Patrick Curry’s Thoughts on Game Design

A big part of being a game designer is trying to come up with game scenarios that I think will be fun. After all, if a game isn’t fun, what’s the point? Since I make action games right now, that means I spend a good deal of time coming up with fun stuff to blow up, fun enemies to blow up, and fun ways to blow it up. Yeah, blowing up stuff is fun.

But there’s a little more to it than that. How do I judge whether or not a particular idea will be fun? Well, at first it’s a best guess. Sometimes it’s a total gut-check, but there are some common fun threads that I fall back on. For example, something new can be fun, just because it’s new. There’s something rewarding when you do something you’ve never done before, or when you see something you’ve never seen. That’s one reason why people spend tons of money to travel all over the world: it’s just fun to see new places and meet new people.

It’s also fun to express yourself. It’s fun to be creative, even if how you’re being creative is by blowing stuff up. What’s the first thing everyone did the first time they played Half-Life and noticed bullets leaving marks on walls? They tried to write their names with bullets! A good action game will let you own the destruction you create, to the point where it becomes more yours than the designer’s. So the more opportunities we give you to express yourself within the game, the more fun you’ll have.

And finally, it’s fun to be noticed. The only thing more fun that expressing yourself is having other people react to your creations. Being a painter is fun, but seeing your painting in a gallery is often as fun as actually painting. So how do we apply this to games? For one, we try to recognize when you’re expressing yourself within the game, and then reward you for doing so. But it’s also good to let players recognize and reward each other, so we try to do that too. Sometimes those expressions are hugs, but sometimes they happen to be bullets. It all depends on the game.

There’s definitely more to fun than just this. These are three of the high-level ways I think about fun. But there are more to come…

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