How did you become a game designer?

It turns out that I have been making games my whole life. Growing up in the college town of Bloomington, Indiana, I was lucky enough to have a lot of spaces for play. I would draft neighborhood kids into test-driving elaborate haunted houses I would make in my basement, or play variations of Kick the Can or Ghost in the Graveyard with the kids on my block. Of course I was an early computer game player (my fifth grade class had a TRS-80 and my best friend had an Atari) and I was a Dungeons and Dragons supergeek in Junior High and High School.

But I was always interested in making art too – music, visual art, writing, and theater. I studied Painting at the University of Pennsylvania for my undergrad degree. I was always making these diagrams about the relationships between the artist, the artwork, and the viewer – elaborate models for the creation and experience of art. After I left art-making to make pop culture in the form of games (during which I received an MFA in Art & Technology at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design at OSU), I realized that in designing a game I am able to focus on those relationships to the exclusion of all else. A painter makes an object for passive contemplation. A game designer creates a system which only comes to life when it is inhabited and played by players. Structuring social relationships (even if it is between an individual and a responsive system) is a very unique kind of design activity and I find it very satisfying.

In the digital environment gaming is a key medium. What do you need

to know that goes beyond the traditional realms of design?

First of all, creating a digital game is a highly interdisciplinary endeavor, like making a film. A gameLab team might include a programmer, a visual designer, a sound designer, a game designer, and a project manager. Instead of trying to address on all of these roles, let me focus on game design. Game design, is, after all, the one role that doesn’t exist in any other medium. Programmers create all kinds of software (including games) but you won’t find game designers doing anything but making games (unless they’re unemployed).

One of the challenges of being a game designer is that there isn’t really an established discipline of game design. So it is difficult to acquire the fundamental skills of the field, or even to know what they are. In general, I would say that the skills a game designer needs are similar to those of an interactive designer or industrial designer. At the core is the ability to structure a participatory experience by understanding how dynamic systems function. The trick is understanding how these formal systems relate to the experiences of players in terms of desire, aesthetics, communication, emotion, representation, meaning, and other vectors of the multivalent play experience.

It’s also important to have a sense of the 20-year history of the medium, preferably as an avid digital game player. And of course, knowledge and interest in non-digital games is important too. Finally, as with all of design, it is crucial to understand how one’s own disciplinary knowledge intersects with other design fields and with culture at large.

Obviously, the term "video game" conjures dungeons and dragons and

Myst, etc. How is what you do different from these extremely popular

fantasies?

One of the things that drew me to create digital games is how formally innovative they are. More than any other medium, digital gaming really reinvents itself every few years. Some of the most interesting vectors of computer culture - realtime graphics rendering, complex interactive systems, massive online communities, procedural interactive narratives, nonstandard hardware interfaces, artificial life & artificial intelligence - find their most robust manifestations in gaming.

Yet at the same time the culture of games is somewhat stunted, mired in adolescent male power fantasies like the pulp fantasy you mention. In my work, I have tried to incorporate narrative content and visual and audio styles that aren’t normally found in games. Digital games are a pop cultural medium and it’s time that they had the same sense of style, appropriation, and cultural subtlety that other pop media like music and fashion share.

Do you think "child" when you design games? Or do you think "everyone?"

The idea that “play” is for children is a deeply held belief in our culture. Along with this notion is the idea that the purpose of play is make these children better citizens of the state by educating them cognitively, socially, or ethically.

There are many other ways of thinking about play as well. I like to think about play as a kind of subversiveness or mischeviousness – the “play” of a steering wheel, for example, being the interstitial space which exists between utilitarian structures. I’d like to find those spaces and have players inhabit them.

So no, I don’t think of children when designing games. I’m not even sure about this whole category of “adulthood.” I think of myself as a boy…

You worked for game designers, what were the challenges of starting

your own business?

Starting any kind of business is challenging. gameLab opened its doors in September 2000. At that time it was just myself and co-founder Peter Lee. Since then, we’ve added three staff. Now that we have real personnel overhead every month, I would say that the biggest challenge is finding online publishers willing to pay what it takes to make great games.

We are unhhhappily sandwiched between cheap online games that you’d never want to play more than once and big huge expensive retail game titles. Although the game industry is well established, web gaming is relatively new and revenue models are still experimental. Publishers are very conservative about how they want to spend their money and that’s been our biggest challenge.

How much of your work can be categorized by the word "design," and

what does that mean in terms of what you do?

I have a very broad understanding of the word “design,” which I borrow from designer Katie Salen. Design is the creation of contexts from which meaning can emerge. In this very inclusive sense, everything I do, from teaching a class to designing a game to answering the questions of this interview, is a kind of design activity. That may seem like an indulgently vague understanding of “design” but for me it is a useful definition. The challenge, of course, is: What kinds of meanings do you want to emerge from your designed experience? And how can you make it as meaning-ful as possible?

How much of your creative time is devoted to R&D, and how much to making money?

I don’t make those kinds of distinctions. All time spent in the company is “creative time” and all time spent “making money” is also time spent in R&D.

Gratuitous (but earnest) rhetoric aside, gameLab staffers are expected to spend 20% of their time (about a day a week) in research activities like playing games and developing side projects which aren’t connected to a paying job. We’ve also integrated a number of research activities into our company, such as a research library (every gameLab staffer has a monthly budget for contributions) and periodic research sabbaticals. Too much West Coast game culture is about bleary-eyed developers putting in 80-hour weeks and sleeping at work. Game development is a cultural practice and it’s incredibly important to us at gameLab that we have culturally robust lives outside of the office.

What, in your estimation, constitutes success? In other words, what

are the goals of your business?

The goals of gameLab include finding new audiences for gaming, expanding the boundaries of the medium, and changing the culture of gaming.

How do you market your products?

We don’t. The computer game industry is structured like other content-based industries, such as the music industry. In the game industry, there are two kinds of companies, publishers and developers. Developers play the role that musicians do, generating intellectual property in the form of computer games. Publishers are like record labels: they fund the development of games and also are responsible for manufacturing, marketing, and distributing them. Our company, gameLab, is a developer. So we don’t market our products to the public ourselves.

Yours is a fairly new venture, how do you see it evolving?

There are a number of economic, technological, and cultural factors affecting the development of the game industry. While the game industry has grown remarkably quickly (it now is comparable to the film industry in America in terms of revenue), it is like the Hollywood film industry without an alternative film industry.

Games are very expensive to make (a mainstream game typically costs US$2-4 million). The equivalent of the "garage band" that can record an album over a weekend does not exist in the medium. Retail distribution is bottlenecked by a handful of store chains that lack sufficient shelf space and have a high turnover rate, which makes it difficult for games without a massive marketing campaign to survive on the shelf. The game industry is a hit-driven industry like Hollywood and so publishers generally are looking for that one hit, rather than experimental or ground-breaking games, leading to hundreds of genrified, "look-alike" game titles. Games tend to be made by and for "hardcore gamers" and therefore games have been slow to find new audiences. Some hope that online distribution can alleviate some of these problems, but the challenge of making money from games online remains an unanswered question.

A question for me is, considering all of these factors, how will games develop as a medium. One possibility is that they will remain stuck in pulp adolescent genres, and like comic books, will never overcome their social stigma, regardless of how much experimentation goes on in the medium. On the other hand, games might become like music, a multifaceted pop medium in which there is room for both corporate boy-band dreck as well as commercially successful experimentation.

Where will games end up? Part of why I’m working in this field is to try and answer this question.