THE GAME DESIGNER'S TOOL KIT
by François Dominic Laramée

At least once a month, I meet someone who, upon learning that I design games for a (marginal) living, immediately pelts me with questions about the craft. (Far more often, they simply shake their heads in disgust and walk away. So much for the glamorous game industry.) Inevitably, the conversation soon turns to The Question that has been plaguing writers and artists for centuries: "Where do you get your ideas?"

I have read dozens of answers to The Question over the years, and they all amount to one word: "Everywhere".

While possessed of a certain Zen charm and wisdom, this answer isn't terribly helpful. So, here are a handful of my favorite idea-generating techniques, many of which apply equally well to writing and to game design.

One caveat: the type of game I like to work on is, shall we say, a little left of the mainstream, so not all of the work (yes, work) I describe here may apply to your project. Feel free to ignore me when appropriate.

The Secret Virtues of Anal-Retentiveness

One of the keys to any successful storytelling endeavor is to be intensely curious about everything. Another is to never forget anything, because you never know whether a certain tidbit of trivia is going to come in handy two years down the road. Therefore, you should read, see and experience as much as humanly possible, write down the relevant (and not-so-relevant) bits on note cards, and store those in a folder. This folder will become your most precious possession; it should be a physical one, and not a computer file, for reasons which I will explain later.

Carry a miniature tape recorder or a notepad with you day and night. Use them to store impressions, bits of dialogue, ideas that come up at 4:00 AM. Your brother's new girlfriend tells a funny story at a party? Write it down, along with a description of that quirky little smile she flashed while speaking. You lose an argument and think of the perfect put-down six minutes later, in the subway? Your character may need it someday. You drive by a dynamite factory, and it's the only building standing in a sea of rubble? There may be a story there.

Read the little two-paragraph items at the bottom of page B12 of your newspaper. They may hide treasures. For example, my folder contains an article about the life and death of the last Chinese eunuch; another one tells of a controversy concerning whether Spaniards beat the Brits to Antarctica in 1819. Will these events ever make it into a game or a story of mine? Who knows? But some of the hundreds of odd bits I have gathered in there certainly will.

Enough Is Never Enough

A good designer should also read extensively, and about as many topics as he can stomach:

• Go to the local college or city library at least once a month, and skim a dozen different magazines; check out The Economist, Scientific American, Atlantic Monthly, and (if you can find them) some alternative news magazines like Utne Reader or the New Internationalist. One issue of the latter contained the most in-depth, personal account of daily life and oppression in Tibet I have ever seen; believe me, Tibet is a lot richer as a setting and a lot more "alien" than the Romulan Star Empire.

• While you're at the library, scan the shelves and grab a dozen books at random. Then, spend five minutes (and only five) reading odd passages of each. Chances are you'll discover at least one intriguing tidbit of information; even if you don't, you will only have lost one hour of your life, which compares quite favorably to the ungodly amounts of time most of us have desecrated on Gilligan's Island reruns.
  

• Roam the used and discount bookstores, and buy as many obscure reference books as you can afford; these days, libraries barely manage to maintain their magazine subscriptions, so book purchases are a rarity. Grab an almanac as well; it is often a great source of basic knowledge about whatever topic interests you, and may help orient further research. For example, my bookcase contains texts on Native American mythology, cosmic string theory, astrology, daily life in ancient Rome, how to mine an asteroid, the Gaia hypothesis, how to colonize the galaxy in 1,000 years or less, etc. All of them have inspired at least one game or story so far, and will likely fuel several more in the future.

If you have the inclination, register for a few scattered courses at the local university or community college. Virtually any knowledge is an asset for a game designer, but some of the topics I would choose include:

• Statistics, probability theory and stochastic simulation. There is at least a minor element of randomness in the overwhelming majority of game concepts. Damage/hitting tables and event scheduling are just a couple of examples; you must ground them in solid theory to make the game as believable as possible.

• History and social science, because individuals and populations should act for sensible reasons, even in games.

• Artificial intelligence and theoretical computer science, to know what is feasible now and what will become so in five years.

• Creative writing, literature and cinema, because a great game has to let the player create a great story, which is only possible if you, the designer, plant the appropriate building blocks at the right places.

Of course, one of the most useful things you can do is play other games.

Study board games and paper role-playing systems. Unlike entertainment software, they must describe their gameplay mechanics explicitly, and will therefore teach you quite effectively. For example, one of my all-time favorites is Avalon Hill's Napoleonic wargame Empires in Arms; among dozens of neat features, it implements the idea that a "free state" (really a puppet regime, but nominally independent) is a lot more productive economically and militarily than a conquered country, but that this added production comes at the price of (sometimes) lower-quality troops and easier loss of control over the territory if your own regime is in trouble. That kind of trade-off is invaluable in balancing gameplay.

(On another note, paper games are often play-tested for months before they are published, and therefore somewhat more polished gameplay-wise than most software.)

Of course, play as many computer and console games as you can, even in genres you don't particularly enjoy; rent a console game for a few dollars, and you may learn an interesting user interface trick or two from playing it for as little as 30 minutes.

Surprising combinations

Sometimes, one idea will be enough to drive your project. I personally prefer to build my projects on weird combinations of unrelated ideas, but that's a matter of taste.

Remember those note cards I talked about? This is where they are worth their weight in gold. Shuffle the cards you have acquired over the years, pick a few at random, and see if you can't come up with a concept encompassing them all. You can generate highly surprising schemes that way.

Here are a few examples of what I mean by "surprising schemes":

• A couple of years ago, a scandal shook the Canadian Red Cross when several hemophiliacs were infected with hepatitis or HIV after transfusions involving tainted blood. I remembered the myth of Faust, and I wondered: what if you received a blood transfusion and then signed away your soul to the Devil; would the donor owe part of his soul as well, since the contract would have been signed in part with his blood? That's the basic idea behind Mephistophoria, one of my current projects.

• If we ever meet an alien race, how do we communicate with them? It is a fairly safe bet to assume that computers will do the brunt of the work in "breaking the code" of an alien language. But what if the computer was so "smart" it exhibited signs of mental illness (specifically, manic depression)? Can we rely on its interpretation?

• You want to conquer the world, but there is only one problem: you are an amoeba. So, you must start by taking over the Petri dish, evolve new genes that allow you to get out into the world, etc.

I have never seen any piece of "interactive writing" software worth its price, so the only advice I can give you here is to build a set of treatment and design document templates you feel comfortable with, and use them over and over again. Make them as detailed as possible, with sections for everything from back-story to simulation model to characters to level walkthroughs to special units; this way, you will never forget anything important.

And finally, make sure that you get as many smart people as possible to read and comment your design... And that you are willing to listen and make changes accordingly. However, remember that not everyone is qualified to design a game, and that responsibility for the project is ultimately yours; knowing which suggestions to reject is just as important as knowing how to incorporate those which deserve it.

Once you have a workable design, make a prototype. It doesn't have to be interactive, or even on a computer: some games can be simulated quite accurately with cards, a table-top map and a few tokens, or even clay figures. What matters is that you get to test and refine your gameplay before that elusive point, 24 months down the road, when the engine will finally deliver more than 2 frames per second. You wouldn't believe the number of good ideas you can generate in a single play-testing session; it is a lot easier to implement them when the whole concept is mere paper than once 90% of the code has been written.

All right, I didn't tell you the whole truth when I said that you can get ideas everywhere. Oh, it's true enough, don't worry. However, for "data" to become "ideas", the associative circuits in your brain must discover surprising connections between various elements; to be able to do that requires quite a bit of time, effort and raw knowledge. You've got your work cut out for you.

(So, next time the lead programmer complains that you sit in your office all day and don't do anything constructive, grab that almanac I made you buy and whack him upside the head with it. That'll show him.)

Bio

François-Dominic Laramée is a freelance interactive game designer, developer and producer.  He has been involved in one form or another of the game industry, whether PC, console, online, set-top box or even play-by-mail, for the past decade, including more than 8 years of experience as Head of Studio, Game Designer, Software Engineer, Producer and Quality Assurance Manager in the interactive entertainment and spoken dialogue interfaces industries.  Learn more on his website at: http://pages.infinit.net/idjy/