Designers are stewards of the player experience.
There's often a myth and misunderstanding about what designers do on a project. They're the idea guys. They're the wishy-washy people who play the games, tweaks the numbers, and play the game some more. They write documents and dream big dreams and say things like, "wouldn't it be cool if.....," or "Man, that sucked, why is that so terrible." Sure, some designers do that, but underling all the ideation, commentary, and griping is an actual responsibility that's outside what other disciplines on a project do.
To be stewards of the player experience, Designer are essentially responsibly for two ends of the experience spectrum; the Player Fantasy and Mechanical Satisfaction.
Player Fantasy
This is often where the myth of designers being the "idea" guy comes from, since the big idea of the designers is to appeal to fantasies of player's play. The inexperienced designer will think that it's about creating cool ideas that others will latch on to. Experienced designers should realize is about creating situations and possibilities for the player experience to engage in the promised fantasy of the game. Good designers then use every bit of knowledge, skill, and experience to evoke emotions and inspire ideas. It isn't just about putting an idea onto paper and hoping the players get it, it's about working to create that emotion and ideas in the first place.
This pretty much relies on the soft skill of empathy.
The goal here it to promise a fantasy, be it a power fantasy of behind a hero that saves the world, a detective that uncovers a crime, survivalists taming the wilderness, or whatever genre or fiction that comes to mind, and then shepherd features and concepts into that cohesive experience that realizes the fantasy. A survivalist fantasy requires the concept of dying. The power fantasy requires power curve to grow against and evils to overcome. Uncovering a crime requires that the crime is complex enough that investigating it takes effort, and draws the detective further in.
Personally, I don't like the idea of creating "fun". Fun is a vague enough term that means many different things to many different people. I prefer the idea of creating "Resonance", a cognitive state of recognition, understanding and connection. It's fun because the players recognize it, it's fun because the players can understand what it means and how to overcome it. It's fun because players connect with it.
Mechanical Satisfaction
Here is where most of the design gets to work.
Mechanical satisfaction involves working the design that gets the player to interact with the games system. How to create the little details of gameplay that achieves a state of flow. It's figuring all the mathematics, logic and systems of interactions that create and impact the player's mental state.
It's about understanding what the game is at a fundamental second to second level. What actions can a player perform? How do create a series of escalating challenges against the actions the players performs. How to build systems the player can manipulate and manage and thus achieve their goals.
Mechanical design is a craft. It's applying the knowledge of a vast array of related subjects matters to achieve specific design goals. It's about creating small compulsive loops, that feed into larger and larger loops that eventually encompasses the whole of the game.
At some level, mechanical satisfaction should be somewhat divorced from the player fantasy. Understanding how to achieve mechanical satisfaction free of the player fantasy is a difficult skill for game designers to master, but something they should attempt. Think of it like doing almost like doing chores, cleaning dishes, folding laundry. There's a satisfaction in completing the task even if the overall vibe of the actions seem tedious and boring.
Achieving that level of rationality unlocks the designer's ability to then make it cohesive with the player fantasy, and larger design objectives.
That's because it's the layering of the player fantasy that makes the experience of the game resonant; the marriage of the mechanical satisfaction that tickles the players subconscious and physical skills and player fantasy that excites their creative imagination.
The cohesive experience of these two ends of the spectrum working in concert.
Finding the Balance In-Between.
Different players need different things out of their video game entertainment, and it's rarely ever one thing. Most of the time, it falls somewhere in between wanting a game that satisfies all their players fantasies, while being mechanically satisfying enough not to care, or it might be they really want a game where the core loop is deep, compulsive and engaging and it doesn't matter what the fictional frame of the game is.
In board games, there's an oft cited difference between Ameritrash games and Eurocentric games. The central difference being that Ameritrash games focus on the thematics and feel of the game, while the Eurocentric games are more mechanically inclined, and thematically agnostic. I think there's a semblance of this in video games as well, though the spectrum is far wider and messier.
As an aside, I'm only going to briefly mention the concept of ludonarrative dissonance for now, as that topic mostly comes up when a games indulges in presenting an "immersive" storytelling experience as its key message. Ludonarrative dissonance is the fancy way of saying that the game's mechanical fiction has far too many suspensions of disbelief to support the weight of the player fantasy.
But I am going to conclude that the day to day work of a designer is often to have this constant conversations with other designers and desperately trying to understand where the limits of a wide variety of audience's suspension of disbelief lies. Finding that balance between Player Fantasy and Mechanical Satisfaction. It's a balance that shifts so often during a game development's process, often at the mercy of so many other disciplines, personal opinions, and creative hot takes. Sometimes, someone just wants to be clever to prove how clever they are.
Currently Playing:
Mudrunner
Mudrunner is a great example of when the confluence of Player Fantasy and Mechanical satisfaction comes together into a cohesive experience. The simulationist fantasy of being a truck driver in the wilderness coupled with the fractal problem solving of moving massive hunks of metal from A to B. It's a physics puzzle game organically woven into a logistic management game under the frame of a simple premise. Be a truck driver.
Who knew that watching lovingly rendered mud deformation as I white knuckle my controller's trigger to push my massive truck through marshlands could be so immersive?
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