Richard Garriott on why “most game designers really just suck”

The current game designer I'm with could not tell you anything regarding various character creation tools and strategies that have been used in various games (APB, City of Heroes, Skyrim, etc. being good relatively recent examples), yet his job is to spec out that very thing for one of our products. The result has not been very good, but this person outranks the rest of the team on these decisions.

Currently this guy is so bereft of anything to do design-wise, he's decided to read some books on Agile and has moved into pushing the artists and programmers around as if he's the project manager as well, which upper management collectively shrugged at and allowed. Management is where every 'designer' I've worked with has wound up and this guy will be no exception.

At the end of the day, I no longer have much faith in the average game studio because I know these people are out calling the shots on creative decisions. If you aren't a coder or an artist, for the love of fuck, please at least be a genuine gamer with a working understanding of game design history. There's been tens of thousands of video games produced now and some are very much worth remembering when considering a new design, both what to do and what to avoid. Your products will be better for it.

Is this true?

I thought that actual "game design" jobs in terms of creative direction were like gold dust and something you could only get by either starting your own studio or rising through the ranks.

All of the game jobs I see advertised are either art,programming or testing.

I don't think that it's because designers suck, but that when you are working with AAA games with 100 million dollar budgets, you often don't get a single designer whose focused vision can drive the project. You have multiple designers working on multiple systems, and then you have a layer of management who wants to hold some of your feature ideas for their DLC monetization strategy down the line, and you need to maybe break some of your systems in order to add social media integration options or compromise on your core ideas in order to create some integration that can justify the always online DRM that you need to put in place.

When Richard was making Ultima, he could just say no. Well, up to a point anyways. By Ultima 7 and origin's acquisition by EA, references to difficulties with EA even bubbled into the game. I mean the main antagonists were named Elizabeth and Abraham. Origin's tagline was "We create worlds" the evil force in the game was known as the destroyer of worlds.

Even if you're skeptical about that, nobody can doubt that the quality of Ultima 8 and 9 were, at least in terms of game design, quite poor. Was that because Richard all of a sudden became one of those bad game designers? Or was that because the design of the game became more committee based and had to cater to focus groups and demographics determined from on high.

Maybe Richard had to work with other bad designers. But that's just how things work now. It's just that because you can't work by yourself so much any more, the quality of management and other designers directly influence people's perception of you. I mean, if Richard were to be judged, instead of by his work on Ultima 1-7 but by his work on games like Ultima 8-9, Lineage 2, CoH/CoV, Tabula Rasa, his highly anticipated "Ultimate Collector" someone might consider him a designer who sucks.

It's not the designers who necessarily sucks, it's the ecosystem that allows sucky design to persevere. In the 80s if you had a designer who sucked, they made a game who sucked. Today if you have a designer who sucks, you have one more bad system in an otherwise good game. That becomes tolerated and users are willing to get yet another bad system in a good game, until the games become a mass of "could have been nice" features that end up poorly realized, rushed, or retooled to appeal to a wide audience.

Not exactly huge sample sizes here, I know, but his argument is plausible to me. It behooves designers to at least be ankle deep in the technical cesspool of game development.

But that makes sense- as he says, it's hard to go to school for it. It is a non-linear discipline. You need to be knowledgeable of all the other disciplines (how the game is technically built to understand scope of design), you have to be able to work from a systems scale all the way down to individual variables, you have to be able to talk the language of engineers, artists, and producers/business/marketing.

What I find offensive is that Garriot is saying "If you don't hit all those points, you really just suck as a designer."

Well thanks for the input, Lord British. Your flamebait has really elevated the state of the industry.

Maybe the problem isn't that most game designers suck, but that the major studio's have calculated that they can be more profitable if they don't bother spending the time and money it takes to make games that are actually well designed.

Look at someone like Ed McMillen if you want to learn about current game design. I get the feeling that Garriott hasn't even PLAYED a video game in ages.

Also, this idea that a person is infallible in any role (such as Game Designer) is absurd. He seems to believe that he posesses some special mojo or insight which means that any game he makes is a work of genius. This is obvious on the surface that it is not the case.

Just because a talented person is involved is no guarantee the work will turn out any good, games or otherwise. This is a simple truth. Creating something great is much more complicated than that.

Why speak your mind tactfully when you can call everyone else bad at their jobs and get more buzz as a result?

This is what I have been preaching all along. I apply this to UX monkeys and other scum too.

Game Designers are basically just idea guys - get a gamer game developer or a gamer graphics artist you'll get a better job, leaner too.

Thanks for getting some validation here, Richard.

To become a good game designer, one has to design games and-- here's the important part-- get feedback from human players. That seems tautological and obvious, but it's an important insight. What seems like a great game will be broken in ways a designer might not anticipate once it meets real players. Non-designers might find the brokenness of the earliest Magic cards to be laughable-- how could they not see that Ancestral Recall was broken?-- but designers get it. Balance is hard, man.

It's hard as hell to come up with a game worth playing. I probably designed a hundred crappy ones as a teenager before I got a hang of it and, even then, I only have one real success which is a card game-- a fairly closed system, not something continually expansive like Ultima Online or Magic: the Gathering. It takes a lot of trial and error to get good at it. It's easier to go through that process when you have access to other nerdy teenagers who'll be playtesters. For adults, it's much harder to get testers. That's a huge limiting factor.

Then, combine this with the big-budget corporate setting. Few game designers get to design a whole game. They work on pieces, not having responsibility for a whole. It's the same issue that we have in software engineering: most programmers never get good because so few ever work on real stuff in their paid gigs. I haven't worked in AAA game development, but it wouldn't surprise me to see the same principle in force: mediocre designers because most corporate work is mediocre and people never get the chance to get good.

I think Garriott has a point, though, in the assessment that it's rare for a "pure idea guy" to be anything but mediocre and passive. Curiosity is an important trait in a game designer. If you've got it, you'll code. That doesn't mean that you'll do it professionally or be able to write x86 assembly by hand, but you've no excuse not to fire up Codecademy and learn the basics of programming. Most of the great designers had other interests. You can see Garfield's CS and math backgrounds in the design of Magic. You can see Paul Graham's painting experience in his approach to programming and language design. The biggest hits require crossing wires.