Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Do Game Developers Actually Play Games? Shouldn’t They?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 20, 2010

In the forum thread about RPG Codex’s Game Developer Picks for RPG of the Decade [warning: They have been known to occasionally engage in harsh language… 😉 ] some posters rather colorfully called into question the judgment of these game developers (myself included as one of the offending responses) by asking whether we actually play any RPGs anymore.

Now, I cannot speak for all game developers. Only myself, and those I know well enough to know their game-playing habits.

I will say that some of them (fortunately, not me) engage in far too much of the recreational drug known as World of Warcraft.

But aside from that, based on my very informal, anecdotal evidence, I will actually answer the two questions posed by the title in reverse order:

Q: Should game developers play games?

A: Absolutely. I think a game developer must not lose touch with what is happening in the field. More importantly, I  think that a game developer (designers, especially) need to have a passion for games… and if they aren’t playing games, they are probably losing that passion.

Q: Okay, so DO game developers actually play games?

A: Of course they do. But often not the way a hardcore gamer does. And I’d submit not nearly as much as many of them would like to. And in my case – probably more than I should.

I discovered, when I became a full-time game developer, that how I played games changed. I often found myself analyzing games critically in a way I hadn’t before. And I found myself playing games specifically for that purpose.

I found myself playing the kind of games I normally wouldn’t, trying to keep myself well-rounded or something.  I found myself “browsing” games a lot more frequently, rather than seriously attempting to play a game to completion. I was more willing to play on the “easy” difficulty levels.

And yeah, sometimes when I got home at night I really didn’t feel much like playing games.

Now that I’m a part-time indie, I find that my time is far more constrained. As an indie – full-time or part-time – time is money. I can almost map my development progress as an inverse function of how much time I spend playing games.  I generally have about four hours of useful development time per evening that I could apply to getting my game done.  Most weeks, I end up applying only about half of that time to development. More than half of the lost time ends up going into playing games. Sure, some of it I find necessary – after all, if I want to talk about indie games, I ought to play ’em, right?

But I do find myself playing some games far more than I strictly need to.

So it’s a tough balancing act.


Filed Under: Biz, Game Development - Comments: 7 Comments to Read



  • Peter said,

    “I often found myself analyzing games critically in a way I hadn’t before. And I found myself playing games specifically for that purpose.”

    Professional artist’s disease. Friends of mine who are professional actors and musicians have the same experience, as do I (not a professional, but a couple of years of film school will drastically change the way you watch a movie).

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    Heh – yeah. The worst is when you find yourself playing a bad or tedious game, not because you are enjoying it but because you are trying to understand something about it. (“The game sucks, but the camera control is one of the best…”)

  • Kimari said,

    I shouldn’t need to play games in order to design games, especially if what I’m doing hasn’t been done in the past. If the case were the other way around, say, you’re making an FPS, then maybe you should play a few games so that at least you’ll realise that controlling the camera with the keyboard is a very BIG mistake.

    Mmmhhh, well, thinking about it in that way, then yes, you could say that developers, be them indie or not, should probably play games in order to learn from other’s mistakes. Now, wether or not excluding a “normal” feature from your game can be considered as a mistake, that’s a whole another can of worms that I won’t touch, not even with a 20 foot pole.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    @Kimari – It IS true that everybody has some gut instinct about game design. We were all children once. We all learned by playing. Some of us still do. It’s instinctive – part of the human Operating System.

    But would you expect someone to pick up a guitar and make great music if they’d not only never had a lesson, but never actually heard or seen a guitar being played before? Or create a great painting if they’d somehow been shielded from any other works of art? I imagine that with a GREAT DEAL of trial and error – probably a lot more than they’d have had to endure otherwise – they might eventually reach a point where they are proficient (and probably pretty unique in their approach).

    I think it’s the same with game design. I can’t tell you how many times I listened to a non-gamer describe to me their “idea for a game.” They were uniformly awful, even though there were occasionally some little germs of ideas which might have been usable and successful in some other design. But even if they had some notion of something that “might be fun in a game,” without a foundation of experience, they simply had no idea how to translate the concept into something playable.

    Stephen King explained in his book, “On Writing,” breaking the rules (of grammar) is absolutely fine and dandy if you 1) Know what rules you are breaking, and 2) know exactly why you are breaking them. Ignorance of the rules will not lead to good writing.

    We don’t have hard-and-fast rules of game design, but there’s a heck of a lot of accumulated knowledge.

    Which is, I guess, a round-about way of coming to your eventual conclusion. 😉

  • Aelfric said,

    This discussion actually reminded me of an anecdote from some time ago. In college, before I wised-up (or chickened out), I was a music major, and my favorite class was jazz improv. One day we were lucky enough to have a bit of a jam and a lesson from Tommy Flanagan, a jazz pianist who played with John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and basically everyone. His overriding lesson for the day was simple: “there are no wrong notes, only poorly thought out notes.” It changed the way I thought about music forever.

    As a sidenote, my favorite moment was actually different: one of the other students in the class asked him “what do you think about when you play?” I am sure he expected an answer like “modes” or “scales” or “harmonies.” Tommy, however, lowered his head, and was silent for about ten seconds, before looking the young man in the eye, and simply saying: “chicks.”

    It ruled.

  • WhineAboutGames said,

    But would you expect someone to pick up a guitar and make great music if they’d not only never had a lesson, but never actually heard or seen a guitar being played before? Or create a great painting if they’d somehow been shielded from any other works of art? I imagine that with a GREAT DEAL of trial and error – probably a lot more than they’d have had to endure otherwise – they might eventually reach a point where they are proficient (and probably pretty unique in their approach).

    See also ‘outsider art’

  • Wavinator said,

    This one’s hard for me. I find playing games to be less relaxing than it used to be, probably because my expectations have become so high. I look at photo-realistic shooters on the 360 and think ‘meh, same game, different artwork.’ And I’m acutely aware that every hour I spend playing something is an hour I don’t have to put into making something I’d prefer to play.

    But I think you’re right, it’s important not to lose the passion, especially when you’ve been feeling burned out (as I have recently).

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