FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Other Motivations That Influence Design
In the commercial game industry, video games are always built for entertainment, but even so, several factors can influence the way a game is designed. This section examines some of them.
When a company chooses to build a game specifically for a particular market and to include certain elements in its design specifically to increase sales within that market, that game is said to be market-driven. You might think that any game made for sale should be market-driven. Experience shows, however, that most market - driven games aren't very good. You can't make a brilliant game simply by throwing in all the most popular kinds of gameplay. If you try, you get a game that doesn't
feel as if it's about anything in particular. The best games are expressions of the designer's vision, which makes them stand out from other games.
The opposite of a market-driven game is a designer-driven game. In designer-driven games, the designer retains all creative control and takes a personal role in every creative decision, no matter how small. Usually he does this because he's convinced that his own creative instincts are superior to anyone else's. This approach ignores the benefits of play-testing or other people's collective wisdom, and the result is usually a botched game. Daikatana is an often-cited example.
Many publishers commission games to exploit a license: a particular intellectual property such as a book (The Lord of the Rings), movie (Die Hard), or sports trademark (NHL Hockey). These can be enormously lucrative. As a designer, you work creatively with characters and a world that already exists, and you make a contribution to the canon of materials about that world. One downside of designing licensed games is that you don't have as much creative freedom as you do designing a game entirely from your own imagination. The owners of the license insist on the right to approve your game before it ships, as well as the right to demand that you change things they don't like. In addition, there is always a risk of complacency. A great license alone is not enough to guarantee success. The game must be just as good as if it didn't have a license.
A technology-driven game is designed to show off a particular technological achievement, most often something to do with graphics or a piece of hardware. For example, in addition to entertaining the player, Crytek's game Crysis is intended to show off Crytek's 3D graphics engine and encourage other developers to use it. Console manufacturers often write technology-driven games when they release a new platform to show everyone the features of their machine. The main risk in designing a technology-driven game is that you'll spend too much time concentrating on the technology and not enough on making sure your game is really enjoyable. As with a hot license, a hot technology alone is not enough to guarantee success.
Art-driven games are comparatively rare. An art-driven game exists to show off someone's artwork and aesthetic sensibilities. Although such games are visually innovative, they're seldom very good because the designer has spent more time thinking about ways to present his material than about the player's experience of the game. A game must have enjoyable gameplay as well as great visuals. Myst is a game that got this right; it is an art-driven game with strong gameplay.
