risks.
• "Personal attention is valuable currency." Keep class sizes small when possible. Group work can enable larger class sizes by having you deal with a small number of groups rather than a large number of individuals.
• Recruitment is rarely thought about, but is important. The more diverse your class (or, um, game studio), the more creative the ideas you're likely to see. When approached by a female and/or minority student, be supportive and ask if they have friends who would also be interested in taking your class. Also, consider the accessibility of your classes: if students can choose between written or verbal assignments, you will see higher enrollment among those for whom English is a second language.
• Use a lot of class time on playtesting and peer review. Professor should model appropriate feedback, to show what it looks like.
• Encourage uncertainty, in projects, classes and life. "Your game design education does not end when you leave this class. It has just started."
• Don't just have students solve problems that are handed to them, because this is not how real life works. Have them create and seek out their own problems to solve.
• There is a negative relationship between the time and emotional investment in a project, and willingness to take risks. In the middle of larger projects, consider giving smaller-scale "lightning round" design challenges that encourage creative risk-taking -- for example, email students with constraints of a challenge at noon one day, and they have 24 hours to post a short concept in an online discussion group. These are not a major component of the course grade; they are a chance for students to show off. Examples: "Design a game to be played in the waiting room of an ICU while you're waiting to see if a loved one lives or dies." / "Design a game for NASA that can keep astronauts alert and interested on a 3-year mission to Mars." / "Design a game for Obama's cabinet to help improve their effectiveness as a team."
• How do you assess creativity? Note that you get what you measure; students will game any system. If you want to reward risk, you have to give grading opportunities for it. Jessica splits the final project grade into three equal parts: the game itself (the final result of the process), the theory (students write a companion paper that shows the connections between the theory learned in class and its expression in their game), and the process (students submit a "process paper" that includes everything that was part of the project but not visible in the final form: raw data, early playtest results, early versions of the game, mechanics that were tried and abandoned... whatever the student wants the instructor to see).
• Divide larger projects into many feedback cycles / milestones. Iteration is part of the creative process, and class projects should reflect that.
• The nature of instructor feedback is important. If you just give a grade, that carries very little information. Extensive written feedback is much better, but can take a lot of time; to manage this, favor group projects or smaller numbers of submitted projects per-person.
• As the instructor, you are a strong influence on the culture of the classroom. You want students to feel comfortable taking risks, both in their projects and by raising their hand to make suggestions/comments in class. How you react when students say something "stupid" has a huge impact. Suggestion: draw from the "Yes, and..." technique of improvisational theater -- accept everything in class, refuse to shut down an idea or say that it's wrong, and instead challenge yourself to find the nugget of truth in there.
• Give students a sense of mission. People are more creative under stress when they believe in the importance of the final project. Because of this, fewer projects (reduction of workload) can paradoxically lead to students spending more time and doing more work... as long as the projects they have are the right ones.
• Self-efficacy is important: students must believe they can perform well in the class. Corollary: we as teachers must believe in our students. Research has shown that a teacher's belief in a student's ability to perform is often self-fulfilling.
• Praise students not only for their projects, but also for exhibiting personal qualities that we want them to continue: hard work, persistence, etc.

Walter Rotenberry (Wake Tech), on the challenges faced by Community Colleges:

• The ideal case for a Community College is that you are based in a "hub" of the game industry, so that your graduates have immediate local employment and internship opportunities. What if there are no game companies in a 100-mile radius?
• An alternative: focus on entrepreneurship. Require your students to take classes in business, enough that they would be comfortable building their own startups. Give students the tools to start their own local studios.
• Wake Tech's approach to a two-year program is interesting: cover a little bit of everything (at least one or two courses from programming, design, art, production, audio, business, game studies, etc.) to give a well-rounded background. This provides a foundation for transfer to any four-year school. I thought this was an interesting approach -- in my experience, usually with only two years to work with, Community Colleges focus on art or programming. I'm not sure that one approach is "better" than the other, but I can see the use of both.
• Encourage students to take courses in other relevant areas and departments: theater/drama, history, storytelling, etc. - the bonus is that in many cases there is no need to add specialized "game" classes, you can work with what is already there.
• Wake Tech got an $800K grant from NSF to develop their curriculum. This money is not allowed to go to new hires, but can be spent on curriculum development and new equipment. Other schools may be able to get similar money, so it is worth looking into.

G. Michael Youngblood on Computer Science-focused game research:

• Students can get involved through an NSF program called REU (Research Experience for Undergrads).
• It's easy to get academics involved; this is what many of us do. Biggest challenge is collaboration across departments, since games are so interdisciplinary.
• If you're working in industry and want to get involved, the easiest way is to visit. Invite some local researchers to lunch. Look at their stuff, read their papers, ask questions on what you don't understand.
• You can support students for your own benefit! If you have an idea you'd like to test out, $1100 per month for a grad stipend x 5 months = $5500 for a prototype and white paper. This is a pretty good deal if you're a large studio with an R&D budget! Note that some schools and some researchers will ask to charge overhead (to cover costs of building maintenance, utilities, etc.) that is as much as 50% of your grant. You do not have to put up with this; operations costs are not required for non-governmental grants, and you can offer the funding on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Most universities would rather accept money than turn it down.
• Be on a university's Industry Advisory Board. Suggest that they research difficult, interesting problems.

Michael's list of things that the industry should keep in mind when dealing with academic researchers (particularly in Computer Science):

• Academics are extremely "paper-focused". If there's not a publication in it, then it doesn't matter.
• Academics are always behind and have too much to do.
• Like any programmer, academic researchers will overstate their ability to deliver for nearly everything.
• If a study involves humans in any way (such as, say, using college students in a playtest of your game), learn about the IRB process.
• The field of games research has matured quickly. Two years ago, "I'm working on a game" was good enough to get published. Today, you must also be able to show why your game research is cool or useful in some way.

Random tidbits from side conversations:

• Games and learning are both negative feedback loops: once you have learned something, you don't want to learn it again. This drives students to learn something and then stop. We need to find a way to counteract this by including a positive feedback loop, so that great students will want to keep learning and to learn more.
• I wonder if a school has ever hired an entire small development studio. Granted, not everyone has teaching skills, but you would get complete coverage of all subject areas and you'd be hiring people who already know how to work together as a team.
• Giving students a general literacy of classic games is important. One approach: have students write "reviews" of classic games. How do you get them to play older arcade or console games in the first place, when the original hardware is hard to come by? Several alternatives: first, many companies are repackaging their classic games for sale on modern systems (Atari Flashback, Midway Classic Hits, original NES games downloadable on Wii, etc.); second, with questionable legality, you can download emulators such as MAME; and third, particularly useful in class, you can find short gameplay videos of just about everything on YouTube to show what some of these games looked and played like.

Required Playing

A recent conversation I had reminded me of something, which I share with you now.

Students of any artistic medium should are expected to study the more famous/important works within that medium. A graduate of a film school who had never heard of Citizen Kane, a graduate of an art school who couldn't recognize the work of Van Gogh, or a graduate of a creative writing program who never read Shakespeare would all be considered rather embarassing to their schools. So, it's up to the school to make sure their students get exposure to the great works of their field. So it should be with the study of video game design.

Let's assume for the purpose of this exercise that a teacher can find some way to gain access to any game, regardless of technical constraints. Let's also assume that there are no time constraints, and "how do I fit all of this in the core curriculum?" is someone else's problem.

The question: if you were to make a list of games that all students of game design should know about, what games would be on that list? This should mostly involve games that did at least one thing really well or poorly with respect to game design (not technology or art), i.e. those games that we should be able to learn something from. The games that, intentionally or not, made some contribution to the field of game design.

Here's my own list, so far:

Classic Non-digital: Chess, Go, and at least one card game featuring trick-taking and trump (Spades, Bridge, Whist, etc.)

Modern Non-digital: Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Puerto Rico, Magic: the Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons (at least read the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master Guide)

Arcade: at least one ball-and-paddle game (Pong, Breakout, Arkanoid), at least one LaserDisc game (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, etc.), Pac Man, Gauntlet, Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter 2, at least one side-scrolling shooter (Gradius, R-Type, etc.), Tetris

PC: at least one Roguelike (Rogue, Nethack, Angband), Archon, any game from the Civilization series, Warcraft 2, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, Star Control 2, Ultima IV

Console: Chrono Trigger, Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, any game from the Pokemon series, any game from the Harvest Moon series, any cart-racing game (Mario Kart, etc.), any realistic racing game (Gran Turismo, etc.), at least one side-scrolling adventure game (Super Metroid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, etc.), any tactical RPG (Final Fantasy Tactics, Disgaea, etc.), any modern Western RPG (Knights of the Old Republic, Oblivion, etc.), any modern Eastern RPG (Final Fantasy, etc.), any modern 3D platformer (Ratchet & Clank, Sly Cooper, etc.)



Feel free to post arguments against any from the above list, or any games not on the list that you'd add.

One important difference between Game Design and Contemporary Art

I have a confession to make. Having gone on record as saying that all game designers should study art, I've never actually taken a course on studying art until just now. (I did take a course as an undergrad where we created art using a computer, but I'd never heard of Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko or Robert Mapplethorpe until recently. This is the point at which any artists in the audience are rolling their eyes, wondering how I got as far as I did... and everyone else is wondering what the heck I'm talking about.)

Now that I'm studying contemporary art, I'm seeing a lot of similarities between art and game design. In particular, the art world has already encountered a number of issues in the past 100 years that video games are only beginning to struggle with today. I'm sure I'll post more about that in the future.

Today, though, I want to talk about one of the few big differences between art and games. It has to do with accessibility.

When most people today see a piece in a contemporary art museum or gallery, their first reaction is: "huh? I don't get it." The reason is that a lot of art isn't trying to talk directly to laypeople; it's artists talking to other artists. If you're an artist and you want to say something about the quality or nature or meaning of art, you don't give a lecture at an art convention, nor do you write an article for an online magazine about art; you create a piece of art that states your viewpoint. And other artists and critics who are already familiar with the current issues and discussions in the field (and who are already familiar with you and your background, culture, and viewpoints) will immediately see your piece and understand what you're saying. It's a very efficient way to communicate, actually. You just do your work and it explains itself.

Game designers don't have this luxury. For us, improving our understanding of our craft is a separate activity from actually making games. We talk about how to make better games through articles on Gamasutra and Game Developer, we give lectures at GDC, or we just talk to people in local IGDA meetings or the like. And then when we're done talking, we go off into our own respective worlds and try to apply what we've learned.

And maybe it's because of the complexity of video games, or maybe it's because a lot of video games hide their underlying mechanics from the player, or maybe it's just that a lot of designers aren't that good at game analysis, but we don't learn much from just playing each others' games... at least, not compared with how much artists get from looking at their contemporaries' works.

Here's an example: suppose you're making a CCG and you want to know the relationship between drawing an extra card and having the opponent discard a card (both of which give the player a one-card advantage). I can tell you from experience that the discard is usually more powerful (by a factor of about 1.5x), unless your game has really weird mechanics. But if you just looked at a variety of CCGs, this isn't something that you'd see plainly. Sometimes it's downright obscure, because cards often have different cost structures, or combine things like drawing and discarding with other effects (which makes for more interesting cards, but also obscures the basic costs and benefits and relative values of the simple things). So, unlike an artist, I can't just stare at the work of fellow game designers to learn how they do what they do. And unlike an artist, I can't just make a great game and have it speak for itself, to the point that other designers will just universally "get it" and be able to make their own games better.

But then, this limitation is also a strength of games when it comes to the mass market. If you haven't studied games, if you've never taken a game criticism or game analysis course, you can still sit down and play a game and have a good time with it (even if you don't understand why you enjoy it so much). But if you haven't studied art, and you go to an art museum, most of the stuff in there will likely go over your head. So, the communication between game designers may not be as efficient as that of painters or sculptors... but on the other hand, more people can appreciate and interact with a game than a painting or sculpture.

The importance of a Game Industry course

I taught a course last year called Game Industry Survey, sort of a who's-who and what's-what of the industry. Recent events highlight why such a course is inherently useful.

See, there was this game called Guitar Hero, and if you haven't heard of it, it became a surprise hit, originally launched in 2005 with a sequel the following year. The original and sequel were developed by Harmonix and published by RedOctane. Then, things got complicated. RedOctane was purchased by Activision, and development on Guitar Hero 3 was handed to Neversoft (of Tony Hawk fame). Meanwhile, Harmonix is focusing its efforts on Rock Band, an iteration on the same basic concept.

What needs to be understood about this mess?

• There is a difference between the Developer and the Publisher. (Briefly: Developers make games; Publishers make money.)
• Intellectual Property is often tied to a specific Developer or Publisher, but it can also be its own separate entity, as is the case here.
• Ditto with the code base for a game series, which is often tied to the IP (and the Developer) but not always... as in this case.

Why is understanding these things useful?

• A lot of people in the game industry are following this unfolding story with great interest. A lot of us like the original games, you see. So, if you're talking to a developer and you don't understand this stuff, you're likely to have a foot-in-mouth moment that could cost you a job opportunity.
• Even if you're not interested in joining the industry, if you're just an avid game player who likes the series, understanding these things lets you make better purchasing decisions. "I likes the first two Guitar Hero games, so I'm guaranteed to like the third one" is no longer given if the people actually making the third game are different from the ones who made the originals. If you follow the developer and not the publisher, you'll usually find more consistency in product lines.

My thanks to the industry for making my job easier. For once.

Another Course for Game Design Students

The IGDA Educational SIG at GDC showed me another course that deserves to be part of my proposed curriculum for Game Design majors: Game Appreciation.

Any student who wants to be an artist should take Art Appreciation. Film students take Film Appreciation. Music students take Music Appreciation. Game designers should, therefore, take Game Appreciation.

What would a Game Appreciation course look like? It would involve playing lots of games -- pretty much every game that is widely known in the industry for its gameplay (good or bad). I could offer a list of games, but first I'll welcome all of you to do the same in the comments. At any rate, students would play these games as homework and in class, and then discuss them in class: why the games were important, where the innovations are, what was derivative of what.

Why would this course be useful? First, it's needed as a basis for understanding the art form. Second, it provides the closest thing we have to a critical vocabulary -- "this game is like that other one" -- so it's good to know the right games to compare new ones to. Third, anyone who wants a job in the game industry (especially as a designer) should be familiar with the great works of the past (and present) in order to not appear uneducated. Fourth, it gets your enrollment numbers up because it's an entire course about playing games.

Game Design Curriculum: Game Design Classes

Wrapping up my series on the game design curriculum, I wanted to suggest some game design classes. You can't have a game design major without some classes that focus on game design, right?
(I realize these are not practical for students who may have no control over their university's curriculum. That's why I saved this section for last.)

Since these courses aren't standardized anywhere, I'm making up the names as I go.

Game Industry Survey. Game design students, especially, need some kind of survey class that talks about the important people, companies and games that every developer (whether a designer or not) should know; and also, an overview of the types of companies and jobs found in the game industry. As I said earlier, you should have at least one minor related to another area of game development, so this course would help you decide which area to minor in.

Theory of Game Design. Every game designer wants to have their own Grand Unifying Theory Of What Makes Games Fun. Most of them are useless. A precious few have gained acceptance (or at least acknowledgement) within the industry: LeBlanc's MDA, Koster's Theory of Fun, Bartle's player types, and some others. Students should be introduced to the prevailing theories of what Fun is, where it comes from, and how to make it.

Core Systems Design, Creative Design and Level Design. Those of us in the industry largely learned game design by doing it; the same is true for artists in other media. The bulk of game design courses in school, then, should be practical and not theoretical. I would envision several "pure" design courses where students are given a set of projects, each with their own constraints. Students then create designs, test them and iterate on them, ideally under the watchful eye of an experienced designer who provides guidance. By "Core Systems Design" I mean creating the basic rules of the core of a game; "Creative Design" would deal with the design of characters, plots and storylines, and UI; and "Level Design" is, well, level design.

Technical Design. A designer should have some experience in the left-brained side of their field. This course would include some Game Theory (prisoner's dilemma, payoff matrices, stuff like that), some applications of mathematics in game design (e.g. solving intransitive games, use of triangular numbers in games), and some basic understanding of numerical methods and computation (for example, what the difference is between integers and floating points... and why Hit Points -- and most numbers in a game, in fact -- should be integer).

Prototyping. As far as I can tell, the only people in the entire game industry who like to see 500-page "Design Bibles" are Producers and Publishers, because it gives them the impression that work is being done. Designers don't like them because they take a long time to write and they're impossible to maintain halfway through the project, and the written word is static while most game systems you're documenting are dynamic. Programmers don't like them because reading a massive design doc is boring, confusing, and obsolete as soon as the designers stop maintaining it. A far better way to communicate and "document" living systems is with a prototype, whether it be in the form of a paper boardgame or an actual computer program. Designers should be able to whip up a quick prototype of a small system (say, a subscreen or a turn-based combat model) in Flash or a similarly "light" scripting language, even if they don't know C++ or Java.

Team-Based Game Development. This wouldn't be a game design class per se, but an interdisciplinary class where students work together in moderately-sized teams to create a full game or game demo. Of all disciplines, game designers cannot exist alone; they need to learn to work well with programmers and artists. Luckily, finding strong programmers and artists who want to make games isn't that hard at most universities :). If you look hard enough you can usually even find one student who's skilled enough at game audio, and maybe another student for production (or the teacher can act as producer). This course might also be called a "capstone" or a "portfolio-building" class.

For what it's worth, this year I'm teaching Game Industry Survey; plus a Prototyping course (my university calls it Game Development) and an advanced variant that will be closer to what I'm calling Core Systems Design; and a 20-week Team-Based Game Development class (we're calling it a Capstone), and something else (TBD) in the Spring. So, I'm practicing what I preach here.

Game Design Curriculum: Elective Minors

The sad fact is, almost no one gets a game design job immediately on graduation. Most people enter the industry as a programmer, an artist, or a software tester. The reason for this, I think, is that those positions are inherently low risk: a programmer or artist who screws up their entry-level work is probably not going to sink the entire multimillion-dollar project; another programmer or artist will clean up the mess and no one else will notice. (A tester, by definition, can at worst do nothing.)

But a designer's job is, essentially, to tell the programmers and artists what to do. Design mistakes don't just require another designer to make repairs, but also programmers and artists to redo their work. Design mistakes bleed across departments, so companies tend to be very careful of who they hire in those positions.

As such, anyone interested in game design should also minor in Computer Science, Art, Business, Marketing, or some other discipline that is directly related to game development. This gives you three ways to enter the industry: game design (unlikely), QA (easier to find, but tedious and boring to most people), and whatever you minored in. Understanding multiple disciplines also makes you marginally more attractive to a game company (especially a small one), since you can fill more than just one role and you're more likely to communicate well with people in different departments.

Additionally, take a second minor in something that has nothing at all to do with games. Game designers need to foster a lifelong passion for learning (just look at all the crazy stuff that Will Wright or Sid Meier knows – the stuff that has nothing to do with games – like astrobiology or world history). I know, I know… most educational institutions do their best to squash the love of learning out of every last student. That makes it all the more important to reverse the trend in college, by studying in-depth something that really interests you. It could be anything; astronomy, art history, classics, Shakespeare, French, quantum physics, whatever. There are many reasons why this will help you. First, it will set you apart from others by giving you unique interests. Second, it demonstrates your all-important love of learning. Third, it gives you a small, random chance to be a perfect fit on any given dev team (example: if you minored in abnormal psych and unbeknownst to you, the company you’re applying to happens to be in negotiations on a game with a paranoid schizophrenic as the main character…).

Two minors? Sounds crazy, but in a field with practically no entry-level positions open to new graduates I consider it a necessity.

Game Design Curriculum: Other Stuff

There are a few other assorted courses that I've found useful in the field.

Communication. No matter how good your high-level designs are, you must communicate your vision to the rest of the team. Having solid communication skills is one of the most important aspects of being a designer. If your school has a class in active listening, take that too -- designers tend to receive lots of feedback from their team (mostly on how much their design sucks :-), and being able to listen effectively and deduce the real design problems from someone who isn't a designer is a great skill to have.
Microeconomics. Really, anyone that wants to work for a company of any sort should understand the basics of supply and demand. Like it or not, game companies are businesses and they therefore need to make money if you want to continue receiving a paycheck. This course will prevent you from saying embarassing things in company meetings, like “we should make our game engine open-source and stop charging people for it, we'd get more players then.”
Women’s Studies. Currently, the game industry is really terrible at dealing with women. First, it’s lousy at attracting women to the industry; the average game company is about 10% women, and it’s even worse if you just look at game designers. Second, it’s not so great at marketing to women; the number of female gamers is growing, yes, but if you look at game ads and game magazines (and some games, too) you still see chainmail bikinis and the like. Game developers (especially male ones) need to understand some fundamental truths about women if we ever want to make them feel welcome. I sincerely hope that some day, this problem will be fixed and I’ll be able to remove this course from my proposed game design curriculum.

Game Design Curriculum: Computer Science

If we accept that learning art will help you to communicate with artists, then learning some computer science should help you communicate with programmers.

Intro to Programming. Some aspects of game design are pretty technical; if game data or rules are stored in a scripting language (either a commercial one like Python or Lua, or a proprietary one) then it is often expected that a designer will be creating content in those languages, which requires at least some fundamental knowledge of programming. Since you do want a solid foundation, take the course for CS majors if they'll let you.
Data Structures and Algorithms. I don’t feel that a single, introductory programming course is enough to truly understand how to convert ideas into code. A course dedicated to algorithms will give you a better idea of how that’s done, and a course dedicated to data structures will give you some tools that’ll make certain problems much easier.

Game Design Curriculum: Fine Arts

Now we cover the really creative stuff. How much art do you need to be a designer?

Intro to Art or Intro to Architecture. Two reasons for this. First, some aspects of game design are pretty artistic, so understanding the basis of art can give you some perspective (or architecture, since designers are effectively architects: instead of creating blueprints and plans for building a structure, they create blueprints and plans for building a game). Second, you’ll be working with artists, and being able to understand some small part of what they do will help you communicate better with them.
Computer Art. Take a course that requires you to use the tools that artists need to use on the job (currently this would be either 3DSMax, Maya, or Photoshop). Again, this lets you communicate better with artists on your team, and lets you express your ideas more visually.
Improvisational Acting. You learn three things in this class, all useful skills to have as a designer: creativity; thinking fast; and making the other people on your team look good.

Game Design Curriculum: English

By now you might be wondering if game design is a purely technical field. No, I promise, there are plenty of arts (fine and otherwise) in the field.

Writing. Designers write. A lot. If you can’t stand writing, seriously, you might consider entering the industry through a different field. Anyone who writes a lot needs to start with a foundational course in college-level writing.
Creative Writing. Designers are the ones who write the text that goes in the game: backstory, storyline, character dialogue, and related stuff. Designers are also asked to write formal game proposals, which involve a bit of creative writing.
Technical Writing. Designers write two types of documents, primarily, that are technical in nature (that is, their purpose is to convey information rather than to entertain). These are the design document, and the game manual. If you ever wondered why no one reads the manual, it's because most manuals are not written very well, because the writer did not have a solid grounding in technical writing.

Game Design Curriculum: Science

As with math, the creative field of game design doesn't intuitively seem to require a strong scientific background. But if we've already established that math is useful, science shouldn't be too much of a stretch from there.

Physics I. As I mentioned when I was there, any game that uses physics (and there are many of them) requires knowledge of kinematics. Taking the rest of the sequence (heat, fluids, electromagnetism) is not necessary, as those aren’t used in games nearly as much.
Biology I and Chemistry I. Some aspects of game design are scientific in nature (consider that an advanced prototype that asks the question “is this particular mechanic fun?” is essentially a scientific experiment), so a basic understanding of the scientific method is useful. A good basic Biology and Chemistry class will teach you about the basis and methods of science. A bad class will just make you memorize a bunch of stuff and not tell you why it’s useful at all, but at least it gives you the opportunity to meet some Bio/Chem majors who can explain it to you if you ask. Your best bet is probably an intro course for non-majors, if one is offered at your school.

Game Design Curriculum: Math

When I mention math to most college students who are interested in design, it comes as a surprise to them. Game design is a creative field, and creativity and math go together about as well as, um, chocolate and broccoli. Right?

Except that any time you hear the words "game balance" (as in, "this game isn't balanced" or "I need to tweak the balance of this level") you're really talking about math. Game balance means that the game is neither too difficult nor too easy, and while it can be done by trial and error, it goes much faster if the designer can put together some good mathematical models. Game balance is the designer's job, so a good designer needs to know at least enough math for that.

Two examples should suffice. In Civilization, each unit has its own cost, strength, defense, speed and several other numerical stats. If those numbers are out of whack, then players will find one particular unit type (or strategy) to be better than any other, and the game will quickly become boring. Similarly, in Final Fantasy (or any RPG of your choice), there's typically a huge database of numbers: monster stats, player stats, level progression charts, combat formulas and so on. Those are all math, and they all need to be designed.

So, what math does a designer need? I've found the following courses helpful:

Calculus. Calculus teaches you the math to describe and analyze how fast something is changing. It is therefore necessary if you’re trying to describe a variable in a game that changes over time. If you’ve ever heard talk of game “pacing” or the “difficulty curve” of a game, that’s calculus. Also, the entire field of Physics is based on calculus, so taking Calc will help greatly in your understanding of Physics (I'll talk more about Physics, and science in general, in a later post).
Linear Algebra. This gives you the tools to solve systems of equations using matrices, which is useful when you have several variables or stats in your game that you need to relate to each other. It’s also useful for solving certain types of game-balance problems, like Rock-Paper-Scissors-like ("intransitive") game mechanics. It’s also used in computer graphics for rotation and scaling, which you might encounter at some point.
Intro to Probability. The field of Probability was created to study games (gambling games in particular), so this shouldn't be much of a surprise. Any game with randomness requires probability to describe the exact nature of that randomness. Rating systems (or any other form of player ranking) also require probability, to show if they’re fair or not.
Intro to Game Theory. Sadly, “Game Theory” has very little to do with game design; it’s a branch of mathematics that deals with particular kinds of probability questions (particularly those that involve multiple players making simultaneous choices). If you’ve ever heard of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, that’s game theory. It’s useful when designing certain types of multiplayer dynamics, especially in boardgames or strategic computer games.

Game Design Curriculum: Where We Are Now

To my knowledge, there are two previous attempts by the game industry to come up with a curriculum. I do promise to start writing about my own ideas soon, but first I'd like to comment on what has come before.

Tom Sloper doesn't exactly give a curriculum, but does give a list of courses he feels are necessary for a game designer to take. While I agree with Mr. Sloper on many points, this is not one of them. Realistically, there is no way an undergraduate can take all those courses and still major in anything, while still graduating in four (or even five) years. It's just too much. Also, he doesn't give the reasoning behind why those courses are supposedly important; from the list, I suspect he was considering the skills needed to design popular games. You can't design Civilization without having a strong background in history, so sure, all game designers should study history. But... what if you're working on Guitar Hero? Now those history courses don't seem so useful.

The field of game design is already broad enough that we're specializing: very few people are good at story design and level design and core systems design and technical design, even without expecting that every designer is somehow equally skilled to work on an FPS and a Tycoon Sim and a historical turn-based strategy game.


The other group working on building a curriculum is the IGDA, and they've put quite a bit of effort into their curriculum framework. This document has the lofty ambition of defining fields of study for all disciplines in game development, not just game design. As such, it is necessarily more high-level and abstract than I'm looking for here. Also, for game design it focuses on design-specific topics (core systems, emergent complexity, feedback loops, risk/reward cycles and so on) but doesn't draw any associations with existing courses in other departments. It doesn't say how much math a game designer should be taking, or how many courses in psychology or philosophy or history or what not, nor what kinds. The curriculum framework is an excellent starting place when thinking of how one would go about teaching a course with the words "Game Design" in the title, but it does not define a full liberal arts curriculum as I wish to do.

Some universities are trying to build entire game design departments with large heapings of course offerings. But if you're at a university that doesn't have a dozen game design faculty, what do you do? In the next post, I will start answering that question.

Game Design Curriculum

Suppose you were just entering college, and you already knew that you wanted to be a game designer some day. That's your career goal. In lieu of a game design major, what courses should you take?

Or, suppose you're a faculty member at a university, charged with designing a curriculum for a game design major. What courses should be included?

Hopefully the answers to these two questions are the same.

Unfortunately, the industry does not have any solid answers, yet. Part of the problem is that it's exceedingly rare for anyone to get a game design job fresh out of college. Also, game design is so interdisciplinary that it's hard to find a department that it naturally fits in.

So why bother coming up with a curriculum at all? Because there is demand for one from students, and from the game industry. Also, schools need consistency: if they graduate a student with a Bachelor's in Game Design, they need the industry to know what skills that student is expected to have.

Over the rest of the summer, I will write a series of articles on what I would hope to see in an undergraduate game design major. I will start by covering the work that has already been done and where I see room for improvement, and then I will give my own vision of what courses I've personally found useful -- and why.

EDIT: I'm adding a table of contents in this post, so that there is a central place linking everything together.
Where We Are Now
Math
Science
English
Fine Arts
Computer Science
Other Stuff
Elective Minors
Classes about Game Design