September 12, 2006
Greedy Designers?
Gamasutra - AGC: Blizzard's Pardo On WoW 's Success
The following is a quote from an article describing an Austin Game Conference session by a Blizzard VP on the game World of Warcraft:
The company also tried to remain conscious of trade-offs in game design, and the fact that "every decisions costs" in one way or another. "All game designers are very greedy by nature," Pardo said. "We want to have every cool feature, and we want to serve every market. The reality is that almost every design decision comes with a trade-off. Nothing in game design is black and white, it's all shades of grey."
It is interesting to think of designers as "greedy" but, upon further reflection it is probably true. This might be the key distinction between a novice designer and an experienced designer. I will speak of designers in general but my thoughts are directed toward instructional designers.
It is the role of a designer to know what is possible. It is only by knowing what is possible that unique solutions can be posed to solve problems. Many designers, however, get lost in what is theoretically "possible" and lose site of what is sufficient to accomplish a goal. As noted in the article, and was once said by Don Norman (1999) all design is a series of trade-offs.
A greedy instructional designer might see that all the graphic and media bells and whistles will make learning more engaging and appealing. If, however, they lose sight of timelines or budget, then these enhancements won't matter. I have seen designers get very upset when they cannot implement all the ingredients they would like to include.
Blizzard VP Rob Pardo, noted that they had to trade off photorealism in Warcraft to allow the game to play on a greater number of computers. This initially hurt marketing efforts but created a broader base of customers and also has a higher level of longevity and sustainability. Note that this lack of photorealism does not mean that the game is not of a high quality or lacking in polish. Blizzard made clear trade-off decisions but, once they were made, they have stuck to their guns around quality.
Mark makes a similar point about whether there is really always a need for great graphics (albeit on a humorous note) with his post on the stick-figure comic).
Posted by Rovy at September 12, 2006 8:25 AM
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