FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

Execution Matters More Than Innovation

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

—Thomas Edison (attributed)

For games, the proportions are a little different from Edison's proportions for genius, but the idea is the same. Most of what makes a game fun has nothing to do with imagination or creativity. The vast majority of things that make a game not fun—boring or frustrating or irritating or simply ugly and awkward—result from bad execution rather than a bad idea. A surprising amount of the job of making a game fun, therefore, simply consists of avoiding those things that reduce fun.

Here's a list, from most to least important, showing how the different aspects of game development contribute to fun:

■ Avoiding elementary errors is the most important thing you can do. Bad pro­gramming, bad music and sound, bad art, bad user interfaces, and bad game design all ruin the player's fun. Find and fix those bugs!

■ Tuning and polishing are the second-most important aspects of making a game fun. This means paying attention to detail, getting everything perfect. Dedicated tuning sets a good game apart from a mediocre one.

■ Imaginative variations on the game's premise contribute to the player's fun. Take the basic elements of the game and construct an enjoyable experience out of them. Level designers do most of this work.

■ True design innovation is perhaps five percent of the source of a game's fun. Design innovation encompasses the game's original idea and subsequent creative decisions that you make.

The smallest and most mysterious part of the fun in a game emerges from an unpredictable, unanalyzable, unnamable quality—call it luck, magic, or stardust. You can't make it happen, so you might as well not worry about it. But when you can feel it's there, be careful about making changes to your design from that point on. Whatever it is, it's fragile.

So innovation by the game designer contributes only a small part of the fun of the game. That may make it sound as if there's not a lot of point in game design. But to build a game, someone must design it and design it well. Most game design deci­sions give little room for innovation, but they're still necessary. A brilliant architect may design a wonderful new building, but it still needs heat and light and plumb­ing, and in fact, the majority of the work required to design that building goes into creating those mundane but essential details. The same is true of game design.