A prominent game designer recently said in a Dice Exploder thread, that breaking down design paradigms before you design games is self-limiting and unproductive. This was interpreted by many as “you don’t need to read or play a lot of games before you start designing games”, which is both true and not true. I thought I’d talk about how it is and isn’t true.

If you want to design games, you have to do the work of designing games. Lots of bad, dichotomous discourse comes from this advice, but it’s like any art: You just have to make it to get better and find your voice. But also, like all art: You’re going to be bad at it, initially. This is part of the process. You have to do the work of bad design to get to the work of good design. Don’t let anything stop you from your practice. And at the same time, you have to do the work of learning about game design. Do these things while you continue to design games.

The first thing you have to do to learn about game design is read a range of games. You need to get to know what has been designed before. There are at least 50 years of game design before now: Loads of clever people doing clever things. You will be better if you know about them, and have thought about them. You’ll be inspired by their beauty and by their flaws. Read designers: Designers with a long catalogue have been in conversation with themselves, and you get to listen in. It’s illuminating and it will help you grow. Read a range of games!

The second thing is to play. You can read more games than you can play (or at least most of us can), so your reading also acts as browsing the catalogue. Which games will you actually bring to table? I suggest the ones that make least amount of sense to you. Try to play as well as run, but games are often as much about how the book acts at the table as how they read. If you can, play the same game at different tables, because it’ll help you internalise the fact that every game you read comes to the table completely differently with a different group. If you can’t, actual plays can substitute, or complement. Seeing people play and run games gives you insight into the extent of a designers power over the play.

The third thing you need to do is to start learning the extra stuff you need to (sadly) do to make a game. Art, layout, information design and editing in particular, are important parts of your game design. They are game design. You can collaborate with people or do it yourself, but collaboration is a skill in and of itself that you have to learn, and thinking in terms of art, information design and layout is something your games will benefit from incorporating into your thought processes, even if other people are working with you. None of it is optional as part of your game design development. Your game design will be better once you embrace that game design is multimodal, not just rules and words.

The important point here, is that yes, if you’re a new game designer, just make games. Don’t wait until you’ve read every game: You never will. Don’t wait until you’ve played every game: You never will. Don’t wait until you’ve can make or afford art, layout, marketing, editing, printing, or any of that stuff. Just make your game. But also: Read games widely, play games broadly, and practice, research, grow.

Don’t wait to create, and don’t wait to learn.

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