One Veteran's Perspective

The appearance of a story on Ted Castranova's Arden: The World of William Shakespeare in last month's issue of WIRED began a discussion around The Education Arcade about academia's role in game creation and specifically in creating educational games (since that's what we do). This post by Ed. Arcade Creative Director Scot Osterweil continues a series of posts we'll run on the topic. We hope to begin a discussion in the educational game community about their best practices, so please comment with links to some of your own thoughts and best practices!

As someone who has been privileged to work in both commercial game development and academics, I was grateful to Ted Castranova for being a good sport in sharing his experience as an academic trying to make a game in his WIRED article, “Making Games That Don’t Suck.” In the article, Castranova details the mistakes made in creating the game Arden, which was intended as a research tool for the study of virtual economies, but which ended up floundering on its inability to excite its audience. I find myself in any number of meetings in which scholars with a concept to teach or a story to tell casually talk about turning their work into a game, as if games were just ribbons to be tied around bright shiny ideas. Having someone of Castranova’s stature admit that making games is hard provides a useful starting point for such conversations in the future.That said, Castranova’s discussion bears further exploration. While his list of do’s and don’ts represents a good starting place for understanding the challenges of making good games, it still reflects the experience of someone just getting his feet wet in the industry. The discussion might benefit from being reframed from the perspective of a grizzled veteran of the games biz. In the WIRED article, Castranova distills his experience into five key points, which I'd like to take up in turn.

1. Don't be overly ambitious. Castranova is speaking here about the impulse to create fully realized 3-D worlds, and all the complexity that suggests. Yes, that turns out to be very hard, but an even more elemental error is assuming that such realism is desirable. We can see from the commercial game industry that the race for ever-higher polygon counts and more realistic splatter doesn't necessarily lead to better, more imaginative games. We make a mistake when we see current industry fashions as the pinnacle of achievement. There are many creative ways to envision game worlds and tell compelling stories without resorting to hyper-realism, and while such alternatives may not be as technically challenging, they can be, if anything, more artistically ambitious. It's hard to imagine a game world more thrillingly inventive than that of the flash-based 2-D game Samorost. Rather than shy away from the cutting edge, I think we should be more "ambitious" than our commercial counterparts in promoting alternative visions of what a game can look like.
2. Go Low Tech. It's hard to disagree with Castranova's point that really interesting stuff is being done on many platforms, including plain vanilla html. And this certainly squares with my comments above about ambition. I would just spin it slightly differently. The idea is not to specifically go "low tech" but rather to be disciplined and inventive in whatever platform you do use, and don't rule out even basic technologies.
   One role for low tech that Castranova doesn't mention is in prototyping. It's always good to try out your designs before you commit them to their final form, and this is best done with unadorned prototypes that you can put in the hands of potential players. Sometimes this can be done with paper and pencil, sometimes with simple html or basic Flash. Here, the goal should be to create a prototype as quickly as possible, and iterate as much as you can before the real development starts.
3. Think About Your Audience. Arden bored its target audience, so according to Castranova, "Arden II will be more of a hack-and-slash Dungeons and Dragons type of game." Reverting to tried-and-true formulas may be appropriate for Arden, but don't assume that audiences only want what is familiar. Most games are still targeted to a specific, and all-too-narrow demographic of traditional male gamers. If you ask people what they want, all they can conceive of is what they know, so they will ask for more of the same. As we think about the audiences for our games, we owe it to ourselves to look at all the other forms of culture our players participate in, and ask what that says about them. Kids spend plenty of time in on-line social interactions that mainly depend on reading and writing. That doesn't mean that games can succeed largely through text, but it does suggest that players can be engaged by a huge range of activities provided there is the right balance of challenge, feedback, and interaction with others. Thinking about your audience should mean continually striving to tap into the real emotional lives of game players, not just repeating trusted clichés.
4. Get a full time staff. Castranova's experience aligned well with ours at the Education Arcade. Some of the disciplines of game-making are simply too rigorous for even the most talented students who work part time and have competing demands on their creativity. Our solution though has not been to hire large full-time staffs, but rather to think seriously about what parts of the task are appropriate for our group, and where we should seek outside partners. We've learned that design and prototyping can work quite well in an academic setting. This work is often accomplished by a combination of full-time staff and students. If you can structure your project so that this initial design happens at a less rushed pace, the added time to think and let ideas "breathe" can often be good. After design has had some time to cook, it can then be fruitful to kick into high gear for development, and here we look for commercial developers to partner with. There are companies out there whose bread-and-butter may come from work for hire, but who are eager to get involved in interesting and creative work. They will often throw themselves into such projects with as much zeal as your most committed team member. The real challenge is learning how to work with third parties, how to communicate your ideas, and how to benefit from the input that others will bring to your work when they get involved.
5. Concede screw-ups. Absolutely. The real challenge is in knowing how to be passionate about your work, and clear-eyed about it at the same time, but this is true for practitioners in every creative medium.