Friday, June 13, 2008

What is "game development"?

Recently I talked with some folks from a college involved with game development.

One of them says, "(person X) says he doesn't know anything about game development". Person X is a major official of a group that's all about game development! Then later "(person Y) doesn't know games" (or maybe he said, "game development"). Person Y is heavily involved in game development/creation education, and ought to know something about game development, surely. But person Y comes from the art side of things.

On thinking about it, I recognized that the speakers equated "games" and "game development", and further equated "game development" with computer programming.

Fairly obviously, you can know a lot about games, in a variety of ways, and not know much about game development. We get students all the time who think they'll be good at creating games simply because they like to play games a lot: NOT SO, bucko. Yet you can also be an important part of a team that creates electronic games, and know next to nothing about computer programming.

This long introduction leads to the key question: is "game development" now the equivalent of computer programming for games, or is it something much broader? When creation of an electronic game was a one-person endeavor, back in the 70s and 80s, every game developer had to be a programmer. But this "one hero per game" style practically ended around 1990--I've had students who were born later than that--as most games became too big to be done by one person.

Nowadays, many more artists than programmers work on electronic games. And there are teams of game designers, level designers, sound people, narrative writers, and so forth working on big games. Programming is the minority endeavor.

More important, in almost all cases programming nowadays can only screw up a game, not make it outstanding. What makes an electronic game outstanding is, first, the design, the gameplay; second, the look and feel of the game, which is a combination of design and art. Good programming can certainly contribute, but mostly, programming is there to implement the vision of the designers and artist, and is a fairly mechanical contribution to the game. But if it's poorly done, then it can ruin the game. Patches typically fix programming problems, they can rarely fix fundamental design problems.

Now mind you, unlike a great many of the people who teach programming (I do not), I actually worked full time as a programmer for a while before getting deep into networking and user support. Nonetheless, this is my take on programming, especially today:

"Programming is donkey work".

What I mean by "donkey work" is that programming is mechanical. We know today that many of the steps programmers used to have to do manually, are now done by software tools. Ideally, we'd like to be able to tell a computer-based tool what kind of game we want, provide it with art, and it would write the programming. Game engines go partway in this direction, simplifying programming by (in effect) doing some of it themselves.

Constantly, people are trying to write tools that will make programmers less and less necessary, less and less important.

Yes, yes, we know there is creativity in programming. But once we get past the highly entrepreneurial stage (which we have), too much creativity in programming causes problems. In games we want programming to be reliable, solid, fast--mechanical, not creative.


So what is "game development"? Not programming, folks, it's design and art, with programming coming in near the rear. Programming is a necessary evil, not the heart of an electronic game. (And if we stray into the world of non-electronic games, we have design and we have art, but we have no programming at all.)

Now perhaps we could agree that "game development" means programming, and we can change our "game development" curricula names to "game creation" (those that includes artists and designers, at any rate). Or we can recognize that "game development" means all aspects of game creation, not just programming.

Unfortunately, "game development" programs in colleges and universities are often started by programmers, who have no interest in art and little interest in design (and sometimes, little interest in games!). In many less-well-known schools "computer programming" is going away as a topic of interest for the millennial generation, or has already been dropped; "game development" is grabbed as a life-saver for those who want to teach programming but lack students. These "game development" curricula are about fifteen years out of date when they start. My own experience of this is that when programmers start "game development" programs, those programs are a disaster for artists and designers. "Game development" should be in the hands of gamers who are teachers, not of programmers.

If you're a student planning to pursue game creation as a career, find out whether the school you have in mind runs the programming version of game development, or the broader version that accommodates non-programmers.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Game Design refers to game development and not game programming. If someone thinks that his is going to create his own little fantastic one, he needs to focus equally on every aspect. Game design is art. That's y game design needs concrete teams with a variety of professions. ;) Very nice blog!!! RSS'd ;)

Anonymous said...

To me, for board games and non-electronic games, game development is a step in the process :

Once there is a solid prototype with working mechanics ant theme, and playtesting is going on, game development starts.

part of it is made by the author:designer, part of it may come from playtesters, or the publisher

For instance, belgian "Repos prod" is famous for never accepting and publishing a game just as submitted, but rather they take an active designer role, and collaborate with the author to take the game 'one step further'.

that, to me is development of a game : taking a working, playable game and making it evolve in a better, newer game.
This means adding or removing mechanics, maybe changing the theme and graphic design, and so on.

Much like those japanese kids who take a mundane car, pop the lid, and turn it into a racing monster ^_^'

Lewis Pulsipher said...

Eric, you're talking the non-electronic version of the term, no one in electronic games uses "development" in that fashion, in fact there is still a lack of recognition that there's a big job to do once the working prototype is done.

The "developer" in non-electronic games is an SPI innovation, because they felt the historian types who designed games would only do 80% of the job. I try to do 100% of the job, because I'm doing it for my own satisfaction, not for $$$$. My experience with "developers" in this sense has been quite mixed, see

http://pulsiphergames.com/gamedesign/developers.htm

...which I need to revise someday to include my mixed experience with FFG.

(The preview isn't showing the whole word "developers.htm" at the end of that, only shows "de".)

Ian Schreiber said...

As I've seen it, "game development" (in the context of video games) is a pretty specific term. It's the process of creating the game (which includes design, programming, art, audio, QA and production, and is NOT part of game publishing which includes funding, sales, marketing, distribution, etc.).

If someone says they're a game developer, they're saying that they make games, but they're not being very specific. I equate it to science -- if someone says they're a scientist, are they a chemist, biologist, physicist, botanist, or what?

Likewise, a school that lets students major in "game development" is similar to one that would grant a Bachelor's degree in "science".

By contrast, game design is the creation of game rules and gameplay-related content. A university offering a major in "game design" should probably force students to take at least a little programming since game dev is so interdisciplinary and team-based, but if the entire focus is on programming then the school is simply not giving students what it is advertising, and the school is making it clear that they do not know the first thing about game development, and prospective students should stay far, far away.

Lewis Pulsipher said...

I agree 100%, Ian, yet the two largest community colleges in this state are actually treating "Simulation and Game Development" as programming, and devil take the artists and designers.

Perhaps if we went back far enough, we would see that "game development" was regarded as synonymous with "programming". It should not be now.

Ian Schreiber said...

Perhaps if we went back far enough, we would see that "game development" was regarded as synonymous with "programming".

No, if we go back far enough "game development" was synonymous with "game designers who had to learn programming because they didn't have anyone else to do it for them"...

Lewis Pulsipher said...

Who knows without doing a lot of research, but I'd bet there were a lot more programmers who decided they wanted to make games, than non-programmers (which, at that time, meant non-computer people, virtually every computer person was a programmer to some extent) who took up programming in order to make video games. The non-programmers had another option, to design non-electronic games instead. That's the way I recall it.

Dolores Adler said...

I agree with Ian's analysis of the meaning of Game Development. When I say I'm in game development, I'm referring to the process as a whole, not only the art, the rules of a game, the concept, or the programming.

Lewis Pulsipher said...

The question isn't so much what you mean (unless you're Humpty Dumpty), it's what other people think a term means. And outside the game industry, "development" tends to mean "programming". If you don't care about what people outside the industry think, OK.

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