Thread by @krides, Let's talk about game quality. People throw nebulous terms like "good game" [...]

Let's talk about game quality. People throw nebulous terms like "good game" and "bad game" around a lot.

From a game design standpoint, it means a particular thing, often quite different from a player's, business person's, or reviewer's perspective.

Thread.

First of all, to clear the air: no, it's not "whatever," and it's not all purely subjective. And no, it's not a popularity contest either: metrics are not the only measure of success.

When a game designer analyzes a game, there is a specific way to evaluate it critically.

One of the things you learn very early is to look at the intended *overall game experience* and try to match the features to it.

The word "experience" is often overused. For the purpose of this thread, it means "the way the player is meant to feel while playing the game."

So you come up with an experience like that, for example: "I want the player to feel like an assassin."

First of all, it *really* helps for this to be an explicit, well-defined statement. Being vague about it or not understanding what you want will be a problem later.

Then you think of your target audience. What kind of people would this experience resonate with? What else would they expect from it? What other games do they play? What do they like about those games?

This is who this game is for. There's no such thing as a game for everyone.

I can't stress this last point enough: no game has ever been made that appeals to everyone. It is essential to understand this because if you don't, you will likely make a game for no one at all.

But I digress. We're not making games here; we're analyzing them.

After the experience and the audience are well-defined, you start coming up with *verbs* the player needs to have in order to get that experience.

A verb is a thing the player can *do* in your game: an assassin moves stealthily, climbs buildings, and kills from the shadows.

Any experience can be expressed with various verbs, and each verb can be expressed in a variety of different ways. For example, our assassin can use gadgets, wear disguises, and kill from a distance. Or kill in close range and hide in bushes. Or both – why not.

So this is what you analyze – the precise *implementation* of the intended experience into concrete game systems.

Keeping the target audience and the intended experience in mind, how well were the verbs chosen? Are there any superfluous verbs? Are any verbs obviously missing?

And you look at *how* the verbs were implemented: is using them making you feel like an assassin, or does it feel like you're playing a video game instead? This usually happens when something feels clunky, and that's where the designer needs to dig deeper and figure out why.

It's also important to analyze the target audience (if you know what it is or if you can at least guess it). Does the target audience of the game understand and relate to these verbs? This is often a hit or miss, just like the verbs themselves.

A game is a triumph of game design if the experience – or message – that it was built to convey carries over to its target audience. So a game designer's analysis tries to answer three simple questions:

1. How well does it carry over?
2. Why?
3. Seriously, why, exactly?

There aren't perfect games because most games don't find their intended audience exactly and instead end up appealing to a slightly different group of people with different values, or because some of the implementation invariably misses the mark on the intended experience.

A game is "good" from a design perspective when it does those things at least *reasonably well*. And a feature is "good" when it fits the vision and conveys the experience.

This is why designers care so much about how the game is *intended* to be played.

If you don't play the game the intended way, it's mostly still the game's fault and usually results in something other than the intended experience. It's often our job as designers to prevent that, if at all possible, saving the players from themselves.

By the way, this is a point that @gamemakerstk has been talking about again and again in many of his videos. For example, in this one:

Now, if you break the game or play it in some way that wasn't intended and are still having fun, that's totally fine, but that's on you. A designer can't take credit for that, but can often see it as a negative because they worked very hard to accomplish something else.

In simple terms: if you play the game like this, do you feel like an assassin, or do you feel like a baker? It can be fun to feel like a baker, but the game was built to make you feel like an assassin, so clearly, something went wrong along the way.

Depending on how broad is the definition of a game's intended experience and how wide its target audience is, you'll see games that let you customize things about them: create your own character, choose difficulty settings, etc.

And therein lies the common miscommunication between game players and game designers. This is why people *expecting* and *demanding* a feature in a game because "another game has it" is usually met by bewilderment from its dev team.

A game has to be designed with these broadening customizations in mind – designed from the ground-up, from the moment the intended experience is defined. If it's not – if it's something slapped on top with duct tape, it will negatively impact the *intended* experience.

And by the way, this is the reason why you see more and more AAA games with RPG and *player choice* elements. The more choices you specifically designed for, the more ways the player can play and still have that elusive intended experience. It's designers hedging their bets.

An intended experience can be "bad" or "wrong" from the consumer, market, or business perspective – but that is for other people to decide.
Whether or not a design was successful is a separate question – one I have hopefully helped demystify just a tiny bit here.

End of thread.

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