In Defense of Ignorant Design
I want to start
this article by forcing you to read something that someone else said in an article one time. It’s some game designer who works at a company called Nintendo:
“I always look for designers who aren’t super-passionate game fans,” Mr. Miyamoto said. “I make it a point to ensure they’re not just a gamer, but that they have a lot of different interests and skill sets.” Some of the company’s current stars had no experience playing video games when they were hired."
I also want to - importantly - note that this wasn’t an original observation by him, and it is in fact something of conventional wisdom in the field. I had actually heard this years before this article was published by an awesome game designer named Cindy Poremba. To paraphrase her, she said something to the effect of ‘the best designers are ones who either play every type of game under the sun, or don’t play any games at all’.
I think this wisdom is conventional for a reason!
The thing about designing games is that it’s simply impossible to do in a vacuum. For better or worse, everyone has a unique and personal lexicon of design thinking they are pulling from whenever they approach a design challenge. That is to say, everyone will approach the problem and solve it differently.
I’ve found this to broadly be true, and that the most effective designers fall into the two camps of Informed Designer and Ignorant Designer.
The Informed Designer who plays tons of video games of every type will, of course, have a vast working knowledge of the possibility space that games afford. They might know when a health system could be taken from a shooter or a strategy game, or have a working knowledge of various unique styles of inventory systems throughout many games. Obviously solving a design problem is just one piece of the puzzle, but this style of designer will have more varied references to pull from and will have more tools in their belt to make something unique and informed by a wider culture of other games and their own approaches.
You might (rightfully) assume that this would mean a person who has little to no knowledge of games would be at a disadvantage. However, they actually have an important advantage we tend not to think of: Ignorance.
The Ignorant Designer who barely touches games is less likely to meet them with any pre-existing assumptions about how games “should” work. They won’t assume what a game “should” do, how a mechanic “should” work, or how a problem “should” be solved. In a sense they’re actually more free to take experimental approaches to design, conjure up unique ideas to solve problems not often seen in games, and generally have a more open mind when it comes to solving problems.
And I’m a huge opponent of pulling from genre because I think leaning too much on genre is something that can really stop you from getting weird and interesting with things.
I see this all the time in students or junior designers especially; they encounter a problem and immediately decide upon a solution for how it should be solved. When I ask them why they approached it that way, they answer “well, that’s how [other video game that their project is referencing] works”.
I see this a lot in indie games too, where a creator will obviously be inspired by a certain game or genre and attempt to chase a style and genre of said game, but will do it so by-the-letter they fail to make their creation their own game in the process of doing so.
And I think that line of problem solving is just really limiting creatively!
Anyway I could talk all day about how I dislike leaning on genre, but I want to stop burying the lede so I’ll get to my reflection now:
I noticed recently
that when I make my own games I have a tendency to simultaneously adopt these two very opposite, yet complimentary, approaches. And I find they work well together!
On one hand I try to Ignorant Design when it comes to the direction of my games; I often decide to make games of genres I have virtually no experience with - and often ones that I have zero interest in playing at all.
On the other hand, I try to embody the Informed Designer when it comes to approaching tangible design problems, because the first thing I do when encountering these is to reference those similar games and genres to see how they solve their problems.
In this way, Ignorance is helpful when you’re using it to establish and chase your game’s direction, but staying Informative is important when designing your game.
First, the Ignorant Designer
I tend to use as the person who dictates the creativity and direction of my game. It’s the Kojima that lives in your head who might really want your game to have a music sequence in the middle of it for no good reason, or the Suda51 who says your game should just have a cheerleader protagonist who kills zombies because why not?
This Ignorance is powerful because - just like I mentioned above - you can go wild with your approaches and don’t need to worry about staying on the implied track that games of your genre do.
While I practice street art, Bombing!!: A Graffiti Sandbox was a game I made despite not really playing any artsy painting games myself. In fact I don’t really even like playing games where you make art in, because my thought when doing so is always “man, I’d rather just be actually drawing”. That said, the idea of building a game where you can paint anything sounded like a fun problem to tackle from a developer/design perspective, which is largely what motivated me to do so.
Same goes for my current game in development as of writing: S.K.R.U.B. Squad. While it’s a game all about cleaning, I actually don’t like cleaning games at all! I think they’re just too slow for my brain. The only thing close to this I’ve played for any extended period of time is House Flipper, and even then it was only for a handful of hours. Mostly, I made S.K.R.U.B. Squad because I saw gameplay of a game like that and went “I could make one of those”. And so I did!
When I resolve to make games like this I will do my best to avoid having the well of my mind tainted by ideas about what my game should be; to that end, I avoid using references from other games or informing myself by them at all when it comes to building the direction of my games.
In fact, I set very strict boundaries for myself: “While making this game, I am not going to touch or play these types of games at all”.
The Informed Designer on the other hand,
is the one who uses their vast experience of design knowledge to stops your Ignorant Designer from getting too wild with it.
They sweep in to solve problems, troubleshoot issues, and think about the game as the player would. Because while making the wild, radiant and untethered fantasy of my dreams is well and good, I also make games that I expect an end-user to play - and usually, that end user doesn’t have the same lofty ideas I have (nor will they have the patience to put up with them).
The end user will also, notably, be more familiar with similar genres and games than even I am.
When the Ignorant Designer invariably runs head-first into creating a design problem, the Informed Designer recognizes it as a User Experience issue and not simply a creative one. That’s when I’ll start dipping my toes into my references to understand what their approaches are, because there’s an inherent power to pulling from genre where it’s needed to get people understanding the core of your game easily.
So how do you stay Ignorant about genre, while working on a game in a genre?
The magical part of this approach to direction is that - just like anyone who actively practices being ignorant on a day-to-day basis - it’s a simple, effortless endeavour.
They say “assuming makes an ‘ass out of u and me’.
So go crazy and make an ass out of yourself! Make assumptions! A lot of them! Get messy for a while!
Assume that your first thought about a game or style of game is true. Believe that the way you think your genre works must, in fact, be how these games work. Assume your first approach is the right one, or that the feature probably works a certain way in all these types of games. Don’t bother looking at a reference for it or sanity check yourself at first. You’re probably right. Write it down, move on, and come back to it later when something gets flagged in playtesting.
Don’t worry about if your idea for the game is correct, or accurate, or intuitive, or even logical - let the Informed Designer step in later on that if they need to. What matters for building your game’s direction creatively, is you’re trying something that feels like it probably could be how it works.
In some cases you might be correct in your assumptions - and that’s great! But often you will find yourself to be wrong.
However I think in this case being wrong about your assumptions - whether productive or not - has at the very least pushed you into making something that is different, and in many ways I think that’s far more valuable than making something perfectly reflective of the genre you’re working in.
Yes, you may have accidentally made a user-unfriendly mess you have to now iterate on, or made a feature that feels out of place, but in the process you’ve likely pulled your game in a unique direction you may not necessarily have been implemented as such if you were designing for your genre, rather than challenging it.
In some ways, I think this approach to building direction can be similar to the approach of mixing different genres together to create something new…but I think the difference is that approach involves knowing multiple genres well and having the wherewithal and design chops to blend them conciously.
However, by staying ignorant to your genre you often end up making new and unique modifications or alterations to an experience in a way that actively challenges your own assumptions unconciously - and I think that’s pretty cool!
An important footnote
It should be noted that I think almost none of this applies to working on larger teams where you are reponsible for guiding the ebb and flow of a project, it’s production, or delivering something on a tight timeline.
I think Directors are, ironically, some of the most notoriously wishy-washy folks on the planet (sorry to any directors who are reading this!), and while I think it’s still important to adopt an Ignorant Design approach to push your project against the grain, it’s not worth practicing at a headache to a team or risk to your production.
In fact, it’s my experience that most directors are perhaps too good at the Ignorant Design part of this process, and actually quite bad at the Informed Design part of this process.
So maybe learning to work from reference and grounding your ideas could prove more useful if you’re working in a greater team context 😉
