I have a novice grasp of Adorno’s ideas about creativity. Adorno loathed Jazz. He thought it was not creative and was nothing more than kitsch, made only to appease the public’s tastes. The creativity in Jazz, to Adorno, was not creative nor revolutionary and the improvisation and the flourishes were where everyone expected them.

Not to speak blasmphemy to the Jazz fans around in this forum, but Adorno has a few valid claims about creativty. If you keep making Jazz, then all you will get is Jazz, with the aforementioned flourishes where everyone expects them. For the game designers, is the design really revolutionary and creative or is the public forcing what they want to [hear] play? Which is what Adorno thinks about Jazz, so grant me that we can apply this towards game design. Is the designer actually making a game, or his he going along with what is expected of the design, by the public.

Adorno hated Jazz, which he equates to nothing more than kitsch. A common art that is meant to appeal to the masses. Adorno said it was not revolutionary, and was more of the same, with different flourishes where everyone expects them.

Of course Adorno, thinks that Schoenberg is a great example of revolutionary and creative art, but this is another story.

I might be talking sacreligious nonsense to all in the Jazz crowd, but my point is not to bash jazz, but to challenge the game design industry.
If you keep making Jazz all you will get is Jazz. Where is the creativity? Where is the revolution? Perhaps all the public desires, is what has worked before, with the proverbial flourishes where everyone expects them.

In many ways, game design follows a very archaic structure of master/apprenticeship. if you look over the online resumes of a hundred game designers, the most popular path into the industry seems to be QA. I think this fits very much into what you’re saying here – that you have to learn the basic rules before you can attempt start to write new ones. QA is the epitome of “learning the rules”. Generally speaking, one isn’t creating in QA. One takes the creations of others and systematically applies rigorous testing standards to the design over and over to verify the systems work as expected. In many ways, it’s an assembly line of apprentices, with most, I’d expect, hoping for a chance at that brass ring – a shot at actual design.

But again, I used that pesky “s” word: standards. In my primary profession, the standards are fairly straightforward. There are professional organizations for Project Managers, such as PMI or the Agile Alliance. Project Managers can follow several different schools of thought or and we can earn actual certifications in a wide range of methodologies, such as a Six Sigma Black Belt or a CAPM or PMP from the Project Management Institute. These are industry recognized standards, which indicate to our peers that we have proven a certain standard of knowledge related to our profession.

With standards, you establish firm expectations of what is and what is not an accepted path of advancement within the industry. With many professions, these standards have been formalized and laid out for all to see. Where then, are the standards for game design?

To my knowledge, there are none. There are some degrees from some schools (SMU’s Guildhall comes immediately to mind), but in general, the industry still seems very much reliant upon internal promotions (i.e. – QA, CR, etc.) and the aforementioned Master/Apprentice system.

In many ways, I thought it was particularly appropriate that you chose Coltrane to illustrate your point. After all, there’s not real “certification” to become a Jazz musician, either. You either got it or you don’t. You can certainly come up the ranks of Jazz by way of rigorous instruction and classical training…or you could just pick up a instrument and learn how to play.

Trane learned in public schools, community choirs, and even in the Navy. However, for the most part, he did as Owlchick suggested – he played and played and played for small audiences, gaining invaluable feedback along the way. He learned from other greats, such as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie (master/apprentice) and eventually started to come into his own in a big way.

This is very much how I see the game design industry of today. There’s work underway to more formally train and certify designers, of course, but for the time being, it’s basically just jazz: lots of trial and error; apprentices learning from established masters; and of course, improvisation.

One of my favorite things, one hour of My Favorite Things from that album. Great call. When I was in college in St. Paul during Bush I’s tenure, the late night Jazz DJ would play that at least once a week – I think so he could eat or nap.

There are a few free or low-cost game toolsets available to the public. Create a mod in one of them. Fine tune it until it’s satisfying game play as you see it. Submit your mod to that game’s community and look at the feedback.

Make another. And another. Each time you go through the process, you learn more about what makes it fun, what makes it interesting and what needs to be cut.

This is just one way to gain some design experience without have a game industry job. Some designers got their start this way, so it’s a definite possibility.

“Successful design is all about being able to send your most beloved ideas crashing to the floor if the game is stronger as a whole for it.”
I’d even go so far as to say some already existing designs, no matter how hard everyone wanted them to work, should have been scrapped I’m curious to know at what point designers are trying and trying to fit something into the achitecture and at what point they finally say “this isn’t going to work”.

Another subtle point is the old highlander catch phrase “There can be only one”. Lets face it, there’s a million ways to implement one thing, and several hundred might even fit perfectly into the existing architecture and “big picture”. But reality is – there can be only one way. And people will complain “well why wasn’t it done this way” or “that way”, and really it comes down to the fact that if it was, then an equal # of people would complain “well why wasn’t it done the (first) way?”. Did anyone ever read through the SWG Jedi forums? If you want an idea graveyard, dig that place up. There was a billion ideas there, and I’m sure an excellent designer could have properly implemented a hundred of them, but lets face it: there’s only one Star Wars MMO and there can be only one way to do it.

That’s convoluted and pretentious, so let me try to rephrase.

One of the great things about this business is that great ideas can come from anywhere at anytime. That’s partly what makes online communities such a major facet of games–especially games that constantly evolve like MMOs do.

But for each player-generated idea that gets posted somewhere and ends up being put into a game, there are hundreds/thousands of others that aren’t, even though they may sound equally cool. Why aren’t those put in? Probably because they didn’t fit within the context or overall goals of that particular game.

That’s the difference between ideas and game design. Designers have the burden of making sure their implementation matches the goals and overall feel of the game they’re working on, or else the idea will end up on the cutting room floor. It’s not all that different from watching deleted scenes from a film. Very often, directors will talk about how a particular scene that got cut is their favorite moment from the movie. So why cut it? Because it just didn’t fit with what the project was at its core.

A dedicated MMO player could sit down on any given day and list off dozens of features from their favorite games that they’d like to see end up in their dream MMO. And on the surface that makes sense: why not just throw a whole bunch of fun cool things together? That will make something even more awesome than what’s come before, right?

The problem is, all those cool features (even if there was time to implement all of them in a sane production schedule) don’t necessarily gel together in a consistent way. And if they don’t, no matter how cool they are, they need to be cut.

(This is one of the reasons combining awesome musicians into a single supergroup rarely works out all that well, by the way.)

The game designer part of you needs to understand that and accept such conclusions, even though the player part of you is screaming for the feature to remain. Successful design is all about being able to send your most beloved ideas crashing to the floor if the game is stronger as a whole for it.

The other point I want to clarify is that I’m not talking about absolutes, such as “You just don’t get it because you aren’t a real designer.” As with anything, there are many shades of grey. The distinction I’m trying to make is that:

ideas + implementation = game design

not

ideas = game design

Which is a point that is easily lost in the critique-by-talking-loud atmosphere of many online gaming communities.