Making Games is Mostly Research
And everything else is too
There was a dream I had up until last year. A dream where I could open up Unity and make an entire game without opening one tab on the browser. A dream that I could one day be so knowledgeable about how to make games that I no longer needed help or guidance. That’s what I thought it meant to be a real game dev or to be an adult really.
Okay, maybe an exaggeration. I never thought through it in those terms, but I still had the feeling that stooping to opening up a tab and searching for the third time how to save a render in blender was sort of a failure for me.
In the past year I’ve rapidly expanded the base of tools I use and expanded what making games means to me. In doing so I’ve realized that research is, and will always be, essential.
I use the example of technical researching partly because that’s 75% of my google searching in the past year, but also because it’s the most quantitative form of research done in development. However, the ubiquity of research applies to every aspect of a game’s creation. Teacher’s told me every year about the importance of research, but its a lesson you do not finally understand until you’ve actually gone and done real labor.
The context for this discussion is a post-mortem on my experience working on a game with an entire class over the last semester. The game is an AR capture the flag cyber-punk mobile game called N30N. (Pictured to the left) There are many things I could touch on from this experience, (failure, communication, roles, production and design were all topics for the previous drafts of this article) but looking back the value of research in my personal success is what I most want to bring out from the class.
So what do I mean? Well, let’s look through the major examples of research that I practiced within the course of this semester. How does it connect broader topics in games, entertainment, and honestly life.
Examples of Research
Technical Research
In sheer quantity this is the research I find myself doing the most. Having a specific technical problem, and searching google for someone to have hopefully solved it before me.
As I understand it, everyone does this. Software is very complicated, precise, finicky, and confusing. Being comfortable parsing documentation and tutorials is one of those foundational skills that most creative people have to learn to be successful.
This is particularly the case for me. Someone who is not in a computer science or visual arts degree and has no official education in any of the tools I use daily. Yet, I found myself as the developer and asset artist for this semester long project. You can bet that after every work session I had 30 tabs open at least.
My success in this class has been completely driven by the last four years of not understanding Unity, or Blender, or Photoshop, or programming. I challenged myself to slowly discover these tools to the point of semi-confidence. Even though I am mostly still asking basic questions, there’s 100 questions I’ve already answered that can get me to the point of making a game.
Concept Research
Any creative work will start with an idea. An idea that is mechanical, visual, narrative…al that you want to explore. Making a game is a process of messing around with an idea until something interesting emerges. The game is hopefully a polished recreation of that process of messing around. Like how a truly great essay can find the value in any topic, games can make anything “fun.”
That messing around manifests itself in two equally important ways.
The first is (you guessed it) research. Just the same as you would for an essay in high school. Hopefully, this initial process of idea exploration is more exciting and interesting than an essay. If the subject matter of a game excites you, if you’re waiting for books to ship to you, if you are talking to experts, or just looking through Wikipedia that’s a great sign. This type of research has given me enough energy to pull me through development. In the process of art research for N30N a teammate pointed us towards Soviet era computer prototypes. Which are amazing and just that one idea is what made me comfortable giving my energy to this game.
The other side of this is early prototyping. The kind done before outside eyes catch a glance. At this point this is merely research. It’s a direct question answering tool. This kind of work should be planned for and done very early. Proof of concept. One issue with this project is one large hurdle, online multiplayer, did not get a prototype until halfway through the semester. It proved to be unattainable, and there was a difficult patch where the game began to slip away. In the future I plan to formalize this research into production as a first step in development. Additionally, until a proof of concept is proven, not assuming that the test will come back positive. Check early, check often, and prepare for when the checks will fail.
Design Research
I was not on the design team for N30N. However, I learned more about what game design really means in this class then any other. Mostly, have people play your game. Test with your playtest, don’t just seek broad critique.
Games (and all art) are systems based around humans. Making sure that humans can understand the system is step one. I will be honest, I always imagined game design to be only about diagrams and imagination. Something that can be done alone with little feedback. Sure, that will work well enough for a Medium article, but games have to require players. Professional game design is a continuous study of what fun is. It’s all research. Just like everything else.
A Pithy Conclusion
There are other domains of research I wanted to talk about. However I think the main idea has gotten across. Games are not just mostly research. Games are research. We are not born with knowledge, we research. Even within the most innovative groups of game designers, kids, games act as a way of starting to understand the world. Justice, strategy, empathy, teamwork and much more are learned as children through making and modding games. That doesn’t go away 15 years later in a college course. We are still trying to figure that stuff out, and I would say games are as good as anyway to put in the research.
