5 hard truths game design students don’t want to learn but are happy when they do

Find out what mobile game design students don’t want to learn about, and you’ll get a good indication of what they most need to learn about.

Everyone resists hard truths, right?

We spoke to an instructor at the New York Film Academy, one of the fastest growing game design programs in North America, to find out what their students didn’t want to learn about (but were secretly glad they did).

It turned out to be a great barometer for understanding what game designers need to know in order to succeed in today’s mobile games market.

1. Free-to-play is here to stay

This is something that many of our game design students and NYFA really don’t want to hear. Even today, a lot of designers have a narrow view of what constitutes a “game,” and free-to-play doesn’t fit their definition.

Part of the problem is that many early free-to-play games didn’t use the language of traditional games; there was a lot of clicking, but not much strategy or stealth or sometimes even fun. That’s changed a lot over the past few years, and even console game designers are starting to experiment with free-to-play models.

The key here is to help students expand upon their idea of free-to-play, how it works, and how it can be used to gain a larger audience than they might attract with more traditional premium games. Once you show them that the most successful mobile games are now free-to-play in one form or another, they do start to think outside the premium-game box.

After they realize that free-to-play is here to stay – and it certainly is, in one form or another, especially for more casual experiences – the challenge becomes convincing them, as designers, that they need to take into account how the game will monetize as they construct their designs. It is also a challenge to convince them that, long-term, this can actually be a good thing.

One way of doing this, while also helping them hone their design skills, is to have them think more deeply about why people will play their games, what truly motivates them (whether it’s attaining mastery, or challenging themselves, or even just socializing with their friends).

Good free-to-play designs must understand the psychological underpinnings that compel players to play. And this requires designers to explore the complex relationships that players have with their games. For serious designers, this can be a fascinating and rewarding process.

2. Good designers think like marketers

Designers and marketers – there’s always been a tension between the two, and even plenty of the students at NYFA buy into it. This often happens before they’ve even taken their first job in the industry.

This tension though, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. In fact, the best game developers know how to utilize the strengths of each to help assure the success of their games. But with the serious glut of mobile games out there, designers really need to work overtime to incorporate the needs of marketing into their games.

This is especially true for social games. Since competition is so fierce, it’s imperative that social features help grow the audience. It’s not always financially feasible to expect paid advertising to do it all. Rather, designers need to incorporate features that encourage players to share, invite their friends, and generally spread word of their games.

So yes, designers need to think more like marketers.
This can be a tough sell to designers, considering the traditional tension between the creative and business side of game development. But like free-to-play, we believe that NYFA students need to understand how their game designs can work cooperatively with marketing to make sure their games find their audience.

Again, if students see this as a challenge – to incorporate features that will encourage players to evangelize their games for them – it becomes a lot more palatable. Plus, designing for mobile and social games is much more iterative than for traditional premium games. And game design needs to be informed by how players actually play games even after their initial launch. They need to understand how best to evolve their games over time.

Which brings us to another thing students need to learn…

3. You’re designing games services not just games

So essentially, the designer’s job is never done. At least it’s not done just because your game has launched. Rather, designers – like producers, marketers, and the finance guys – need to be in it for the long haul. They need to incorporate feedback from actual players, from reviews, and from real-time game metrics.

One way we pitch this to NYFA students can actually be very liberating. Their games will essentially always be in beta, so they always have the chance to improve upon their designs. That can be very appealing, especially to designers who tend to be perfectionists.

However, it also means that designers need to juggle more possibilities. So if a game is successful, games-as-a-service will likely require the creation of additional content. However, the nature of that additional content needs to be informed by how players are actually playing your game.

On one hand, a designer could see this as possibly co-opting their vision. A good designer, however, would see this as an opportunity to connect with their audience and to evolve an experience that’s more compelling, more engaging, and maybe even more fun than an experience they could create in total isolation.

4. Metrics and game analytics promote creativity

Numbers and creativity are polar opposites, right? One’s left brain, the other right. Plenty of designers still believe this even though some of the world’s most creative people are engineers and scientists.

In the new world of connected mobile games designers need to embrace numbers, no matter how frightening they may be. And many students seem plenty frightened. However, when we show them how game metrics and analytics are simply a tool to divine how players actually play their games, this can lead to a very fruitful synthesis of their left and right brains, so to speak.

Going a step further, we explain to our students that a good understanding of game metrics can actually enhance the creative process. As an interactive medium, games aren’t meant to be observed like a movie or painting, but are meant to be experienced.

Designers experience their own games one way. But their players, of their own free will and using their own creative instincts, might experience their games in different and unexpected ways.

An analysis of game metrics can help designers uncover the ways different players experience their game and open up the mind of a good designer to possibilities they never anticipated. This is creativity guided by solid, objective feedback.

5. Good ideas alone are worthless – the ability to execute is where it’s at

Well, ideas aren’t completely worthless. A good idea is requirement number one to even get started on creating a good game (or a good anything for that matter). But a good idea is still just an idea. Only when it’s well executed does it become a good game.

That’s why NYFA students participate in all aspects of game development, from game design and team building to asset development, engineering, and even testing. That way they actually experience the process of turning their ideas into functioning games and they learn how the design process is affected by execution.

To some designers, this is just a lot of compromise. They have a vision, and their vision is frustrated by the real needs of execution, perhaps a technical limitation, or even a financial limitation. But a more open designer will incorporate the sometimes harsh realities of game development into their creative process.

“If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage,” is an old theater adage, but the iterative process of game design has somewhat turned that idea on its head. If an idea can’t be well executed, maybe it’s not worth the time putting the idea to paper.

Again, games are interactive and their success is thoroughly dependent on how players experience them. So even the best, most insanely good, most original idea doesn’t stand a chance if it can’t be executed in a way that truly thrills its audience.

David Fratto is a game executive who has worked as a developer and publisher for companies like Knowledge Adventure, Vivendi Games, Scholastic Media, and the BBC. He currently teaches in the game design program at NYFA’s Los Angeles campus.