If you have a passion for game design you are out of luck, because everyone thinks that he can do a better work than you.

The truth is that game design has no dignity. It’s FALSE that evaluating “game design” is harder than evaluating good art or a good programmer. And it shows. There are out there plenty of games that have terrible engineering or terrible art. There is the exact same amount of arbitrariety. If game design hasn’t a value on its own it’s because it has no DIGNITY. And the reason why many games suffer is because of that. You CANNOT be a game designer because you have studied and researched it, because you have dedicated all yourself to it.

While you CAN AND HAVE to study to become a good programmer, you aren’t allowed to do the same if your discipline is game design. Because “game design” is only a “prize title”, a BADGE you win as reward if you are good at doing something else. Even if you are incompetent in your new role.

You become a game desiger only because you “happen” to be one, as a “drift” from another position that may have nothing to share with game design. It’s like a lottery. Since game design has no dignity and concrete presence on its own, people are told that they must be good at CS, or good programmers, or good artists, or whatever. People finish to work as game designers even if they LACK that competence. Because training and study are considered superfluous for this discipline. Maybe those same people will become good designers, with the time.

It’s acquired, not prerequired for the role. You are allowed to study and learn game design only *after* you received that title. So we have good designer who became *good* desigers AFTER they have been promoted to that role. Because game design is considered a SUBPRODUCT of other disciplines and a “reward” if you did well something completely unrelated. Because there’s no real training. In the meantime games suck because many game designers are promoted from programming and bringing with them a wrong, convoluted mentality that is pretty obvious on many, many titles.

Game design is *its own* discipline, not the reward for a career achieved through other competencies.

So the problem is that there isn’t a culture of game design, and because there isn’t one that game design falls behind, is considered something that EVERYONE can do. Something trivial, something superfluous. Often a reward or prize that has nothing to share with the competence that is being rewarded in the first place. It’s the model and the attitude to be wrong. This is a commonplace that should be fought, because it’s damaging this industry.

And finally, why this website cannot work as a portfolio? It shows how my brain works, it shows the way I approach problems, it shows how I analyze, it shows my critics, what I think of the genre, my approach, my ideas. It shows the way I communicate to people, the way I look for a dialogue and a confrontation, the way I answer to critics and MORE. I don’t see as this has less value than someone showing a portfolio with some drawings or a DVD with 3D works in Maya or 3D studio. I CAN see out there who has good, solid ideas that are possible that I would like expressed in a game, I can see who doesn’t. In a similar way as I can, arbitrarily, say if someone can make good or bad art.

And if I can ALSO make a great mod for UT2004, HL2, NWN2 then I’m showing a different kind of competence that may be irrelevant for a MMO. And this without even recognizing that game design is a so broad concept that has many other different disciplines within. Each of those requiring its own competence and expertise. Each of those requiring study and specialization. The game designer who does world building doesn’t have the same competencies of the game designer who writes and scripts quests, or the game designer who designs the UI, or the game designer who writes the backstory, or the game designer who directs PvP, or the game designer who creates and balances classes, or the game designer who takes care of the economic systems.

What is missing isn’t the concrete material or the possibility to prove a competence. What is missing is the recognition of a discipline that just hasn’t been granted DIGNITY on its own.

The REAL wrong message is that you can “eventually” become a game designer even if you never studied or dedicated yourself to it.

Logic would say that if you want to do something and be good at it you have to study it. No, not for game design. Do something else. Studying game design is superfluous and competence an optional.

That’s the truth that no one will tell you in all those “breaking in” pages.

Let me spend some words and connect some dots about this that I was thinking these last days. At what point are we with these game communities? If you read the quote that Lum has taken out (and the other) you can see that the scenario isn’t a very positive one. It’s not really what we would have portrayed, not what we would have wished.

Hey, that’s the same Lum behind the ltm.net community. The “golden age” that I almost completely missed (and lament). What we learnt? Where we are today? Is this what we really wanted? Is this all we got?

Today’s communities like F13 exist on completely different premises, I think. The “meaning” isn’t anymore into a “referent” outside, like MMOs. That’s just the expedient for something else that became the real subject of the community itself. That is now self-referential. The community is more about itself, its own habits, characters and so on. Games can be an excuse. Ubiq would define this the “corner bar”. Lum also described perfectly all this in an article he wrote on the occasion of one anniversary of F13 and that must be still there, somewhere.

I usually lose interest and participation in those communities as that happens because I hardly integrate myself in those processes, and also because it’s not part of my original goal. See, the point is that I seem to be the only one left who still remembers the original goal. The original “mission”.

So what’s this original mission and motivation?

To that question I usually quote GBob: “Lum the Mad was riding high with his web site, forcing game companies to engage the player base in a real dialog”. But from a broader point of view I’d say that the mission is to “do our part”. Become part of the process. Contribute. Participate. That’s why I found the courage and arrogance to “invade” the forums and communities with my broken english. I never lost the sight on that mission. A mission that was supposed to be what we ALL had in common, what we all shared. Sensitize, discuss, polemize. Follow, help and accompany the process that can bring to better games. To be part of it somehow.

I’m the only one who’s still waving that flag?

Those communities were and are important. They may degenerate into cesspits, but you can find a lot that is valuable in there. Even if I don’t think, contrarily to what Raph wrote (about me, even), that this is a growing trend. What I see is that game companies actively suffocate that kind of dialogue because they think it’s an attack to their own identity, a risk. So we get empty community support, PR and all the current “politically correct” and “professional” behaviours that are concretely just a determinate removal of that kind of direct relationship that we fought for. A few like Raph are left. But they are now just outsiders and unique cases instead of a growing trend that we contributed to build and develop. The point is: we are losing that battle, if not lost already.

Why I’m not satisfied by current MMO companies?

Not because games are “flawed” and the flaws unforgivable, but because of the general situation. The gap between developers and the community is GROWING, not shrinking as we all hoped. Instead of training new blood, new enthusiasm and passion for this genre, we have what Megyn defined twenty years of incest. We lack a positive, constructive culture. We lack that kind of “humus” from where the developers of tomorrow will come. I ranted a lot in the past when I saw always the same names jumping from company to company and, from my point of view, lacking the passion and commitment that are a necessity in this genre. But it is also true that the problem isn’t just of the dev who decided to leave a company for another, but also of the company that made that dev flee because he wasn’t put in the condition to do his work at best. So the problem runs deeper.

What I’d like to see?

I’d like to see a game company that is more responsive and aware. More alive and human. That isn’t ashamed or scared of a dialogue with the players, but that actually promotes and encourages it. A company that pushes the evolution of the genre instead of being VICTIM OF IT. Anticipate the trends instead of being caught off guard. A company that can produce a game that doesn’t start to sink just one year down the road. With the ambition to stay and leave a sign. A dev studios that doesn’t need a new brand or flag where to hide behind every couple of years because they have burnt the previous one. And this isn’t just about game design, but also about technology. The technology must be more flexible and powerful. This obviously needs work and time, it needs traning, study and research both inside and outside.

But if this is true then why EVERY MMO company has two, three, four MMOs in development when they can HARDLY support one?