Game Design is Multidisciplinary: A True and a Lie
Thinking about how we think about games
You’re playing a game. Something you really enjoy. You’ve been trying to get your friends to join you but find yourself struggling to explain to them what’s so great about it—or even what kind of game it is. To constrain your favourite game within a set genre or pithy label feels too restrictive.
Take Slay the Spire. It’s nominally a roguelike video game (or a roguelite, depending on whom you ask) where you work your way through different levels, fight monsters using turn-based strategies and, as is the norm of the genre, die and respawn a lot. Yet, Slay the Spire’s card-based combat system and character (i.e., deck) growth also reflects its creators’ passion for tabletop card games like Android: Netrunner.
The multidisciplinary nature of game design might give an air of magic or mystique to creators. Yet, having worked with people from varied backgrounds (artists, chemists, engineers, even a librarian—most without formal design training) for playtests and game production, what I’ve realised is that we’re all wired to riff off and synthesise ideas from disparate fields and genres.
The truth of multidisciplinary game design
Let’s look at another game, the much-discussed Hades. It features polished action-RPG combat in a roguelite framework, coupled with a gripping story. There are as many who play it for said story as those who do for the frenetic battling. Yet to just call it a “story-game” or an ARPG feels wrong. Hades, like Slay the Spire, refuses to remain bound to a single genre.
If games, especially good games, are so definitionally elusive, then it should not surprise us that their development is equally multidisciplinary. This seems like an obvious truth.
To be precise, not only are games multi-genre, the types of thinking required to produce them are multidisciplinary—art, programming, project management, design, etc. And to further clarify this point, it’s worth recognising that, beyond technical skill sets, what’s really required is multiple ways of thinking.
A good game writer, for instance, is not measured merely on their ability to churn out copy, but instead on how they use their unique perspective on the role of narrative (as mainly expressed through text) to enrich their fellow developers.
This is a skill and something that goes into the makeup of a studio’s unique design DNA. Supergiant Game’s (the developers of Hades) previous titles Transistor and Bastion also reflect and, hence, reinforce, their emphasis on gameplay-driven-storytelling.
In my own design work at the indie board game studio Aerie Games, I tend to focus on player psychology. This reflects my current pursuit of a degree in the field. One of my teammates, a robotics engineer, on the other hand, focuses on game systems. What is crucial in our game development process is the way each of us draws strength from each other, through a mutual appreciation of multidisciplinary game design.
Similarly, a game artist once told me that he saw his job not as asset creation but as creating inspiration for his team—a piece of digital art, in his eyes, was something capable of generating new ideas and conversations. For him, each piece he made existed not just in the visual medium but also in the design and narrative fields.
In other words: Does good art lead to good mechanics and story? Or vice versa? The answer, of course, is that most processes in game development are bidirectional. Art inspires mechanics which inspires story which inspires art.
What a multidisciplinary approach gives you is not just access to different skill sets. (If that’s all you wanted, you might as well outsource all the labour you need for a game.) Instead, it equips you with multiple conceptual toolsets (aesthetics, reward and motivation systems, user engagement, etc) to consider concurrently when creating novel game experiences.
Peering deeper, what we find, in fact, is that the multidisciplinary nature of good games extends not just to their genre or their development, but to the very essence of gameplay. Try to break a game down to its constituent elements and you find that it becomes impossible to distinguish what field a given part comes from.
For instance, take the user interface of Papers Please. A game about being a border guard in a dystopian state, its grey-and-grimy interface is simultaneously art, narrative worldbuilding, and play—as you check documents, stamp passports and operate your screening booth, you are experiencing, sometimes without conscious awareness, the workings of multiple fields of design.
And here is where we come to see just how democratic and inclusive such an experience is, revealing the secret to—and hence the lie behind—our initial assertion that game design is multidisciplinary.
The lie of multidisciplinary game design
While I have championed game design’s multidisciplinary approach, the different lenses and bodies of knowledge that go into a game are in fact centred on a simple thing anyone can relate to: people and their experiences.
People are complex and varied. Hence, the tools with which we present and unpack their experiences need to be multidisciplinary. Whether it’s aesthetics, storytelling or ludology, every discipline in game development can be seen to be tied to this basic principle.
Be it giving players a sense of wonder and exploration in Zelda, nostalgic melancholy in Life is Strange, or mastery and flow in Guitar Hero, every game can be broken down into a prepackaged bundle of intended human experience.
All the technical workings of production, after all, are meant to go beyond the pushing of buttons and manoeuvring of meeples. A game matters because of the experience it creates for its players, not the positions of tokens on a board or pixels on a screen.
Game design might be multidisciplinary insofar as the path each designer takes is idiosyncratic, reflecting their unique skill set and perspective. Every path, though, ultimately converges in the goal of crafting a singular and memorable experience.
A skillful designer, then, should be equally comfortable discussing art direction as they are mechanics and narratives. How is an initiate meant to master such a diverse approach? The truth is that game design, precisely because of its multidisciplinary nature, is uniquely welcoming.
Your perspective—unique and novel as it is—will contribute to the rich design thinking that is needed in game development, whether you are just a playtester or intimately involved in a game’s design
Every fresh take feeds into the eventual synthesis of ideas. Guided by an ultimate interest in experience, your lens on the world becomes a new potential solution, the spark for a better and richer game.
Do you have a game project that requires multidisciplinary work? Check out Playlogue’s art, editorial, design and production services here!
Russell is the co-founder of The Aerie Games, an indie board game studio. Their first game Kawa [DiceTower review] captures the experience of a relaxed afternoon by the riverside. Having worked in and alongside other small indie teams, he loves the energy and excitement that comes with making games.
