Learning an art is always as exciting as it is frustrating.

Whoever tried to play an instrument, write a book, draw something, or whatever knows how painful the learning process can be. I’m specifically talking about the beginning since when you get used to it, the pain often turns into pleasure.

I know what you’re thinking: What about Game Design? Uh… you want to jump straight to the point, don’t you? For complex problems there’s always a simple answer, and it’s often wrong. So, let’s try a different and more pragmatic approach.

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The keyword here is Analysis.

We’ll take a look at both my past self (having been a beginner myself, like everyone else) and the current state of Game Design as a discipline. The focus will be dissecting the very start of the beginner Game Designer’s journey. We aim to understand what happens (the problems, the cracks, the pitfalls) when learning Game Design from scratch.

So here’s today’s menu.

• The 3 Questions Wringing Your Mind
• Too Much Information Is Like No Information
• Mindset Is More Avoiding Lies Than Adding Truths
• The Process To Turn Ideas Into Real Games
• Becoming An Actual Discipline

Here we have it.

We have a lot to discuss; get comfortable, grab your favorite beverage (I pulled out a delicious hot tea 🍵), and let’s dive into it.

The 3 Questions Wringing Your Mind

Every Game Design journey starts with a passion.

It’s hard (almost impossible, I should say) for someone embarking on learning Game Design without a prior interest in games. Not only that. It’s almost always such passion that makes “taking the leap to the other side of the industry” more than a random thought for us. We’re fueled with motivation (albeit sometimes we have false expectations), but we lack knowledge.

Yet, there's a place ready to catch us whenever we don't know something: the World Wild Web.

In this task to approach Game Design, we immediately face both the wideness and wilderness of what's available. As we'll see, approaching Game Design for a beginner is not a walk in the park. Or at least it could be an exciting journey if it weren't that as we cross the park gate, we must overcome a series of giant walls. And I assume that none of us at first come out packed with rope and climbing equipment; I guess we're in trouble then.

We immediately face the steepness of the learning process.

We know it’s not a secret and sometimes is taken for granted (which is a problem) since every wanna-be Game Designer must face them. So, let’s give it a more relatable (and concrete) appearance, shall we?

The 3 walls we have in front of us generally take the shape of 3 questions (not necessarily with these exact words, though):

1. “Where do I need to start?”
2. “How do I need to reason?”
3. “How do I turn ideas into games?”

They usually pop up in the beginner’s mind in the early stages of the learning process.

As you can see, they’re pretty generic questions, and I’m sure we could make a parallel with other discipline’s first approaches and find many similarities.

But, anyway, what's interesting to us is what's happening in the beginner's mind.

The uncertainties each question hides. But we want more; let's not settle for a top-down view and look deeper. We'll unpack each question one by one and take a peek at what happens when trying to find some answers. No spoilers, but it won't be a pleasurable experience (albeit not at the beginner's fault).

So, follow me, and let's tackle the first concern about the quantity and quality of available Game Design sources.

Too Much Information Is Like No Information

The web is built on quantity.

Let's rephrase the first question. "Considering the mindboggling amount of resources I can find on the web, where do I start to avoid losing time?".

So, it's a time issue generated by a quantity issue. You can try it yourself by googling something like "Learn Game Design", and hundreds of millions of results pop up. What to do?

“Nothing new”, you might say.

It’s a pretty common struggle in the Digital Era, and it’s not just a Game Design issue at all. I raise my hands; you’re right. So, are we complaining for nothing? Uhm… no, because there’s a fundamental difference between Game Design and other disciplines. Let me explain.

There’s only one way to manage a huge amount of information to process.

Revolving to the standards of the Community of Experts in the field. Do you want to learn about Physics?

Wikipedia, books (academic and not), and some renowned Authors are a good start. You don’t have to stop there, though; otherwise, you’ll fall into the “Authority Principle” pit. In fact, you START from there and build on it by studying and learning more. So, the issue with Game Design should be pretty clear. We don’t have such standards from a “Community of Experts” (we’ll discuss this point more in-depth soon).

That’s why this widespread problem is indeed more severe in Game Design learning. So, what do we actually do at this point?

We cut to the chase and choose the most easily available source.

Due to how the web works, it often means the most "famous" content. However, what's famous is not necessarily good; that's what "Communities of Experts" exist for.

They are supposed to select the best sources that stand the test of time by working (being reliable and accurate) and ignoring the "fame factor". They're not good objectively but intersubjectively; it's not faith but trust. But wait, what's happening here? The issue shifted from a quantity one (still present) to a quality one, right?

In fact, this is just the beginning; it's about to get worse.

The average quality of the Game Design content (famous or not famous) is pretty low.

Yet, the real issue is not false information (only sometimes) but mostly superficial. Our research can't help but end up in an endless spiral of debates and contradicting resources.

And the worst thing is that they often focus more on opposing each other than supporting claims with clear arguments, so we can't analyze and build our own ideas about it. But don't get me wrong; debate is generally a good thing in a discipline (it depends on where and how it's done). However, a beginner is searching for a reliable, current "state-of-the-art" to at least begin grasping something.

This is a nightmare scenario. And unfortunately, due to the sources' generally low quality, this happens quickly in the learning process.

There is more “do this way” content and almost no “this is how it works” content.

In future episodes, we’ll analyze the issue with “Best Practice” in detail. What we want to point out here is that Game Design learning is full of personal narratives describing how someone solved a problem.

It’s a giant pool of examples that don’t explain how Game Design works but tell anecdotes.

A beginner faces 2 main problems with this scenario:

• He can’t use anything since anecdotes are not adaptable.
• He can’t clearly distinguish between a game and a Game Designer.

If the first point is self-explanatory, the second has to do with “how to think like a Game Designer” and can be a bit more multifaceted.

This is why it has its own question (the second one).

So, to properly address it, we need an entire new section which is about to begin.

Mindset Is More Avoiding Lies Than Adding Truths

Changing mindset means gaining a new pair of eyes.

It’s not a spiritual thing, but a matter of point of view. And having a mindset means just that: having a point of view. Analyzing something through a different lens makes you “see” different things (more or less depending on the actual mindset). What you ignored before is now relevant and interesting because you can assign a new meaning to it.

That’s the environment from where the second question becomes pressing.

The beginner realizes that to do what other Game Designers do, he needs to change the way he looks at games. However, he has a problem he’s unaware of (and some veterans still are, unfortunately). He’s a player first.

What initially was a powerful motivating force is now an obstacle. Let’s understand why.

I’m sure, at least once, you looked at something through a telescope.

It’s a key tool in human history that bridged the gap between here and there. However, this “bridge” is perceptual since if we want to reach that “there”, we still need to cross the space in between. For a wanna-be Game Designer, the wrong approach is a little bit like that.

He has a telescope glued onto his eyes and looks at the actual Game Design at a distance. But the real issue comes over time.

Keeping looking through the telescope lens makes him believe to be much closer than he is.

And that’s the core of the issue. For a beginner, the perception between the player and the Game Designer is subtler than we think. A Game Designer is not just a passionate player who makes games instead of playing them. To actually become Game Designers, we need to turn into a completely new way of looking at and thinking about games. And the player’s perspective mostly hinders it.

It makes us fail to understand the game both as a piece of art and a system of rules.

We tend to see it more like an “interactive adventure”, precisely like players do. And the leap necessary to change the mindset is not “common sense” or something that “happens naturally”. We need to look at games from a different and more analytical perspective.

But that’s during the changing mindset process the real issue gets to the surface.

The concrete advice following from the “happens naturally” narrative is: “Just design games”. Oh boy… I’ll admit; I love it when people generate circular concepts and contradictions. I love it because I hate it. So, after making amends, you forgive me, but I cannot hold myself back from showing it.

Let's start by saying the obvious: to design games, we need a mindset.

Meaning we need a mental model of what games are and how they work. Otherwise, we'll stand still doing nothing.

So, from a beginner's perspective, we can't help but embrace the only mindset we have: the player's mindset. And that's it. The carriage fits perfectly into the rails, and we're stuck in an endless and never-changing spiral. We're trying to change our mindset by doing that thing (designing games) that needs that mindset change.

Repeating Game Design alone won't change anything. We're focused on doing and not analyzing.

And all of this goes back to the issue of low-quality information from the previous question.

By searching on the web, we find ourselves drowned in shouted claims about billions of opposing views. Things like “a game should be fun” and “the player is the most important thing in the game”, etc.

Yet, there are no clear explanations about what these concepts even mean. So what can a beginner do to cover this mindset lack? He can only cut to the chase (again), turning his focus on “pure practice”.

And that’s where the third question comes into play.

The Process To Turn Ideas Into “Real” Games

In our minds, everything works because we’re not bound to reality.

Don’t go crazy about it; our thinking process is real (electrochemical things doing stuff around). However, each time we imagine something, we create a new fictional world where everything works perfectly, even if we don’t know how.

This happens because there are too many details to process, so we ignore them. However, such details are crucial to make things in the real world. Reality has some strict rules (we call them physics), and we can’t do anything other than follow them.

So, having ideas comes naturally to all of us, but designing a game out of them is a different beast.

And such a beast is constantly fighting back because we want it to be unique, but it must also follow the rules of reality. If you don't have time, budget, or skills to make something, those are "physics limitations" too!

Having ideas is mostly frustrating. Or at least it is when we try to turn an idea into a game without a proper design process. This scenario generates concern about what a Game Designer does and risks the beginner to fall into the "Idea Guy" pit where there's only one rule. I have ideas; you (someone somewhere somehow) make games.

So this is how it raises the third question (”How do I turn ideas into games?”).

This fits into what we said in the previous chapter. Since it’s hard to tell the difference between a passionate gamer and a Game Designer, a question naturally began to wonder in our minds. “What the hell does a Game Designer do all day long?”. And this raises an interesting thought (to me, at least).

When we don’t understand something, we desperately seek a result.

Being the design process so obscure and intangible (it isn’t, of course, but that’s what’s perceived by the source scenario we described above), we feel a lack of progress. We want to see a concrete result coming out of our hands.

This way, we can tell ourselves: “Ok, I’m moving on!”. In a properly structured learning process, a mental model taking clear shape in our minds is more than enough to “reach a result”. We understood something. But in the confusing mists of Game Design, understanding something is not that easy. And this is where the “How to make a game with Unity/Unreal (or what have you)” story arc kicks in.

But let me say that we’re missing one interesting behavior.

Follow me in this reasoning.

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When we craft something, we have the impulse to find ways to improve it.

We can go crazy about that, like Leonardo da Vinci, who kept refining the Mona Lisa until his death (no surprise some classify it among his unfinished works). Or we can just focus on doing better the next time. But, whether we’re crazy geniuses from the Renaissance or passionate gamers in our bedroom, to improve our work, we need to improve how we work.

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So, between a Unity/Unreal tutorial and another, the beginner tries to go back to more theoretical concepts.

Of course, when searching for specific Game Design concepts, the result is as bad as we said before (he goes back into that nightmare spiral). But the third question has not gone away; it's still pressing hard.

So, often, the search involves the Game Design process more broadly. The problem is not the beginner having this doubt in the first place but that there's no real answer. And that's here, during this kind of research, that the beginner learns something that always makes me go crazy. It's often one of the first things someone discovers (because it's everywhere), and I consider it the #1 issue in Game Design. I'm talking about the lack of standards.

The most common form we can encounter this fact is by a narrative that can take 2 shapes.

The first is a single, unfortunately common, claim: “There’s no real process in Game Design because everyone has their own”. We’ll dive deeper into this in future episodes, discussing the issues with teaching Game Design, and we’ll understand why this is 100% wrong.

The second, instead, involves a more subtle effect. It comes from lots of people sharing “Game Design Best Practice” by narrating their personal experiences. Having a direct experience perspective can be insightful and interesting, but not when that’s all there is.

These 2 cases seem different, but they’re essentially saying the same thing. “There are no standardized methodologies, so go build your own”.

Unfortunately, I admit this is at least half true.

We said it a moment ago: there are no standards, so that's the true part. Game Designers agree on a few points (albeit too generic to create real standards), but when it comes to the details, there's a Pandora's Box of opinions.

However, "go build your own" is a dangerous path (especially for a beginner). It's standard advice in artistic disciplines and generally based on something like "understand the medium and find your style". Yet, understanding the medium for a Game Designer means that someone understood it before you. Otherwise, you're not learning Game Design; you're doing Game Design research, which is a different thing and has a different purpose.

That advice is asking a beginner to do both at the same time.

And worse, it's asking the beginner to understand something that even veterans don't fully understand; so… not good advice at all.

So, we have a pretty intricate scenario full of hard problems.

There's a single cause to this situation. It would be too easy. Yet, we can look at this scenario from the opposite side.

We can identify a single issue that, if solved, can create a domino effect. Not necessarily to solve all problems, but at least to bring Game Design as a discipline on track.

So, let's bring this to a close and see where we're headed with our reasoning.

Becoming An Actual Discipline

Our lives are full of uncertainties.

And when we engage in learning something new, we expose ourselves to the peak of “uncertainty meeter”. We hate uncertainty. We seek simple answers to complex issues, we “cut to the chase of things”, we develop blind faith, we strive for shortcuts, we look for oracles, etc. However, we can’t learn without jumping into uncharted territories.

So, that’s why a certain level of uncertainty is fine.

It could even be a good thing that inspires us to dig deeper into complex subjects. Yet what happens with Game Design learning is a bit too much to handle.

A beginner could even be a tough, inspired, and resilient guy/girl, but a scenario like this could bring him/her near K.O. And let me say that it’s pretty understandable. When you dwell on the details, Game Design doesn’t just have “some obscure spots”; it’s a “giant Black Hole on legs”. You can see some external effects of its surroundings, but the inside is a complete mystery.

I can already hear “non-beginners” saying: “Nah, you’re talking shit, that’s too overemphasized!”.

I wish they were right. Doing something and explaining how you do it are 2 very different things. Many Game Design professionals achieve a lot, but that doesn’t mean Game Design as a discipline is formalized and teachable.

We’ll explore in future episodes what it means in detail and why the problem raised by the famous article “Formal Abstract Design Tools” by Doug Church still has no solution. It was 1999.

But some beginners manage to learn.

Either because they can afford it or because they have a strong commitment and character, they push through it. By starting a long, painful, and frustrating trial-and-error learning process, they eventually come out on the other side with a more or less rough personal mental model of what Game Design is and how it works.

But also, many just drop. Overwhelmed and frustrated, they conclude that Game Design is a discouraging waste of time. They push it aside as a hobby; others abandon it altogether.

I don’t want to discuss, at least for now, the various pathways a beginner could take.

They’re a different issue to solve. Not because I’m not interested but because they all share the same problems. Why? Because it’s not much about the individual types of learning paths but more about the Game Design discipline itself. There is a lack of structured models, language, definition, and mindset.

These are what separates Game Design from becoming a real discipline.