As contradictory as it is to read analogue, linear books about a medium that is essentially experiential and interactive, in MEDS/CMPU 389: Design, Production and Critique of Video Games, we’ve started with just that.    Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop and Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design, two intimidatingly thick tomes about the process of game design, are nevertheless excellent handbooks for beginning the creative process. Fullerton’s in particular elaborates on a “playcentric design process,” or, as she explains it, “continually keeping the player experience in mind and testing the gameplay with target players through every phase of development” (10).

Though we are only a week into the course, I have already found the “playcentric design process” to be a helpful way of organizing creative thoughts about video games. Both Fullerton and Schell use abstract, mechanical terminology to break down the creative process, thereby letting readers bring their own ideas to the format they provide.

However, we had one other reading assignment in the first week besides Fullerton and Schell: the first two short chapters of How to Do Things with Video Games by Georgia Tech professor and game theorist Ian Bogost.

Bogost’s book took a different approach than Schell and Fullerton.  He speaks as a game designer unconcerned with monetizing games by appealing to a wide audience. While Fullerton encourages game designers to always have their players–essentially, their buyers–at the forefront of their minds, Bogost’s conceptualization of games ” incorporates another feature of art more broadly: the pursuit of a particular truth irrespective of the demands of reception or sales. The sense that the artifact has something to relate and will not relent until that thing is expressed, rather than an experience to be optimized, is at work here” (17).

All three of these writers avoid using the word “art,” a controversial term in the world of video games. Instead, the word ‘aesthetic’ appears with far more frequency. But Fullerton and Schell employ a definition quite different than Bogost’s. To them, aesthetics are the emotions and reactions that a game provokes in a player: excitement, empowerment, frustration, awe, fear, anxiety, joy.

Bogost’s notion of aesthetics implies not  “what emotions are we trying to draw from the player?”  but “with what elements will we imbue this game world?”   Here, aesthetics are not designed to evoke specific emotions–they are elements that connect the player with the game world, the means by which an emotional and even empathic connection is forged.  Bogost’s  definition encompasses the beautiful art styles of Flower and El Shaddai, the proceduralist mechanics and minimalist art of Braid and Passage, and the powerful emotions of Hush and Darfur is Dying.

Fullerton and Schell speak from within “The Industry, approaching game design in terms of production.   Bogost speaks from without; , though he begins the book by rejecting the eternal “Are Games Art???” debate, treats his subjects as exactly that. His words hold the games he discusses like one would hold an Easter egg, or a dried flower: carefully, respectfully, intimately.

Fullerton offers a method of production, a tried-and-true means of creating good games. Bogost suggests that designers start not from the desire to entertain, but from the desire to craft a world as delicate and as beautiful as an egg.

At the last meeting of my Media Studies senior seminar last week, the class talked about songs that evoked a sense of nostalgia.  We played the songs on our laptops via YouTube and talked about the memories attached to the music, and as we discussed the links between memory and music, I began to think of video game music.

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