Because it’s always 1997 somewhere.
Hi! My name’s Daniel Klein, Daniel Zenon Klein when I’m feeling fancy, my pronouns are he/him, and I care entirely too much about the craft of game design.
I’m not saying this to humblebrag. (Okay I’m saying this a little bit to humblebrag). But seriously, think about it: I’m thinking and (evidently) writing about game design when I’m absolutely not on the clock. I do usually get paid to think and write about (and sometimes do) game design 40 hours a week. I’ve been a professional game designer since 2013, and have been in the wider games industry since 2008. I’m very old, and I’m very tired, and yet the thoughts won’t stop.
That’s because I’m blursed to be one of those idiots who loves what he does.
I’m at the more academic end of applied game design, but I don’t necessarily mean that like a normal person would mean it. I follow game studies with a sick fascination. A lot of it is good stuff and highly useful to adjust the way I think about games and the world as a purely philosophical exercise, but it doesn’t help us make games.
On the other hand, a lot of the game design practitioners I’ve had the pleasure to work with have approached the day to day job of making a game as a purely technical challenge. I struggle to express this properly and I usually end up pissing off my more technical friends, but the bottom line is: technical ability is of varying levels of importance, and it’s never a bad thing to have, but there is a pure discipline of game design that exists outside of the scripting and the tool use you do, and I often find that this part of the job is sadly neglected.
I’m talking about frameworks, falsifiable theories of player motivation & attention, rules of thumb, patterns that have worked and anti-patterns that have bit me in the ass, and so on and so forth.
I came up as a game designer at Riot Games in the 2010s and there’s a few articles to be written here for sure. Riot is a very complicated subject. There was a lot of the awful stuff that doubtlessly everyone has read about in various exposés. I was either mostly blind to it or sheltered from it in willful ignorance. When I did wake up to the awful shit and women co-workers started trusting me with their stories, I yelled about it so loudly I got fired for calling our players names on the Internet.
But at the same time as I was living in a privileged bubble in a place that made life hell for lots of folks, I also had the most intense game design course of my life there. Yes, I crunched myself, yes I was often at the office until 4am working on stuff or discussing design with my peers who were also still there in the middle of the night, but I learned an impossible amount of design thought that has served me incredibly well since.
Again, this is messy as shit. I don’t recommend anyone do what I did, and I know for a fact there are better ways to learn all this, but it’s what happened to me and how I got good at what I’m good at, and I don’t want to lie about that either.
In my post-Riot career, often the most productive thing I was able to bring to jobs has been this theoretical approach, and it’s the thing I enjoy the most. Quasi-academical thinking about the art of game design, but with a clear goal of better actual game experience. Maybe me talking about this here could help someone out there, but to be perfectly frank, I don’t really care if this helps anyone. I just really, really enjoy talking about this stuff, and if I type it into a WordPress editor I’m not bothering my spouse with it.
So there’s your mission statement: long rants typed into WordPress so Yonah doesn’t have to listen to them.
Why are you here?