Design Theory: The Preparation Of Ideas

From my first post, people may have gotten the impression that I'm perhaps slightly aggrieved with programmers.  And I'm really not.  I am slightly aggrieved with programmers who don't use their intellect to think about anything beyond coding.  Case in point: a new friend recently met up with a guy who ostensibly works in the games industry and has taught game design courses at the college level.  When she asked about what was necessary to get into the games industry, his immediate response was, "you really need to be a programmer."

Being completely fair, you can technically create a game without anything other than a programmer.  It may not be the most visually striking, or have any visuals at all.  It may not have the most stirring soundtrack, or the best sound effects, or even eloquent voice overs.  As a program, it will undoubtedly function.  However, the question is whether it qualifies as a game or not.

Sid Meier once described a game as "a series of interesting choices."  For myself, I've expanded on that description thusly: "a series of interesting choices within a specific set of circumstances."  It's not merely the choices themselves that are interesting, so much as the choices available to the player at any given time.  A player's choices are constrained by the circumstances surrounding the player at that moment.  Think back to one of the golden oldies of gaming, King's Quest.  You could type commands and get the character to perform certain actions which would get you past puzzles and through character interactions.  In theory, the player could type this command:

KILL THE KING

The problem is that while the command might make sense to you and I, the circumstances surrounding the character at the time would make such a thing impossible.  The character might not be currently armed.  The character might be half a world away from the king.  Or, even more likely, the developers never envisioned the player might turn regicide and didn't provide any sort of path like that for the game.  Part of the circumstances that your interesting choices take place in are the assumptions that the designer was operating under in the first place.

If somebody were to ask me, "how do I make a game?", my response would be, "Define a set of circumstances."  Let's break down some popular games into their particular circumstances.
  

• Tetris - stack blocks falling down a shaft in a way that the shaft gets filled all the way across but not up to the top
• Street Fighter - compete against different fighters of varying styles to become a champion
• Civilization - develop your nation from the Stone Age to the Space Age through scientific progress, military might, or diplomatic skill
• Skyrim - explore a large area and undertake quests to save the world

Things like scoring, lore, fighting styles, all of that are fine details.  They are not circumstances in and of themselves, but one of those interesting choices you have to make.  Do you go with Ryu or Chun-Li?  Do you improve your Bow skill or your Sword skill?  Do you research Steam Power or Economics?  Do you rotate the L-shaped block one way or the other?  You have to be able to boil your idea down to the essentials.  No characters, no background story, nothing beyond the bare bones necessary to describe the circumstances your players will be experiencing.  Once you've got that down, then you've taken the first step towards building a game.