Developing Your Skills: Playing Games
I recently saw a question on Twitter that spurred a lot of thought for me.
I instantly ran through about a million thoughts and counter-thoughts, but to keep it brief, I replied in the negative:
Twitter is famously a terrible place to express complex ideas and I got some pushback that I basically all agreed with. But I still think I’m basically correct, and wanted to go into a bit more detail and explain what I meant.
Basically, the core issues I have with the statement “you need to play a lot of games to be a good developer” are:
Inefficient Use of Time - If your goal is to improve as a developer, “just play games” isn’t a very effective use of time. There are better ways to spend your time in more targeted ways to advance your skills - including more targeted game play.
Quantity over Quality - It implies a broad, shallow base of experience is better than a narrow, deep base. I vehemently disagree - I think the process of analysis and dissection is the most effective way to extract useful skills from playing other games, and often that requires investing a lot of time and thought into a single game rather than broadly surveying games in general.
Recency Bias - It isn’t really stated, but a lot of people take this statement to mean “you need to have played the games everyone is talking about”. I think this tends to inject a recency bias into game design and can cause industry-wide stagnation when people are all going to the same well.
What is necessary - and I say this coming from the perspective of a Designer/Programmer but I also believe it is true for Artists and Producers - is the ability to dissect and critically evaluate an experience and for that evaluation to sharpen your own work. I think that much of the time that experience can and should come from playing games, but it is not required to and, in my opinion, should not come exclusively from other games.
Some things I believe are more important and a better use of time than just playing a lot of games:
Sharpening your critical skills
Listening to your peers and industry elders share their experiences
Developing a hobby outside of games that you feel passionate about and invigorates you.
Using your gaming time wisely
I figured to be more constructive I’d give some tips for these:
Sharpening your Critical Skills
The most important thing you can actively work on as a developer is the ability to do critical analysis, deeply understanding why a game works or doesn’t work, and being able to communicate that to others. That skill is what separates “gaming” from “research for self-improvement”. To develop that skill, I would recommend some of the following exercises:
Try to write a review for a game you played. Break down what you did and didn’t like. For the things you liked, what choices did the developer make that made them successful? For the things you didn’t like, what do you think the developer was trying to accomplish with them? What would you have done to improve them?
Find and read some more in-depth criticism - it doesn’t need to be academic but being able to parse criticism that’s a bit deeper than what you’d typically find in <insert gaming site here> is a useful skill that will give you some insight into how to think deeply about games. If you’re comfortable with video format, I’d strongly recommend any of Tim Rogers' youtube work or any of HBomberguy's work - especially surrounding games he likes. Or, if you prefer writing, there’s a ton available but a classic example is Clint Hocking on ludonarrative dissonance in Bioshock which is a great introduction to opening yourself up to thoughts about “what are we really trying to do here, anyways?” when making a game.
Watch a Lets’ Play or Twitch stream of a game you know fairly well and see how the streamer reacts in situations that you played. Ask yourself some questions: Do they miss things that you noticed? Why? Is that good or bad? Are they having the same kind of experience you had?
Listening to your peers and industry elders share their experiences
Unfortunately GDC is incredibly - stupidly - expensive, but there are some very good GDC talks available on their Youtube. If there is a game you enjoyed, watch the postmortem! Or find if anyone on their team gave a talk! Just watch postmortems in general! Do not just focus on your discipline - learn how to talk to folks in other disciplines about their jobs, too. If you’re a designer, learn what rigging is. Learn a little bit of programming.
Also, there are some great written resources you can access! Nintendo’s long running Ask Iwata/Ask the Developer series is awesome. Listen to some gaming podcasts! No Cartridge and Designer Notes are good! If you found a game really meant a lot to you, try to track down interviews with the developers - this interview with Hidetaka Miyazaki, the director of the Souls games, stuck with me and influenced a lot of my thinking on where I look to find inspiration for game mechanics.
Developing a hobby outside of games that you feel passionate about and invigorates you.
On that note, I think once you have sharpened your critical skills, you owe it to yourself to develop yourself as a person and focus some time on non-gaming hobbies. While sort of counter-intuitive, I think this is critical for at least two reasons:
As Miyazaki relates in that interview above, inspiration can come from anywhere. And, most importantly, you and your interests can provide a unique perspective to your game development! A lot of your peers will have played Call of Battlefield Modern Black Ops 4 but not a lot of them will have gone fly fishing. If you can look at the experience of fly fishing and understand the joy in it, that is something you bring to the table that most other designers will not. Gardening, Studying History, Film, really anything can fill that role, but any non-game hobby you can become passionate about will develop your unique point of view as a dev.
Equally important if you hope to have a long career in games, being able to escape the world of video games into a non-gaming hobby can be incredibly restorative and combat burnout. I got to the point, working on console games in the PS360 era, where holding a game controller felt like work. I couldn’t do it. Having music, or weird tech nerd stuff to delve into gave me a way to recharge my batteries and not do longer-lasting damage to my career or mental health.
Using Your Gaming Time Wisely
Ultimately, I think most people get into making games because they on some level enjoy games, so when you do choose to play games it can be really helpful to target your gaming time to develop your skills rather than just shotgunning a lot of games. Some suggestions:
Keep a specific subject in mind when selecting a game and focus on analyzing it. It can be pretty overwhelming to try to dissect the entire experience of a game as you’re playing it, so it can be helpful - especially if you know something about the game ahead of time - to keep a specific aspect of the game in mind and focus your analysis on that part. Maybe you are interested in a given mechanic, so you select two or three games with that mechanic, and then you compare/contrast how they implement it and where they are successful.
Try to make yourself uncomfortable. Try to pick well-reviewed games in genres you haven’t typically liked and make a genuine empathic effort to try to figure out why other folks like them.
Know when to bail. It’s OK to give up on a game if you don’t feel like you are going to learn more by playing it and you aren’t enjoying it.
Try to go deep on a single game. Pick a single game and try to really fully understand it. Read the Reddit, watch Lets Plays/Twitch streams, get fully immersed in the community, and see where you agree/disagree with the community. Spending a lot of extra time on a single game can often pay off in deep insight into how games work vs. just surveying a large breadth of games.
Identify your comfort foods. Some games work much better than others as burnout cures - don’t feel a need to push yourself to play the latest thing if you are exhausted. It’s fine to get another Civ 6 game in.
Finally, and this is probably the most important one - you must play your own game. And, if you’re running a studio, schedule working time to play the game you are making. Every person in every department will do their job better with a player’s point of view and understanding of the game they are making. But, employees don’t owe you their time off work, so you need to make time for them to play the game they are making during work hours.