No Time To Play

I like to brag about my work, for the simple reason that I like, well, my work. But it usually results in people taking me for a much better programmer than I am. Then again, that might have something to do with the decent number of completed personal projects on my website: working software, complete tutorials, playable games… Although they are small stuff (after all, there are people out there who write operating systems for fun), they obviously count as accomplishments.

Now, if even such limited success seems to elude you, you may think people like me have some secret ingredient. But all I have is a number of common sense rules derived from (sometimes bitter) experience.

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I’ve just discovered Raph Koster’s essay on game design (via Lost Garden), and while it’s a classic, I can’t help but think that most would-be game designers stumble long before getting to those advanced considerations. Why? Because of a few myths that endure and keep luring people into mental traps. So I decided to tackle some of them in the hope of bringing them down.

Myth #1: My ideas! My preciousss ideas!

This is the big bad wolf of myths, not just about game design but all creativity: that ideas are somehow rare, unique and valuable. Well, sorry to disappoint you: I have more ideas for games than I can shake a stick at. Most of them are probably bad; the rest are likely to end up unrecognizable when (if…) they’re going to be made into something playable. As for uniqueness, where do you think your ideas come from? The same place as mine: everything we see, hear, play, read and generally experience. Guess what, we live in the same world; our experiences are likely to overlap a lot. Speaking of which.

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Less than two weeks ago, I wrote a glowing review of a browser-based MMORPG called Pardus. Yesterday, I cancelled my account.

Before I go into the gory details, remember that negative experiences impact us more strongly than positive ones. You know the saying, “Beauty is skin-deep, but ugliness goes all the way to the bone”? That’s how the brain perceives things. It’s why unhappy customers will complain about your service or product way more than the happy customers will praise it — which in turn is why any business should go out of its way to make customers happy, or at least not unhappy.

That’s also why last time I focused on my positive experiences with the game. I knew the good impression wasn’t going to last. I just didn’t expect things to go downhill as fast as they did.

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When it comes to starting out with game development, people seem to be divided into three main categories. First, there are the kids who show up on forums with posts along the lines of:

I’m 13 years old, and I have this idea for the next big MMORPG that will topple WoW, but I don’t know any programming or 3D modeling. Where do I start? Would you like to work on it? Help!

Then there are those who will promptly and mercilessly mock the poor kid without offering one word of useful advice. And then there are those who will happily tell you how hard it is to make a MMORPG (hint: it’s really difficult). Or even an apparently simple game. Or just a single encounter. And they’d be right. But that misses the point.

Point is, it’s natural for gamers to want to make their own games. Especially nowadays that the means for doing it are cheap (often free) and information is so accessible. Why, then, are we making it so hard to get started for those who want to try?

In the next paragraphs, I will try to give a few pointers from my own experience. Hopefully you’ll find them useful. But first, a word.

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