by the game design veteran Chris Roberts (WING COMMANDER, 1990) has managed, through a combination of traditional Kickstarter campaign and a self-run crowdfunding website, to accumulate over 85 million dollars between 2012 and 2015.38
Just as with the older audiovisual media of theater, film, and television, the economic potentials of digital games are based on the requirement that products achieve a certain technical and artistic quality. A decisive structural condition has emerged only over the last decade with the increase of technical options: small groups and even individuals now possess means of production that two decades ago were the exclusive privilege of large companies and corporate groups and, thereby, also only of highly specialized experts. Admittedly, with access to these new technical means comes the challenge to use them artistically in a way that is appropriate and creative. Four developments influenced game design over the last decade:
A latent stagnation and aesthetic crisis of AAA titles developed through a high degree of division of labor;
The rise of a so-called indie scene, whose ‘small’ games are anchored outside of the commercial mainstream and tend towards artistic experimentation and breaking out of traditional schemas;
A proliferating differentiation into evermore specific subgenres combined with a strong increase in the number of titles being produced;
The introduction of practices and mechanisms of game development into other production and service areas.39
The last of these proves the outstanding position that digital games occupy in the emerging digital media dispositif. Once upon a time the new medium of film influenced the other, older arts: theater and the novel, painting and music developed cinematic qualities. No differently, digital games—namely their aesthetic qualities, such as the mass phenomenon of their interactive reception—are influencing media production and consumption today, especially in the areas of the competing audiovisual media of film and television. Parallel to that the procedures of game design as a production method for audiovisual media are becoming a central practice of digital culture—from the adoption of ‘world building’40, as it is a common practice in game design, by advanced film productions or by the diverse visualization attempts in research and industry to the ‘gamifying’ applications of game design principles in marketing or knowledge transfer.41 As a basic tendency one can thereby identify a ‘democratization of game design’: a steady cheapening and simplification of the financing, conception, production, global distribution and use of digital games.42
In II Game Design I will first analyze the double origins of game design: on the one hand from practices of analog design, especially its principles of prototyping and iteration that have arisen since the beginning of Industrialization in the context of producing hardware artifacts (II-1 Analog Design); on the other hand from practices of digital design that developed since the mid-20th century in the context of software production and visual design (II-2 Digital Design). Due to these dual origins during the last half-century in the design of digital games, the development of highly different procedures took place: The non-commercial beginnings in the academic hacker culture of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the professionalization of the game industry, following in the footsteps of the industrial, highly collaborative role model of film production and especially that of Hollywood. Since the turn of the century an indie scene is also thriving that in its methods of working orients itself more closely toward the rather artistic role models of indie music and indie film (II-3 A Short History of Game Design). Next, I analyze the role of the Game Designer and the most important fields in the production of digital games (II-4 Areas of Game Design) as well as the standard procedures and processes in game production, including the basic principle of world building. In a special contribution, Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman then provide a primer for the all-important method of playtesting (II-5 Practices of Game Design). Evidently game design is becoming a central discipline of creative production in digital culture. Its role model effect is changing the design of soft- and hardware, processes and experiences.
THINKING GAMES—GAME STUDIES
In contradistinction to the central and still growing importance of games as well as game design in digital culture, Game Studies continue to play only a minor role both in public perception and in academia. Groundbreaking monographs, which understood and interpreted games as a new medium and a new form of expression, were first published in the last decade of the 20th century, roughly 40 years after the development of early forms of digital games in research labs. The institutional establishment of Game Studies as an academic field only began in the early 21st century and parallel to the establishment of the first artistic-technical degree paths for game design. Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian universities were pioneers of this process. In the German speaking world such an establishment is still pending:
“Although individual professors and assistant professors are, by now, beginning to make game studies a focal point, this is still not reflected in the disciplines (e.g. at the Technical University for Visual Arts Braunschweig, the University of Paderborn, and the University of Cologne). Beyond that, both small and large third-party-funded projects as well as (virtual) institutes for computer game research sprung into existence (for instance, at the Center for Art and Mediatechnology in Karlsruhe and at the University for Media in Stuttgart, or the Zurich University of the Arts). Finally, at the beginning of 2014, a novel professorship for game studies was established in the context of the artistic-academic bachelor ‘Digital Games’ at the Cologne Game Lab at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences. However, despite these advances, it is still impossible to speak of any fundamental establishment of the field in the German language-space.”43
The formation of new disciplines is nothing special per se. Since the sciences and humanities followed the example of the industrial division of labor and became specialized, ‘Taylorized,’ perpetual processes of differentiation have led to literally hundreds of new disciplines and fields of study. Only very rarely, however, was it possible to found a new discipline whose subject was a culturally defining medium, i.e., a medium which influences and changes the thinking of a majority of people—their view of the world, their understanding of life, and even of their own identity.
The modern process of establishing new disciplines dealing with defining media started during the first half of the 19th century when the analysis of and reflection on language and literature became academic endeavors. Since the Enlightenment and especially in the German-speaking world, literature was thought to promote what had otherwise proven elusive: cultural identity and political unity. Consequently, literature, which during the 19th and early 20th century influenced public consciousness more than any other medium in most developed regions of the world, separated into nationally defined categories despite cultural exchange. Along similar lines, literary studies grew into national academic disciplines operating in the context of national self-assurance and nationalism.44
Next, a good half-century after the advent of motion pictures—a new medium of artistic expression particularly symptomatic of the industrial mentality45—, the academic study of film was organized and institutionalized. Just as economic factors of movie production encouraged (or coerced) planning and production beyond national borders,46 so too did film studies develop—in line with the supra-national influence, distribution and reception of its material—mostly beyond national boundaries and
