Garriott: "Most designers really just suck"

[Reyturner]

If you're a game designer than there is a >50% chance that Richard Garriott thinks you suck. 

 

In my experience (AAA development), there is truth to his statement. 

 

DISCUSS!

[elmuerte]

I think somebody forgot to turn the oxygen on when he went into space

[syntheticgerbil]

Don't feed the troll.

 

Also I think he just sold his mansion+ranch here in Austin. I heard that had good design.

[Reyturner]

I don't think a more successful person would have said the things he said (mostly because really successful people don't spend a lot of time criticizing others in the first place), BUT, he makes some good points. 

 

There is a lot of bad design out there because design is such a fuzzy and ill-defined skill and a lot of designers wind up in their positions because they don't have art or programming skills (frankly, you could replace the word Designer with the word Producer in this article and it would still be as true). 

 

I think there are a lot of egos out there that are being persevered by the fact that it was Richard Garriott that said this, and not because the thing he's saying are wrong.  

 

I've worked in several of studios that ended up either majorly downsizing or outright closing in the last few years where these issues were part of the problem (it wasn't all the economy). I think it's also why the mid-tier studio is dying out: it is way too easy for outstanding AAA studios to find and hire the top tier talent and way easier for outstanding developers to just go it on their own. 

 

People who are good don't have to work at studios that aren't (at least not for long). 

 

This is way reductive, but I think it is more true than a lot of people are comfortable admitting. 

[Reyturner]

To expand on this, I think there is a big problem with kids doing the following steps:

1. going to "Game School" and achieving enough to get a diploma (or no school at all)

2. getting a job in QA

3. doing simple design tasks, for free, helping other designers who followed the same path.

4. defaulting into a design job because there's an opening.

If that guy happens to be super talented then great, but far more often he/she doesn't know what they're doing and they end up learning most of their craft on the job. If they're lucky they end up on projects that are successful and they get to do it again and again and, eventually, they might end up being good (or they might just reinforcing the same bad habits).

I've never seen any really good mentoring or training for designers anywhere that I've worked, mostly because it is an incredibly difficult problem to solve. Things like the Amnesia Fortnight and Personal Development time being scheduled are probably the best thing, but so many studios undervalue that kind of experimentation as it doesn't immediately result in product that they can sell.

Designers have to have the freedom to try, fail hard, try again, fail again slightly less hard, and learn their lessons. Right now, most just stumble through and maybe get good and or maybe their mistakes are covered up by others and it is really a crap shoot as to whether you're going to be able to develop your craft or not.

It's bad for the designers and it is bad for the studios.

Now there's going to be a lot of people going "That's what I did and that's what 90% of successful designers that I know did so clearly this is all wrong" but I think they are suffering fromt he same selection bias that people who think they made good while following The Secret are.

[elmuerte]

The same logic applies to any other profession/trade/whatever

[Reyturner]

Except that there are apprenticeships, certifications, dispassionate peer reviews and a hundred other ways of measuring your expertise or the expertise of others. You can wash out of an art college. Have you ever heard of anyone washing out of the diploma mills that pass for game design schools who didn't just quit? 

 

For game designers, unless you're 100% responsible for every aspect of the project or you've actually go some experience to measure your progress against, you have very little idea if what you're doing is any good. 

[elmuerte]

and how would you measure how good a game design is?

[syntheticgerbil]

I think there are a lot of egos out there that are being persevered by the fact that it was Richard Garriott that said this, and not because the thing he's saying are wrong. 

 

You don't have to hear any of these points from Richard Garriott to see that you can get a long way in game design by blowing hot air. The way that article reads just comes off as bratty and is from a dinosaur designer who has lived a life of excess, so it's probably not a good place to launch a serious discussion about certain professions and the experience that is needed in the games industry.

 

So much lies in personal experience and who you've met and worked with anyway, all professions.

[Reyturner]

and how would you measure how good a game design is?

I'd say the number of finished products under your belt is the only really good metric. Everyone has a moleskine note book full of wonderful brilliant ideas that have never been put to any kind of test. All you can do is design really bad stuff and have it torn apart by people who know what they're talking about and keep doing that until they stop tearing it apart. 

 

The environment that a lot of designers are in is one where too many people are either unwilling or unable to call out bad decisions being made by their colleges (you don't want to burn bridges after all). 

 

When you consider that the average career in game is about 5-7 years, of course a majority of people who basically started actually doing their job in year 3 (if they're starting their career doing something like QA) aren't going to be top of their field by the end of those 5 years. 

 

Game designers need to design games, badly, for a long time. Asking them to learn on the job and building a business model around publishing whatever they come up with regardless of merit is a perfect storm for producing crap. 

 

If I could give aspiring game designers one piece of advice it would be design games before you work in games, ESPECIALLY if you're only inroad is QA. 

[TychoCelchuuu]

Another article about the same thing, plus a comment that Garriott posted on the article:

Thanks (NOT!) for the sensational headline! While I appreciate those of you who read the whole thing, to see better the whole context, even still, this article is skewed to make a sensationalist slant. My point was, that game design is the hardest, but also the most valuable skill to build in the industry. That every company lives and dies based on the talent of its game design team, and that as an industry we are not doing so well creating the talent we need in this industry, because educational systems have not caught up in this area as well as programming and art. I was not trying to toot my own horn, rather state that game design is hard. Ah well.

I disagree with most of the specifics (the stuff about education and experience and stuff) but I guess I agree with the general sentiment - if most designers were good then most games would be fun, right?

[feelthedarkness]

He's made some real clunkers, but he's also totally earned the right to be a prickly eccentric! 

 

I think it's a shame that Ultima Online (a game I didn't really play) didn't manage to set a permanent standard for online gaming: persistent, interactive worlds, immersive, fungible open ended social structures. 

[Nachimir]

I will always remember Richard Garriott for preaching MMOs as money printers from the stage at Develop, then Tabula Rasa failing horribly about six months later.

 

Reyturner is right though: The best designers I know make loads of throwaway stuff, and tend to advise others to do the same. Those who get too attached to ideas really struggle; too much realising a vision and not enough experimentation and learning.

[Reyturner]

The latest A Life Well Wasted is actually a really good companion piece too all this. 

 

Also: ERMAGERD A LERF WERR WERSTERED!

[elmuerte]

Reyturner is right though: The best designers I know make loads of throwaway stuff, and tend to advise others to do the same. Those who get too attached to ideas really struggle; too much realising a vision and not enough experimentation and learning.

 

(Good) level designers, authors, programmers, architects, etc. do the same. It's the basic idea of prototyping.

Of course it only happens when you create something new.

If you're creating another tower defence game, or the nth sequel of a game there's not much prototyping to do.

 

My point being, game design isn't much different from other professions. My problem is with Garriot's ego. You don't hear Carmack say "I've met virtually no one in our industry who I think is close to as good a programmer as I am. I'm not saying that because I think I'm so brilliant. What I'm saying is, I think most programmers really just suck.".

[Twig]

Yeah apparently Garriot is a dick. Sensational headline or no, that shit was pretty egotistical. U:

 

But hey whatever we'll see how this new game he's making goes...

[OssK]

he also identified Will Wright and Peter Molyneux as examples of quality game designers

Ok now, you're fucking kidding me... Molyneux ?

[Lu]

My point being, game design isn't much different from other professions. My problem is with Garriot's ego. You don't hear Carmack say "I've met virtually no one in our industry who I think is close to as good a programmer as I am. I'm not saying that because I think I'm so brilliant. What I'm saying is, I think most programmers really just suck.".

 

In terms of work methodology, to a point, but the work a game designer does is a lot more fuzzy than the work of an architect, author, or even programmer. Those all at least have formalized backgrounds, whilst game design does not. Not yet anyway.

 

And you know, it wouldn't  surprise me at all if Carmack has said that exact thing. 

 

Anyway, Richard Garriot has responded. COPY PASTA:

 

 

Words Taken Out of Context

 

Wow did I strike a nerve! In the midst of a much longer more contextual conversation, PC Gamer noted “Wow, you just gave me my headline!” At that moment, I knew to brace for an out of context backlash. Without the broader real time discussion, as often happens, much can be made out of partial thoughts used as headlines of comments meant as quipping simplification of complex issues, as was the recent case for me. The variations of headlines where I either disparage others, or glorify myself are inaccurate representations of the intent of my full commentary.

Still, I have received numerous comments of support and numerous complaints about my recent words about the challenges of finding great game designers. But, please let me clarify! By no means did I intend to disparage others who have led the many great games of each era in gaming history. I was trying to say, and show why finding or growing NEW great game designers is hard! 

 

Behind the inaccurate inflammatory headlines extracted from a longer dialog, I really do see a major challenge to our art form, specifically in the area of design. The design of a game is simultaneously 1) the most valuable aspect when it comes to the potential of success of a game, 2) the hardest part of game development to improve over previous efforts because of competition, and 3) the skill set with the least formal and informal training available to game developers.

 

 Let me examine the history of design from where I watched it unfold.

Once upon a time, only one person made a game. By necessity that person was the programmer, artist and designer (as well as holding many other roles). I can honestly say that the first artist I ever hired was FAR better than I ever was. I was, and could still be, a passable programmer. Some programmers who my companies have hired have been better than me, some worse, as I would expect. And there are designers whose work in many areas is far better than mine. But I also think some of the work I have done as a designer remains a top contribution for its time.

 

However, while ALL artists in the industry are better than I ever was, and while I can easily hire a programmer who is better than I ever was, it is far more difficult to hire a designer who is clearly capable of leading a top 10 game. For any company, growth only comes when the company finds another leader who can make a top 10 game. Origin only grew when we found people like Chris Roberts and Warren Spector. Most other attempts at creating new game lines failed when we gave the reigns to junior people looking to advance. I want emphasize that this was not always the case, but it happened more times than not. As a business it’s important to understand why.

At Origin, after we successfully added art teams and programming teams, we realized we had huge worlds to build that did not demand the same drawing skills as an artist. We also had NPC scripting needs that did not demand a top programmer. Thus we invented the Technical Design Assistant, often someone from QA (still a traditional source of designers) to build maps and script NPCs. These people did this to GREAT success!

 

But, as the industry evolved, we began to lean more heavily on new “designers” to develop the actual plans for the game itself and to describe the game we planned to build. They were also tasked with making design calls on how much of the computer’s limited resources should be spent on the competing fields of art, sound and interaction. This difficult trade-off is generally best handled by someone who knows the difficulties of coding and art creation issues, and that is more often someone who has programmed and drawn art than it is someone who has not. 

 

Sadly for people who really are passionate about designing the next great game, “game design” remains a hard skill to learn. A lot of indie developers right now who are “triple threats” of artist, programmer and designer, will likely rise to the occasion. They will have a good understanding of ALL the issues. Designers, who never coded and never drew art, have a far harder path ahead of them. After all, we are making “computer games,” and a deep knowledge of the computer is mighty helpful.

 

Artists can take classes and create portfolios of their work and an employer knows they can do the work. A programmer can take classes and produce code samples to prove the same. For designers, there are now at least a few good schools like the Guildhall at SMU, that turn out quality designers. Yet these quality designers remain a rare breed. Sadly, I really do think that most people who get into design roles on a team have no more skills at design than the programmers and artists. They may not be worse, but they rarely have better training than the others to tackle the hardest job of all, determining what game is going to be built.

 

Perhaps my statement that has been quoted so often in recent days could have been presented in a more eloquent fashion. But I stand by the point I was making, that game design is the hardest profession in our business to understand and to learn.

And I certainly am not trying to put my own career on some sort of game design high ground. While I have hit occasional home runs, I have made plenty of unforced errors. I was not attempting to prop myself up with these comments, but rather lament my need…our industry’s need for proper training in the most important skill required to make a good game. I never had any formal training either; I have just had more time to learn from my mistakes than most. If what comes from all this is a frank discussion and lively debate on how to best address this issue, then hopefully I’ve accomplished something. 

 

Thanks for your time,

Richard “Lord British” Garriott

[elmuerte]

In terms of work methodology, to a point, but the work a game designer does is a lot more fuzzy than the work of an architect, author, or even programmer. Those all at least have formalized backgrounds, whilst game design does not. Not yet anyway.

 

Bullshit. I don't know about the architect or author. But the work of a programmer is more fuzzy than an average kitten.

[Lu]

A programmers craft is not formalized?

 

But if the nature of your beef is that I called game design fuzzier than programming, then just for you I'll state that programming is the fuzziest fuzz that ever fuzzed fuzz.

[Twig]

AS A PROGRAMMER... design is way fuzzier. You're dealing with enigmatic qualities like "fun" and "feel-rightiness" and even "mechanics" is still pretty damn unquantifiable, whereas in programming, you're trying to get shit working in the most efficient manner possible. You have a distinctive goal. Sure, there's an element of creativity in order to achieve that goal, but in the end, you're measured by very concrete values. Bugs and shit included.

[elmuerte]

Rarely. The thing is, formalization is really really really expensive. Pretty much the only place where formalization is done is in space technology (because you cannot really put our a patch release). Most companies/people are not willing to pay (in money and time) for quality software

Most of the time programmers are creating something that resembles some vague description of the thing the clients might want.

Programming is quite unlike a lot of other technical things. In programming you are pretty much always creating something completely new or different from what you previously made. This is due to the fact that it's extremely cheap to get a duplicate of the thing you already made.

So, a programming is mostly working on new things which were badly defined. And the worse things are defines, the larger the problems get when things are made by less great developers. Impact of changes in software are not very transparent, especially not when it has not been formalized. The butterfly effect is a common thing in existing software.

Programmers are more like wizards than engineers. And as is common, most of them are shitty wizards.

[tabacco]

... This is due to the fact that it's extremely cheap to get a duplicate of the thing you already made.

 

Depends how much you like spaghetti code

[elmuerte]

You can always refactor it to ravioli code.

[Forbin]

Agreed with all points in this thread.

 

Garriott is being a dick but he's kinda right, and he's definitely taken out of context. Also, programmers are wizards.

 

His main points I think are that people that try to do design that don't have a strong skillset outside design, often aren't very good.  And that a lot of designers are too timid to do something new. Which I think is more tied to the pressure to create something commercially successful than it is with designers being lazy or unoriginal.  Sometimes the parameters are too tight to "move the needle".

 

But this is a sick burn on Koster.