How Good Design Reveals a Game

How much technology and how much design goes into a computer game? Jirka Dell´Oro-Friedl, games expert and professor at Furtwangen University, knows the answer. In our interview, he talks about what distinguishes good game design, the future prospects for current graduates and the must-have game that should be under the tree this Christmas.

You’re a games expert and have won the German Computer Game Award several times – what triggered your fascination with gaming?

As a secondary school pupil at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, I spent a lot of money and time in video game arcades. I found it utterly fascinating to compete against machines that responded to my actions with behaviour patterns that seemed pretty complex and in turn provoked a reaction from me. Those early video games look quite simple to us today but they frequently offered a compelling flow experience – you paid for the release of endorphins, coin by coin.

It was always a social event back then too, though, as I was hardly ever on my own; I was part of a group of like-minded people. We were always working out new ways to crack the high scores in various games. The high score lists were often saved for days and weeks on these publicly accessible machines, so you invariably competed against other groups and players whom you had never met personally. Those are aspects that play a key role in social games nowadays.

Can you still remember your first game?

I can’t remember the first computer game I played – it was probably Pong. But I do remember my first attempt at developing games. I’d been allowed to have a go on a computer belonging to a friend’s father, a VC-20 (predecessor of the C64). After the first few lines of BASIC code and the first pixels it generated, I was fascinated, not only by playing games but by creating them, and I’m still hooked 30 years later. It’s the ultimate game for me and it’s great to see that a current strand of game development focuses on giving players this very experience.

Game-based learning, serious games and classic learning software: why aren’t these methods, approaches and tools routinely used in academic and vocational education and training yet?

Making them good enough so that users accept them and succeed in learning with them is a challenging task which only a few individuals have managed to achieve up to now. Only then will these methods be economically viable. A key aspect of my work at the University of Furtwangen focuses on nurturing students who can drive forward developments in this field. I’ve been able to gain a lot of experience in this sector with EnterTrain Software GmbH, a company I founded in 1997 under the motto “learning by playing”. Not only have our products been recognised with the German Computer Game Award, they have also received the Educational Media Award and several educational media medals from the Society for Pedagogy and Information.

You mainly teach game design at the University of Furtwangen. What is the relationship between computer science and design?

The way I see it, certain areas of computer science are a fundamental requirement for developing computer games, particularly software design and programming. While games designers don’t necessarily need to be able to program an entire game, they do need to have a good understanding of how games logic is implemented so they can produce a workable design. Accordingly, I’ve developed a series of teaching activities that build on each other, culminating in a game design event. Here students are not just asked to produce a design but also to turn their design into a prototype and draw insights from it, which they then incorporate back into their design. Alongside knowledge of computer science, this requires skills in media design, 3D modelling, mathematics, narration, audio and video production and team and project management, which are taught by my various colleagues in the Digital Media faculty.

What constitutes good game design?

There are many factors, each of which can be weighted very differently. But it can be summarised in one sentence by saying that a game fully reveals itself to the player through good game design before he or she reaches the end of the game.

What key qualities and abilities should your students have?

They should be able to work in a structured way, be interested in many different things, possess lots of initiative, enjoy developing games so much that working into the night every so often is a pleasure, have an open mind, be able to work in a team and be able to challenge themselves and their work and examine it critically.

What are future prospects like for graduates in the games industry at the moment?

Employees are needed in all areas of the games industry. The number of applicants is often quite high, though. So it’s important that graduates have actually produced something, which is one reason why the work on developing functioning prototypes is so important to me.

Where do you see niches or potential for growth?

Previously, computer games only interested a very small minority and the technology involved meant they were only accessible to a few people. In recent years we’ve seen how technology is finding its way into our lives more and more, and digital games have also become an accepted medium enjoyed by young and old alike. At the same time, more and more work is being done on new hardware such as the Wii, which has attracted new audiences. Kinect also has a lot of interesting potential. In Furtwangen, we have the ability to make our own contribution in this area through interdisciplinary cooperation, for example with the faculties of Mechanical Engineering and Computer & Electrical Engineering, and also to unlock new growth potential on the hardware side. At the same time, we will continue to see new game concepts on established hardware platforms.

In which other industries are your students in demand?

My own students will be able to find openings in all fields of media design, and in software development. For the Digital Media faculty as a whole, graduates have a much wider array of options.

Christmas is less than six months away. What game needs to be invented in time to go under the Christmas tree?

It’s already been invented but still needs to be finished: the open-world game Minecraft.