
Richard Garriott on why “most game designers really just suck” - Jare
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/19/richard-garriott-game-designers-suck/
======
neverm0re
This really has been my experience at several game studios, including the
current one I am at. Often enough, the 'game designer' tends to be someone who
exists mostly as a political organism in the company. Without fail, none of
the designers I've worked with know much about the history of video games and
will usually be rather dismissive about the subject.

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.

~~~
functionality
Hold on, how do these people get to the role of a designer in the first place?
Where do they come from?

~~~
BSousa
For some reason, testing graduates a lot of designers.

What I found in various game companies is that game designers usually graduate
from other positions in the company and rarely hired as designers from the
start.

~~~
saraid216
> For some reason, testing graduates a lot of designers.

I have been wondering for a while how transparently bad game designers must be
to produce well... a lot of what we see. This actually explains a lot.

Testers are not designers. :( Testers can be wonderful user advocates, if they
make that effort, but... designers they are not. If anything, they're
antithetical to design at their best.

~~~
endianswap
Good testers are hard to find, and what's even harder to find are good testers
who want to remain testers. The pay is terrible, the benefits are usually non-
existent, and they're quite often placed socially at a lower level than the
other game developers. Finding someone who is good at testing and doesn't want
to be a programmer or a designer is nigh impossible in the games industry.
Even if they don't want to be a designer/engineer, they want to advance their
career which leaves them with the option of managing other testers, which as
we all know, leaves no time to actually exercise their testing skills.

Until testing is treated like a real career, with architect-style career
growth options, it will continue this way. Instead, testers spend a lot of
their time growing their connections, internally and externally to the studio,
hoping that a junior level designer/engineer position will open up. Because
there are so many testers, it's quite cutthroat, so spending time at work
"showing off" or playing politics is almost a necessity here for career
advancement.

------
jiggy2011
"If you’re not a good artist and not a good programmer, but you still like
games, you become a designer."

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.

~~~
seivan
It is true.

That's because the management have tricked people into getting the game design
jobs - the easiest (in terms of stress and problem solving) job there is with
most often the highest pay check.

Lotta' ass kissin'.

~~~
coffeeaddicted
That depends a lot on the company. I've seen game-designers which took it
easy, but I've also worked with good ones which took their job extremely
serious.

The good ones are able to catch problems before stuff is coded or modeled. A
good designer manages to describe every object needed (including rough
sketches what they should look like and describing needed animations), every
mission condition (which is very close to coding and needs good understanding
what is technically possible). A good designer can describe the GUI pretty
much ahead in a way that coders don't have to rework it over and over until it
fits (including describing stuff like left-click/right-
click/drag&drop/selection box behavior which can get very tricky pretty fast
in games). A really good designer might even know excel good enough to
calculate all kind of stuff through before even approaching any coders.

A bad designer thinks it's all just about some great idea and throwing in lots
of stuff and the team will do the rest. A good designer knows it's 90% about
describing details and about removing as much stuff as possible.

~~~
seivan
It's 70% Software and Graphics. Don't kid yourself.

EDIT: decreased from 90 to 70 - need some space for voice acting, sounds and
music.

~~~
coffeeaddicted
Yes, around 10%-20% time for design looks correct to me - which is why you
have maybe 1-2 designers in a team of 10 people. But the designer still has to
work 100% to get stuff done and it can get very stressful as well. And his
work is important - because design-errors are early errors which means they
are the most expensive ones you can have.

But it's really as in all jobs - the difference between good and bad designers
is so absolutely unbelievable huge that if you worked with some bad ones and
then meet good ones you hardly believe they are doing even similar jobs.

------
zeidrich
I think the reason that the people he credits as being as good designers are
from his generation is because that was back in the day that a designer could
make a top quality game with a team of 5-10 people.

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.

------
dougk16
I don't know, some fluffy arguments and self-back-patting here, but I have to
tentatively agree on one point. Out of the 11 designers that I've worked with,
7 were rock solid and came from a programming or art background, with the
artists doing some scripting now and again. The other 4 were pure designers,
and only one of them was good (although damn good)...the others fit Richard's
stereotypes pretty well. This doesn't include the few games I've worked on
that didn't have a designer at all, and didn't seem the worse for it.

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.

------
saucetenuto
I basically agree, but those who made Tabula Rasa shouldn't throw stones.

------
badloginagain
The core of his argument centers around that compared to the other
disciplines, it's harder to find a "good" game designer than it is to find a
"good" programmer/artist etc.

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.

------
calhoun137
Game design is NOT easy, and it's just as much an art form as painting or
writing music. Asking what makes a game fun is sort of like asking what makes
a certain song "good"; it boils down to a question of personal preference, and
everyone has different tastes. You can't please everyone at once, but if you
dumb down the game enough you can appeal to a very wide audience. That's what
happens with formula movies, pop music, and increasingly, video games as well.

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.

------
no_wave
What has this guy done for anyone lately? I get that he might have made
something good decades ago, but why does that mean his advice is relevant now?
The entire landscape is different now.

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.

~~~
lutze
What he's done lately is launch a kickstarter for a new game, this is just
marketing.

Or in less polite terms, bullshit hype from a man who needed to come back to
Earth long long before he went into fucking space.

------
ebbv
Hilarious. The Ultima games were far from perfect, and it's not like they
stood alone without any influences. They were heavily derivative of D&D, like
any fantasy RPG.

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.

~~~
martinced
I totally disagree.

The Ultima series had that ability to transport you into these universes (or
this universe) that Lord British (aka Richard Garriott) created.

When there are threads on forums about one game to pick if you had to choose
only one (which is very hard to do, but that's the game: pick one and only),
if you had to choose "the best game ever", well very often people will cite an
Ultima.

I played III, IV and V like crazy. The Commodore Amiga port of Ultima V really
sucked. I was so sad that I paid for that crap. So what did I do? I went back
to the Commodore 64 to be able to play Ultima V.

Yes, you read correctly: dodging the Amiga which has a _way_ superior machine
than the C64 (they're not even comparable feature-wise, these are two
different eras of computers) to go back to an old C64 to spend countless hours
/ days playing Ultima V.

The crappy graphics didn't matter: it was all about the experience.

The only game which did something similar to me is FTL's "Sundog: The Frozen
Legacy". FTL then made Dungeon Master which is considered to be one of the
most influencial game ever.

Lord British is full of it? Yes. Totally deserved. There are no two game
designers like him on this planet.

~~~
potatolicious
I disagree - I regard Garriott much like Chris Roberts: incredibly
influential, certainly talented, early pioneers of their field, but whose
relevance in modern gaming is in doubt.

I for one have more faith in Roberts than Garriott, who reminds me a bit of
Molyneux in his focus on personal branding and professional fame.

Before we fall all over ourselves painting Garriott as some kind of infallible
game design ubermensch, let's look at his track record.

His career pre-2000 is dominated by Ultima games, which were doubtlessly
groundbreaking, iconic, and by almost all accounts, great games.

His career post-2000 is limited. He produced Lineage II, City of Heroes, City
of Villains, and Tabula Rasa. City of Heroes gained a cult, if small,
following, and both Tabula Rasa and Lineage II were commercial failures.
Lineage II in particular was savaged by both gamers and the gaming press -
6.7/10 by IGN, 6.0/10 by GameSpot, 62% on Metacritic.

But don't take my word for it, this is lifted from the Wikipedia article:

"Scott Stahl of the The Daily Orange praised the game's graphics and design,
though he also mentioned that the game "quickly degrades into an incredibly
tedious and monotonous process of killing the same monster a thousand
different times", and that the character creation options are "incredibly
shallow, with maybe two or three different faces and hair styles for each type
of character." Andrew Park of Gamespot said that the game "offers either a
repetitive grind or a stiff challenge""

By all accounts, Garriott's seemingly unquestionable sense of game design
seems to fall apart when he left the Ultima series. I very gladly accept that
he was/is one of the top game designers the industry has seen, but treating
like "there's no one else like him on this planet" is unreasonable.

Secondly,

> _"When there are threads on forums about one game to pick if you had to
> choose only one (which is very hard to do, but that's the game: pick one and
> only), if you had to choose "the best game ever", well very often people
> will cite an Ultima."_

Citation sorely needed. If you went solely to a RPG forum, and specifically
excluded JRPG aficionados, then you'd probably get a lot of answers to the
tune of "Ultima". There have been many "top video games _evar_ " lists made
both by the gaming press and by vote participation, and I've yet to see Ultima
top any of them.

There's a lot more to video gaming than "old school RPGs".

~~~
dyselon
His post-2000 career is basically just Tabula Rasa. Lineage II is Korean made.
City of * is all Cryptic (and later Paragon). Garriott is only attached to
those products by way of being high up in NCsoft's US division at the time.

------
kevingadd
Back when I was working for one of NCSoft's studios, Richard Garriott came out
and took a giant steaming dump on us in the press - and at the time he still
worked for NCSoft. Needless to say, we were all pretty offended. He
apologized, of course - but it looks like he's still up to the same old
tricks.

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

~~~
Karunamon
Garriott always struck me as a bit of an attention whore. There's the author
self inserts in just about every game (Including Tabula Rasa, a failed MMO
where he took the title as General British), the random lashing out at various
people with what seems like no intent other than to stir the pot..

------
seivan
“If you’re not a good artist and not a good programmer, but you still like
games, you become a designer.”

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.

~~~
codesuela
what are UX monkeys?

------
nhoven
Pretty self-centered. For a world with only a couple great game designers,
there's an awful lot of excellent games out there.

------
snake_plissken
Ultima VII still reigns supreme.

------
seivan
Because "game designers" are "idea guys". I rather have a gamer graphics
artist or gamer game developer, than an "idea guy".

------
michaelochurch
I've done some game design, but the only thing anyone would have heard of is
the card game, Ambition. (
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhHZh5IEKBDf56ExgErv4o/edit)
)

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.

~~~
doctorpangloss
_It's hard as hell to come up with a game worth playing._

It's really easy to come up with a game worth playing. Cloning is incredibly
easy. While I admire that you went through the hard process of designing the
game, what was learned?

Taste (and hence design) is completely arbitrary in videogames. There's no
intuitive reason why pushing around sticks on a controller to move around guns
is something people like, or that we use 52 cards instead of 60 or 40.

In other words, Richard Garriot is a bit contradictory: if there's nothing
learnable about videogame design, the things that make a game good are
arbitrary. If the things that make good games are arbitrary, isn't the idea of
a game design guru (Lord British) absurd?

To hammer home the point that making a fun game is pretty easy, there are
thirteen major MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) titles with more than
one million players, and thousands of "endless running" games across all
platforms. But the reason League of Legends and Temple Run reign supreme over
the DoTA WarCraft 3 scenario and Canabalt is not superior design or balance.

The best games, the best in the genres really, are more like entertainment
services, not just mathematical abstractions decorated with pictures and text.

Good games are about running servers; polishing user experience; providing
customer support; maintaining a community; the art, the sound, the writing,
etc.

While your card game looks interesting, I click on it and see a Google
Document. Shouldn't the first link be a web app hosted in Facebook, complete
with bots and achievements? All this engineering and craft is both hard and
vital to making a game.

I'd say what makes a game different from a math problem is _precisely_
everything outside the game design. Math problems aren't that much fun.

~~~
emiljbs
>Taste (and hence design) is completely arbitrary in videogames.

Taste is definitely _not_ completely arbitrary in video games.

What makes a video game good is however harder to operationalize - as it
always is with mediums of art. Ask the average person why they like some song,
an example of an answer would be something like "It's got a catchy hook",
which the video game equivalent would be "It's got good controls and
explosions."

I do not know what actually makes a game good, but I also have a very hard
time believing that taste is completely arbitrary in video games and that
video game design is useless.

>But the reason League of Legends and Temple Run reign supreme over the DoTA
WarCraft 3 scenario and Canabalt is not superior design or balance.

Sure WC3 DOTA is less popular than LoL, but you'd be insane to say that people
do not notice imbalanced stuff.

You seem to hold the view that the more popular a game is, the better. This is
probably not true considering how popular Farmville is (or at least used to
be) while not being a very good game at all.

Hm, I have a lot more to say overall but I think it's just gonna end with me
ranting to a straw man, so I 'm gonna stop here.

~~~
emddudley
> What makes a video game good is however harder to operationalize - as it
> always is with mediums of art. Ask the average person why they like some
> song, an example of an answer would be something like "It's got a catchy
> hook", which the video game equivalent would be "It's got good controls and
> explosions."

While an individual's taste may be particular to him or her, it is possible to
group and classify visual art styles. This is applicable to other aspects of
game design as well, like genre and specific game mechanics.

I hate to link to Quora, but there was a great question about video game art
styles at: [http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-taxonomy-of-names-of-
videoga...](http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-taxonomy-of-names-of-videogame-
art-graphical-styles)

~~~
codezero
FYI, when you link to Quora if you add ?share=1 then people won't be prompted
to create an account.

[http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-taxonomy-of-names-of-
videoga...](http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-taxonomy-of-names-of-videogame-
art-graphical-styles?share=1)

------
papsosouid
He's right except for the part where he paints himself and molyneux as being
in the "not suck" camp. Being a head in the clouds idealist who produces
impressive hype for poor games is still sucking.

~~~
roc
He's trading heavily on nostalgia and free press for his new game. Talking
about Wright, Roberts and Molyneux is a way to stoke the nostalgia, and
blanket blasting the industry with contentious quotes is just a way to get
that free press. He doesn't have a "point" beyond that. He's not 'right' about
anything of substance.

If you actually drilled into Garriott's argument here -- instead of just
recording 'bombshells' and briefly trying to establish some room for him to
backpedal later -- his argument would dissipate into a lot of hand-waving.
Because the particulars are just going to identify exceptions and display a
lack of concrete evidence for his view, beyond slinging arrows at designs that
1. he personally doesn't like 2. are beyond any designers' ability to
influence (e.g. things handed down, or shortcuts taken due budget/scheduling
issues, etc)

~~~
papsosouid
>He's not 'right' about anything of substance

He is right that most "game designers" suck, and that the core reason is
because they were people who didn't cultivate a real skill, so went through
the QA -> level designer -> designer path. A path which doesn't make any
sense, and for which there is very little useful training or education
available. There is so little analysis of what makes games fun and how to
design fun games, and 99% of game designers never see or hear about the little
that is available.

~~~
roc
He gets people nodding along by saying "most stuff sucks". But the absence of
examples is intentional. Because while most people will nod along to "most
stuff sucks", they do not all agree on _what_ sucks. And that goes for music,
games, films, books -- essentially all arts and culture.

Until he actually defines what is and is not good design, he hasn't actually
made a point that can even be evaluated.

The bit about the career path is somewhere between ad hominem and red herring.
The path is irrelevant to the results. If bad designers are getting through,
it'd be due a failure of the filter between level/encounter designer and lead
designer. Not a product of whether the level/encounter designer came from QA
or development or ops or whatever else.

There's also no way for us to evaluate how much a given 'bad design' was a
function of 'no effective training' as opposed to 'time crunch', 'no
resources', 'dictate from management', 'tech limitation', or even 'novel
theory that just didn't pan out'. And absent that, how could we lay the blame
at the feet of career path?

~~~
papsosouid
Yes, everyone who works in the industry is wrong and doesn't know anything.
Good point.

~~~
roc
Did you miss the part where we don't all agree on what it is that actually
sucks?

When I say "most people think most things suck, but they don't agree on what
sucks" - that applies to industry people too. And nothing about their being
industry people means they magically all agree on _what_ , in particular,
sucks nor in what the _non-sucky_ alternative would be.

~~~
papsosouid
No, I didn't miss it. It just is a meaningless statement and does nothing to
further the conversation.

~~~
roc
My pointing out Garriott's fallacy doesn't advance the conversation but your
repeating it does?

One last time: Garriott's statement is uselessly vague. If we ask people "do
most designers suck" we will be lumping together the affirmative answers of
those who think (e.g.) Halo's designers suck alongside those who think they do
not.

So both groups agreeing to the over-broad phrasing "most designers suck" gives
us only the _illusion_ of consensus.

So as long as Garriott avoids defining "what sucks" and "what does not suck",
he is not saying anything true or worthwhile.

~~~
papsosouid
No, you don't need to define what sucks. Most people agree that most game
designers suck. Most people agree that getting punched in the face sucks. This
is not a difficult concept, and trying to pretend the point is "uselessly
vague" simply because you don't like it is absolutely useless.

~~~
roc
> _"This is not a difficult concept"_

I'd have thought not, but you seem impervious to it.

Your consensus includes people who disagree on what sucks. How in the world
can you pretend their seeming agreement on a broad phrasing remotely matters?

8 out of 10 people might says shooters suck, but if 4 think health packs are
the problem and 4 think auto-regen health is the problem and health packs are
the solution, _they do not agree_. The 8 out of 10 number is useless in
deciding not only which is the design that sucks and need to change, but in
deciding _how_ to change it to not suck.

Saying "most people think most design sucks" is at the level of abstraction of
"most people think most human interaction sucks". "getting punched in the
face" is a specific, defined human interaction. If you or Garriott wanted to
specify an example design at that level of specificity, we could evaluate it.

~~~
papsosouid
You are inventing an imaginary problem so that you can complain about it. Your
problem is imaginary, so make your complaints imaginary too.

~~~
roc
Right, because no-one has ever disagreed on whether a game or game mechanic is
good.

