Thread by @Delafina777

So, regarding this thread:

This is why, if you're a creative in games, it's so important to have interests--and *studies*--outside of games themselves, and why I'm worried about a lot of college game design programs. (Thread)

https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1231677601556520960

(actually, thread after I do a quick stand-up meeting, please hold)

Okay, back.

So, I have, over the course of my career at this point, interviewed probably 80-100 prospective hires for various game creative positions. Most of them were writers/designers, but sometimes I was a Representative From Another Team for artists, sound people, etc.

I've also worked with hundreds of game designers.

None of the really great ones had a game design degree (this is not saying that it's a bad thing, but that there is a caveat there).

One of the greats was a former standup comedian. One was a former architect.

One was a former music producer.

Heck, I co-hosted a podcast with Richard Garfield for a while. And I assure you that in addition to being one of the greatest game designers out there, he is very much a math professor.

And over the past 5 or so years, there have been a lot of candidates from game design/animation/etc. programs.

And--not across the board, but definitely as a trend--when I'd ask them their favorite book, they couldn't name one.

We had a round of candidates for a cinematics director position. So, basically who directs our mini-movies in the game.

Only one of the candidates was able to name a favorite movie director. It was Michael Bay.

We had animation candidates who couldn't name a favorite animator.

We had environmental artists who couldn't name a favorite style of architecture or type of biome.

Their entire field of reference was other games, sometimes anime and manga.

Sometimes movies, but not *critically.* They had trouble articulating what creative choices they liked about particular movies.

And that's a BIG problem.

Because games haven't been around that long. Like, whatever creative field you work in, you should be drawing inspiration from outside it.

But that's doubly true for games, because there's *not that much to draw from.*

Game cinematics haven't really developed their own language yet: they're still mostly cribbing from movies. So when other games are your examples for how to do a cinematic, you're deriving from something that's already derivative.

And--while I'd like to see the visual language of games evolve to be something different than that of movies--at this point, they're mostly just doing what movies do but not as well.

If you're a cinematics director or lead and haven't studied film, that's a problem.

And before I get accused of elitism here, I'm not saying you have to go to college and take film crit classes.

There's a lot of solid film crit going on on YouTube. I don't mean movie reviews. I mean *analysis*.

Here's a great introduction to camera movements and angles. wolfcrow.com/15-essential-c…

Here's a short, easy primer on what we're even talking about when we talk about the "visual language" of film.

videomaker.com/article/c18/18…

So I don't think you have to be formally educated to be good at this stuff. I don't think you need a film degree to be a good cinematics animator or even director.

But I do think you need to be *curious* and you need to be *analytical.*

I mean, that's what I've always screened for in interviews.

Not experience. Not *vocabulary*--knowing the terminology is helpful, but you can learn it on the job and insisting someone know it coming in gatekeeps out a lot of people from different backgrounds.

But what has to be there for me to give someone even a soft yes as a potential hire is that curiosity and that desire to analyze.

If you love a particular game, I need you to be able to tell me *why.* To have thought about the decisions that went into it.

Because you can teach technical skills. You can teach vocabulary. You can teach process.

You can't teach curiosity.

And you can teach *types* of analysis. You can show people different frames for it. You can give them new questions to ask.

But wanting to understand *how* something was made and *why,* wanting to get inside the heads of the people that made it--you can't make someone do that.

When it comes to things like the clothes characters wear in game art--if we're talking video games, though I was initially talking tabletop games, where the art isn't animated and there are no limits on what the clothes can look like--there are limitations to the tech.

And that's a driver in just looking to what's been done before for inspiration.

But that's also a cop-out. Part of being a creative in video games is never having the resources/tech to make what you imagine, and figuring out how to stretch things to get closer.

But it's also that if, as a creative, you're not going down rabbit holes for inspiration from the real world for how your fictional world works, you're not doing your job.

You're there to manifest imagination, and to do that, you need to *feed* it.

As one of my mentors, Jordan Weisman, used to say repeatedly: when you're working in fantasy/scifi, you need to emphasize the familiar so people can appreciate the exotic.

And that's partially about giving people touchstones so they're not completely unmoored in your world, but it's also about you figuring out some of the mundane aspects of how your world works.

If you're designing a city, go down some urban planning rabbitholes.

Hell, make your imagined visuals *concrete.*

When I was working on Pathfinder, we had a country called Nidal. It was described as sophisticated, glittering, yet colorless and ghostly. Super-refined aesthetics, but both cruel and washed out.

So I went and made a fashion Pinterest board from it, because if I ended up having to do the art order for a book on it, and *hadn't* bothered to manifest more than a vague mental image, we were going to end up with faux-medieval, but in gray.

pinterest.com/delafina/nidal/

Something I've tried to emphasize everywhere I've worked is that *everything in your game tells a story.* Down to the menu design and language. And if you're not intentionally telling stories with those elements, you're telling stories unintentionally.

And that often means different elements end up telling stories that are at cross-purposes.

So you don't need an architecture degree. But you do need to go spend an hour reading some basic intros to major *concepts* in architecture...

...so that you know how people actually move through buildings, how we use them, what decisions in building design (both aesthetic and functional) say about the culture that makes the buildings.

Because how buildings are used in your game tells a story.

Same with clothes. Character movement. Combat encounter design.

Music. Lighting.

And again, you don't have to become an expert in all this stuff, but you should *understand the basics*, regardless of what area of creative you work in.

Because first, and most importantly, no creative field in games works in a vacuum. They all connect to and influence each other. So you need to understand your own context.

But second, because it's a courtesy to your colleagues and leads to better collaboration.

Not being a know-it-all, obviously. Your hour or two spent learning about film editing doesn't make you an animator.

But it helps you understand how what they do influences and connects to what YOU do, and lets you produce stuff that's easier for THEM to connect to and use.

It makes what you do better, and helps ensure that everyone's contributing to the game telling the same story.

And often, studying how some form of art that's old or low-tech or very, very different from video games tells stories helps you solve problems in how to do stuff in games. (learning about the construction of shadow puppets saved the day once)

So that's what I've got: get curious.

Go down Pinterest rabbitholes. Read up on stage blocking. If you can get a hold of movie scripts (not transcripts, but shooting scripts), read them. Watch film analysis on YouTube. Find a favorite clothing designer.