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Author: Paolo

A sit at the table

Published by Paolo on 16/01/2024

Companies hire game designers (and other profiles) to build their business. Game designers have a specific focus on features and content. When we design features, the best way of showing their value is to focus on the benefits of that feature.

  • Business leaders love to hear about the impact of a certain feature, more than the quality of it.
  • It’s better to speak about the benefits of reducing cognitive load instead of selling a “cleaner” design.
  • One of the goals of feature design is to improve the long-term profit, more than improving the gameplay.
  • Things like accessibility, inclusivity, and so on are useful to reach untapped markets. They are not just a good thing to do.
  • Managers love to hear how to improve the path to purchase, more than vague concepts like flow.

If more designers take this approach, we will see less of them switching to Product Manager roles just to get a sit at the table.

Top game design voice badge

Published by Paolo on 12/01/2024

I have been on LinkedIn for 14 years. I use that platform a lot because of my personal branding activities. When I was fired from Digital Chocolate, because of a bad relationship with my direct manager, I decided to become the best game designer I could possibly become. Part of my strategy involved starting to share my ideas and discoveries of this complex micro world.

In fact, you need to explain things to others to become a recognized expert. It’s not just walk the walk, you need to talk the talk. Also, the language of business is not my native one, so I needed a tool to improve my English. I needed to find my own voice.

And the results are good, I have a healthy small business with my clients. Also, when I go to local meetups often I am reached by people that I don’t know who thank me for something related to my writings and videos. I can say that I feel I am in a good way. Of course, many things can happen and I can screw everything up with a mistake. In fact, pushing your ideas out there is no easy task.

Collaborative articles

For all this, I have never received any badge of any sort. But then LinkedIn published a new feature, called collaborative articles. That feature is probably meant to substitute experts in certain fields in the future. I honestly hate it. So I decided to take action.

Every morning I do this:

  1. I select randomly 5 collaborative articles on Game Design
  2. I copy one of the questions, also a random
  3. I paste it on Bing AI
  4. Then I copy and paste back part of the answer

Tadaaa! In just 10 days I got my badge. It was just grinding, nothing more. These social networks don’t care about the true value of their content.

We need a simple controller

Published by Paolo on 10/01/2024

Games should be simple to play, for everyone. They can also be difficult, and offer a challenge. But the play itself should be a very accessible act.

A gamepad with over 20 buttons is not simple. We need some courage and go back to the origins. With adaptation to the novelties.

8 buttons for NES pad were more than enough, but the shape was not optimal.

Oculus controller solves the ergonomic problem, but has too many buttons. I would save just the trigger and add a touchpad on top

The touchpads of Steam Deck are a good reference for the top part.

Can you imagine that?

  • Connect it with any device, smartphone, PC or console
  • comes with a dongle to stream on any screen
  • takes gestures too

Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is dead

Published by Paolo on 04/01/2024

Long live King Kardashian: Hollywood.

I remember this game took people like me in crisis. We read a lot of breakdowns to try to understand why this game was so successful at the time. Almost nobody understood the real value of that “exposed gem”.

The system was very simple and the economy was pretty aggressive. Only whales, VIP players, were treated with actual respect and that fit great into the game’s metaphor. Of course, for someone like me with my gaming background (as a Player) all of that looked like garbage. But hey, lots of people prove me wrong. People wanted to be entertained by that sort of point and click dating simulator with dolls mechanics.

There was a perfect marriage among a dominant mimicry and an alea. You performed actions using energy and in change you could get some special perk. Fantasy, narrative and expression were the main aesthetics.

We all learned a lot from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. So that at the end it will pass to the game history, somehow. That shitty game!

Are you on the right path?

Published by Paolo on 03/01/2024

This is a question that pops out often while you are making a new game. Especially when you lead business discussions as a game designer. You often need to see your work greenlighted by some marketer or business guy. That’s because they are often at the top.

But the question focuses on the outcome, on something that nobody can control. Often, there are “fortune tellers” in companies that win the internal battles just because they can be very convincing. But nobody can predict the revenue of a game in development.

You can have the top talent and a system that is informed with data. With that, you can cope, adjust, and leverage the unpredictability. That’s it, and it’s more than enough!

Do you want to know if you are on the right path? Are you making the best game you can with the resources you have? Then, you are.

Play Forms

Published by Paolo on 02/01/2024

If you want to learn how to play like a game designer and you don’t know how to start, the Play Forms framework is a good starting point. It is based on a classic book about play, called “Man, Play and Games“. I have never read it, but there is a lot of material out there if you know how to search.

The framework is based on the conception that play has 4 basic forms:

  • Agon means competition, it can be against the game itself, against virtual enemies or against other Players
  • Alea means chance, the random factor that the Player is not able to control
  • Mimicry means the imitation of something belonging to other contexts, such as real life or fantasy worlds or abstract concepts
  • Ilinx means the vertigo, the senses brought to their limits

Ask yourself these questions while you are playing:

  • Am I competing against someone or something?
  • Does my outcome depend on randomness at some level?
  • Am I interpreting some role or adapting to metaphors that I have already seen in other mediums?
  • Do I feel some of the moments are extremely exaggerated and exciting?

My GOTY

Published by Paolo on 01/01/2024

Data speaks clearly. In 2023, the game that I absolutely played the most was Vampire Survivors.

Small team, simple idea, true indie gem. Simplicity at its finest. Nothing more to add, this was my personal GOTY.

Happy New Year everybody!

Wishes and hopes for 2024

Published by Paolo on 29/12/2023

I want to spend two words to write down my hopes and desires for 2024. I will not write any forecast, those are for non-creative people. People with no vision, people who look for an impossible low risk. A forecast is something to convince people to give money to other people, nothing more. I am a creative person, I don’t believe in forecasts and I prefer to write my wishes.

First of all, I hope that next year will be at least the start of a new way of making games. Companies should think of new kinds of contracts and compensations for their employees. Currently, a professional contributing to generating billions will eventually fall in a round of layoffs. Imagine, you create a new character like Spider-Man and other people will get lots of money. And then you are fired. The others, instead, will continue to make money forever. This is plain absurd. Since job stability does not exist, also contracts should adapt.

I hope to see new fresh concepts for mobile games, as second thing. Currently, the industry is trapped in concepts that have nothing to do with actual game design. Good game design is about understanding an audience and its needs. The industry, instead, is talking about “User Acquisition”, hybrid casual, web3, and things that are not interesting for the Players. I hope to see more fresh concepts, with a renewed interpretation of genres.

Third, I wish to see more people building businesses that last 100 years. We are too much immersed in the mentality of fast success. When we see the most successful businesses, they are built in decades, not years. All these people that have been fired this year, plus the people that will be laid off next one, could build awesome things. They have also the power to let fresh energies enter the industries. Start from team building, maybe creating content for Fortnite or Roblox. Start from the team, while you build a strong vision.

The web shops are popping out, so I hope to see more platforms that will help create a community among gamers. This is my fourth and last wish. Things like Steam but not so focused on PC games. Something that relates also to mobile games. Maybe letting the Players add mods and content to some games. That would be awesome. Too much AI bullcrap this year, the best content comes and will always come from real human beings!

Have a great year y’all!

The most sincere form of flattery

Published by Paolo on 28/12/2023

Clone

  • a plant or animal that has the same genes as the original from which it was produced
  • someone or something that looks very much like someone or something else
  • a computer that operates in a very similar way to the one that it was copied from

You will never be a professional game designer until you understand the art of cloning. From a first perception, it may seem like something unfair. You are stealing, copying, and ripping things off. But it’s not. Cloning is the most sincere form of flattery.

The risk of copycats

The problem with cloning in companies is that businesses are led by business people. People working ON the game. And business people are not designers (usually). When they see that there is something successful, they want to replicate the success. The smartest ones dream to make it grow better than the original.

And that becomes a problem, often, for designers. More in general, for developers. For people working IN the game. While we struggle to find the best way of understanding why something is working and how to improve it… Looking for other games that the same core audience is playing, to find how to integrate… the “orders” we receive is to put “that thing that the CEO’s son saw in that game” in. No discussions.

What to do?

The non-obvious solution, to me, is that designers should earn a sit at the table. And to do that, you need to learn the business language and adapt to it. If your company decides it will dedicate its effort to hybrid casual games (it’s a mere example), it’s a loss from a creative point of view. Your Players will never look for a hybrid casual game. They will look for a simple game to play on their mobile phone. It makes no sense, from the client’s perspective, that kind of wording. So our goal is to understand how to communicate with the business in their crazy way while we work for the Players.

Future: remove uninteresting choices

Published by Paolo on 27/12/2023

An experiment I ran this year was TikTok. I made an account and started recording videos in Italian on game design. In a few days, I was completely sucked into the platform. I stopped playing my games for pleasure, TikTok was my unique source of mobile entertainment. I uninstalled that crazy demon from my smartphone.

The algorithm works just great, understands where I stay the most and keeps serving me what it considers to be the best. There were no surprises, every time I needed some fast stress relief I got it.

From a game design standpoint, the lack of uninteresting choices is a great thing when I am the consumer. This doesn’t happen when I run a social casino suite or a mobile RPG. Lately, it has not happened with Roblox and Fortnite either. It doesn’t happen with Steam.

I run these games and I have to choose: which game mode, minigame, or experience, do I want to play? Rarely did I decide this before running a game. So I spend 10 precious minutes deciding.

And in that context, this decision is not meaningful at all! I want to have fun and make meaningful choices in the game. Not on the main screen.

I am completely sure that the next mobile hit will understand this concept and serve the Players with straight gameplay, according to their tastes. With the possibility of swiping them away. And of course, leveraging content creation.