People have often wondered why artists continue to write, or paint, or engage in any other creative endeavor, when there have already been far more books published, paintings painted, etc., than one could possibly consume in a lifetime. Isn’t that a bit like continuing heap food on the dinner table when all the guests have already declared themselves too full to eat another bite?
The answer to that question is also one of the secrets of good design.
Newcomers to any form of art or design often make the mistake of looking at their work and asking “What can I add to make it better?”More often, the question they should be asking is “What should I take away?”
For the recipient, what matters is not the volume of information contained in a piece, but rather its density - how much fun, pleasure, knowledge or inspiration they can extract per second that they spend in contact with your work. To understand this, refer back to the original question: there is always more out there. If you were stuck on an airplane with only one thing to read, perhaps you would prefer a decent novel to a great short story, but for most of our lives, especially in these days of the Internet, art and information are like an all-you-can-eat buffet, and the goal is not to find the most filling items, since getting full is inevitable, but rather to taste as many of the most delicious items as possible before that saturation point is reached.
What this means is that although you can improve your piece by adding to it - provided what you’re adding is better than the average quality of the piece so far - often subtraction is the better solution. This doesn’t always mean you have to take things out, though certainly trimming the fat is one way to improve a piece. The best thing you can do is to find ways to combine elements and make each detail serve multiple purposes.
In writing, this is what they mean by “show, don’t tell.” Convey your message through nuance, rather than spelling it out. It’s also why wordplay, connotation and nuance are so important to a professional copywriter, particularly with things like slogans and taglines - if you can use one word to say two things, that makes a big difference when the piece in question is only five words long.
In visual art, it can be layers of symbolism, composition, the use of colours, and so on.
These are old art forms, though, so these ideas of density and “less is more” are very familiar to any experienced professional. However, it’s overlooked all too often when it comes to game design, which is, all things considered, a very young field. Particularly in the world of digital gaming, the popular belief - both in terms of technology and game content - seems to be that more is more. Every AAA game nowadays has to be 3D and implement the latest graphical effects, has to have sprawling levels and tons of different items and enemies, multiple gameplay mechanics (nothing is ever just an action game, or just a puzzle game, or just an RPG anymore), and so on. Every platform that comes out has to have a more complicated controller than the last, and even the simpler games use most the buttons just because they’re there.
Nintendo seems to be the first to realize the wrong-headedness of the industry, and has started to come back the other way with the Wii. Love it or hate it, you have to realize they’re on to something. Likewise, the casual games industry for PC, for all its faults, does at least understand the merits of simple game with a single set of mechanics.
It’s not that games are getting worse with time, it’s that early titles were forced to keep things simple and try to focus on tight gameplay (though many failed miserably, of course), simply because the technology wasn’t there to do anything more elaborate. It can be likened to writing a story on a napkin - you could write something great or something terrible, but at least the space constraints mean that you don’t risk taking what should have been a sentence and turning it into a novel.
This focus on the core mechanics is what modern game designers need to get back to. Look at great games from previous decades, like Lode Runner, Super Mario Bros. and Doom, and the bottom-up approach these games took to level and monster design. In these games, the player has a very limited range of powers and the enemies are likewise more like variations on a theme than completely different entities - in Mario, for instance, the Koopa is essentially a Goomba that leaves a shell behind when killed. Buzzy Beetle is a Koopa immune to fireballs. Spiny is a Koopa immune to being jumped on. Terrain and power-ups are similarly limited. The level design is based around the interplay between the player’s finite abilities and this small range of assets and challenges, presented in different combinations. And that’s enough - the original Super Mario Bros. has 32 levels, but manages not to be repetitive, because the designers were forced to be creative with what they were given. The resulting game is simple but dense, in the sense that every ounce of potential has been squeezed out of these simple building blocks.
By contrast, modern games seem to be designed top-down, with concepts being created for the main enemies and challenges the player is to face, and then the main character’s and secondary enemies’ abilities being filled in after the fact, in order to lead the player through this story. The result is very often a sprawling, sloppy work with a lot of unnecessary distractions, and infrequently-used features.
Although I’m sure it’s possible to design a successful game from the top down, it would require a great deal of restraint, something the industry is not yet mature enough to be capable of. Until that time comes, major game companies would do well to study the successes of their historical predecessors (as well as such indie titles as World of Goo) and get back to their mechanics-first roots.
