Approaching Game Design

The first thing I want to talk about is my approach to game design. I have gone on record as saying that game design is more of an art form than a science and as such there is no such thing as good/bad design. When you design a game you have set goals in mind and you design your game around those goals, each game will have different goals in mind, therefore the design elements will be naturally different. Not only that, but gamers themselves have wildly differing tastes in games so there is no wrong/right way. Many game designers and even more players seem to struggle with this concept, in their incredibly subjective opinion there is only their own 'right' way for 'good' game design. When discussing the pros and cons and various design elements it is important to understand that design implementation is cause and effect. As an example, it is a well known phenomenon that the more time a player spends unable to execute the actions they desire within a game, the more their frustration grows. You could reasonably expect to describe removing player control as 'bad' game design. In truth, at the very least if your goal is to induce frustration in a player, then it can be considered 'good' game design, as it directly achieves your intended goal. The next important steps involve some deductive reasoning. The idea here is to find the optimum degree to which a design element should be implemented. Again as an example I will use removing player control. First, we approach the matter from the two extremes. Imagine a game where you had no control at all, for the entire game... That is not a game, that is visual media. Now imagine a game where you had full control of everything at all times... That is called games design. So in games the player is restricted to certain actions, if those actions are ones they desire to execute then they are happy, if the actions they wish to execute are outside of their control, they become frustrated until this changes. As mentioned earlier, design is heavily reliant on our goals. For this example, we will say our goal is to build maximum frustration before the player quits the game, and then relieve it, thus delivering excitement at the release of tension. Likewise, as mentioned earlier, players themselves differ greatly, the maximum frustration each individual can experience before quitting varies. We could hypothetically set the player to be unable to execute their desired action for literally years of gameplay. Most players would quickly quit, but a small number might persist for a very long time in hopes of a huge payoff at the release of years of frustration. Similarly we could hypothetically limit it to mere fractions of a second, and some players would find it unbearable and quit. We must consult our goals again, do we wish to cater to a specific brand of player who can handle large amounts of this kind of frustration or aim for the widest audience possible? What is the maximum level of frustration most players can handle? Perhaps we could adjust the amount of frustration we cause based on how much we assume the player can handle. This is why game design is no simple good/bad science, but an art of balancing goals. There are no good/bad games, just games that some people enjoy more or less than others.