There are three guaranteed ways to waste studio development time and money.
The first is to try and make all of a game’s components simultaneously.
The second is to build a large team quickly and then have no real work for them to do for 6 months.
The third is to hire Ernest W. Adams.
This may strike you as a mean thing to say. Why not be more general, and say “design consultants” and spread the blame around? Well there aren’t that many of them, and for seconders because Adams is by far their most prolific and public advocate. Those are good reasons. Mostly, however, it’s because he’s rubbish. And everybody in the industry knows he’s rubbish. But nobody says it publicly due to the general industry practise of omerta.
He writes copious articles and wiggy books about how he thinks game design should be done. He hosts lectures and workshops that teach his methods, and does the GDC circuit. He also works for ihobo (who are also, basically, rubbish). Yet the main problem with Ernest is that he’s never actually designed a major game in his life. His CV includes such wondrous achievements as audio producer on Madden and … something to do with Bullfrog when it became a department of EA that never amounted to anything and … audio producer on Madden…
Ernest is actually a documenter. When hired, he – and other design consultants – mainly produce documents. And charts. And occasionally very large Excel spreadsheets. These documents tend to be very large, they tend to be written in highly academic language and they tend to be somewhat oblique. Their method consists of acting to all intents and purposes as a screenwriter does to the film world.
It’s not completely Ernest’s fault that he’s rubbish. It’s the fault of the studios that hire him assuming that since he talks the talk he must walk the walk. It’s basically because most studios don’t know what a good game designer is or does, and so they just muddle along as best they can. The great open secret of game development is that nobody reads design documents, but that doesn’t stop designers and design consultant writing them. Nobody can tell them what it is that they are supposed to be doing, so they might as well do that.
This method has many problems. It doesn’t embed the designer with the team, nor does it get into actively prototyping. It also assumes a level of design language familiarity among other departments which they don’t generally have, and so most of the work is wasted. Everybody knows that this approach to design generally doesn’t work, by the way, but that doesn’t stop studios from doing it.
What design documents actually do in the industry is make publishers feel happy. That is their sole use. This is because publishing executives are usually morons who know even less about the realities of game development than Ernest does. Since the documents are never read and the development team don’t understand them or the value of spending a week teasing out the consultant’s genius, the whole exercise is a dead loss.
Rule Number Four: Do not hire design consultants. They are not worth the money. Get a junior tester to write the documents instead because it’s cheaper and about the same value in real terms.
January 9, 2007 at 2:53 am |
[quote] This method has many problems. It doesn’t embed the designer with the team, nor does it get into actively prototyping. It also assumes a level of design language familiarity among other departments which they don’t generally have, and so most of the work is wasted. Everybody knows that this approach to design generally doesn’t work, by the way, but that doesn’t stop studios from doing it.
What design documents actually do in the industry is make publishers feel happy. That is their sole use.[/quote]
Ah, there’s no rant I like better than the ‘design by documenting’ rant.
There are more problems than this with a write-everything-down upfront approach, as those documents will eventually be used to strangle a developer if the publisher doesn’t get whatever whim they ask for at that moment. That is, bar none, the best reason to be careful with design docs. An upfront design doc is only useful as a list of goals – a description of how you want your game to feel and taste. After rounds of prototyping and rapid changes, it should feel something like what you described, and will likely resemble little of what you thought it would when you wrote those goalds. As things firm up, you might want to write a more detail oriented doc if other people have to use and understand those systems. Any more than that is design masterbation, or a paper trail that will likely become a noose used to hang you with.
January 9, 2007 at 11:50 am |
I’ve worked on projects with extensive design documentation, and on projects without it. There are merits and demerits to both approaches. Certain games – especially RPGs – absolutely need the big documents. Simpler games like FPS’ don’t necesarily benefit.
I’m curious as to why you are so angry at Ernest. Just picking him out of the dozens of freelance game designers? Or do you have some personal problem with him? It just seems strange. *shrugs* I’ve always enjoyed his talks.
Still this seems to be a ‘hate blog’, so maybe you’re just blowing off steam.
January 10, 2007 at 4:25 pm |
Good design documentation should always be tailored to the end user and not the publishers or marketers. By the sound of it, Ernest is what I like to call a “high tower designer” who sits up high and produces lofty documents and charts that have little to no relevance to the people on the ground who actually make the game. It should also be noted that you and the rest of the development team should have more involvement with the format and content of the documentation being produced by Ernest.
On a sad note, i’ve been on a few projects where publisher approval to greenlight the project only came about as a result of having to produce an impressive looking 200 page design document which was little more than a testament to cut and paste, pretty pictures, and important sounding words. SO, I guess there is a place for it, just not in development.
January 10, 2007 at 7:04 pm |
God knows what your problem with Adams is – I can’t say I disagree or agree with your point about him or consultancy in general (thought I couldn’t be, as they say in England, “arsed” with consultants in general), but your comments about documentation scare me.
You’re correct – it is the sad truth that many teams seldom read design documentation. Does that make the documentation worthless? Or does it make the teams illiterate, fly-by-night yahoos who couldn’t be, as they say in England, “arsed” to do their jobs and implement the work of the designers? There’s nothing wrong with documentation, and everything right – provided your designers aren’t idiots and actually know how to construct useful and logically rational documentation. If you’re about to say they don’t know how to do that – then you’ve never worked with real game designers and I feel for your plight.
But I’ve worked on projects with little or no documentation and I’ve worked on projects with volumes of documentation – and all else being equal (team quality, etc.) – the project with the documentation always turned out higher quality. Similarly I’ve come on to failing projects with no documentation and when we as a team turned those projects around, we always had a volume of documentation at the end that was written during production.
Documentation isn’t a bad thing, but designers that write crappy documents and teams that can’t be arsed to read documents *are.*
January 10, 2007 at 9:20 pm |
Snipehunter – I agree with you. It’s just a shame that good designers working with good teams is a statistically negligable possibility.
One has to make the best of a (typically) bad situation. Where either party are lacking in professionality, the better half has to extend a hand, whether it be designers giving closer attention to coders’ or artists’ work, or whether it’s the team coming together to establish recognized design choices (since a crappy designer may change their mind on a whim – changing a design is not wrong, per say, but knowing when to let the game steer itself, and when to trample potential creep is an art, and mainly gained through hard fought experience). Really, you just have to adapt your approach to the team itself, learning just how much each individual likes/needs to be micromanaged, or how often a designer needs to be ridiculed behind their back.
But you’re right. When documentation gets thrown out, it should be considered an alarm bell, rather than proof of futility. Even if I *know* I’ll be the only one to read a DD after penning it, the act of writing everything down and speccing it out to a reasonable level of detail helps crystallize the ideas. It’s as much a part of a designer’s creative toolkit as it is part of a production method.
January 11, 2007 at 11:51 am |
I won’t comment on the points you made about documentation because it’s a very big and complicated topic and there’s plenty of discussion here already.
As for Ernest Adams however I couldn’t agree more – he is totally useless. As you correctly point out he has done nothing of any worth apart from Audio and Video production on the Madden series. His one actual design role (at Bullfrog / EA) was a farce. The Dungeon Keeper project he was involved with wasn’t canned due to a “strategic decision” (as he says on his website), it was swept under the carpet (along with Adams himself) when EA in the UK realised that he couldn’t design his way out of a paper bag.
Having failed in his own design career he has taken it upon himself to help others design games. Some of the things he has spoken of are well observed and he certainly delivers his thoughts well, but what I have seen is totally lacking in any substance. He enjoys pointing out high level goals of design without backing it up with how to achieve them, and as anyone who actually makes games will understand coming up with lofty ambitions and ideas is easy, but actually making them work is the tricky bit.
My experience (and more notably the experience of my friends who have worked closely with him) of Ernest Adams is, as you astutely point out, that he can “talk the talk”, but not “walk the walk”.
January 12, 2007 at 12:12 am |
I have first hand experience of working with Earnest and I concur. The problem I have is that he represents a type of videogame development that should be left in the past. The braces, beard, Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons, Snowcrash…
I wouldn’t mind, but every time he arrives people turn up to listen. Why?
He’s a nice guy, polite and makes his points well, but he just walks the walk forever.
January 12, 2007 at 12:17 am |
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/author_display.php?author_id=100
shows what has been said already – he can talk. I liked his ‘Bad game designer’ articles, but that’s about it. The first few pages of book he had co-authored irritated me. Talking about books, Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design was awesome.
As for comments above, author’s intention wasn’t to claim that DD is useless; one has to see sarcasm and hyperboles hidden between the lines, although most of what he writes is meant literally. Rule number four mentions documentation – but one must never forget that documentation should serve the purpose (preferably the team, and yes, sometimes just producers), it should not be used dogmatically.
Design consulting sounds like fun. However, design process is not identical to “write documentation” process, which serves only as a tool. Design process is something that started before production and ends after production (releasing patch modifying game balance should be oversaw by designer, who had smoothly blended with the team).
January 12, 2007 at 7:03 pm |
Anonymous jibes at my clothing, no less. How pathetic.
January 12, 2007 at 11:24 pm |
Reading through the posts here, it seems like this is just some bitter kook who can’t get a job in the industry. You can attack people and their credentials, but until you give some of yours, nobody’s gonna care. You talk about “journalists who are too scared for their advertising budgets to actually dig for the truth,” but you’re too scared to put your name to your words. Until you man up and do that, you’ll just be another troll.
January 13, 2007 at 1:06 pm |
You made some really good points. I’m always concerned about this kind of article though, because the very fact that many people (especially publishers) have no clue about what good game design is means they may draw the wrong conclusions. “Oh, no docs at all must mean good design then,” or like that.
You obviously need some documentation to communicate ideas within the design team, as a basic template for creating asset lists and schedules, and in case the lead designer strolls under a bus. (An occupational hazard for those who work with their heads in the clouds.)
What’s really bad – and happens often – is that the designer sits creating bigger and bigger documents that nobody can or will read, and that lead him/her off into Never Never Land when he/she should be engaging with the team, explaining and evangelizing the design, and reacting to ideas and changes that occur daily.
The best experiences I’ve ever had in games are when we’ve been almost winging it (I hasten to add: in the prototyping stage, not in full production!) and the design docs are hastily culled from what goes up on the whiteboard each day. The trouble is that publishers hate that kind of fluid development, which they see as chaotic and outside their control and ability to submit through their layers of bureaucratic process. So we end up with telephone book design docs that attempt, insanely, to lock down one part of the game before moving on to the next and show no understanding of the fact that the spec must be a constantly evolving thing.
Btw it would be a very good thing if all designers started off by writing a short document that said: this is what the player will be doing in the game and this is why it’ll be fun. It’s crazy to have to say in 2007 that you still frequently see designs for how an interface will look, or how resources are collected, or whatever, without anybody having addressed what the damned game is trying to do. The old wood-for-the-trees problem. You’d think the publishers would get bothered by this, but it often seems like they can be fobbed off with the vaguest description about what the game is about, but then they demand specifics about details that shouldn’t be locked down so early.
I’m not a publisher-basher btw. Lots of good, talented people work in publishers – yes they do
The problem is that the system is stupid.
Having said all that, I have to add that framing the comment as a personal attack on Ernest Adams is a cheap shot and a pretty lousy way to get lots of attention. Your arguments are strong enough to stand up for themselves, without stooping to that kind of thing.
January 13, 2007 at 4:08 pm |
I like how Ernest Adams and “Tom S” just try to discredit the writer without any real arguments. Heck, Tom S doesn’t even state his full name and criticizes the anonymity. His logic is faulty, since if nobody cared, Ernest wouldn’t show up – along with dozens other developers who read this.
If author would be troll, he probably wouldn’t be worthy Ernest’s comment, which alone is quite interesting: “Anonymous jibes at my clothing, NO LESS.” However, sadly for him, he didn’t say “no more”. A man so skilled with words should defend himself. Maybe he could tell us that it’s not true that he “mainly produces documents. And charts. And occasionally very large Excel spreadsheets. These documents tend to be very large, they tend to be written in highly academic language”. Maybe he could tell us that he really spends time with the client’s team and speaks to people and ensures that everybody knows what the game should be about and why it should be fun; that he provides support until the game is finished and successful, as game designers should; that he really has some bright ideas that were implemented in games which were fun; that he really does this because of his passion for games.
And not for money.
January 13, 2007 at 5:16 pm |
[...] long time ago. Congratulations. Game industry has entered zombified state. What’s next? Omerta which Truth Blog mentioned will one day end. Wars will become open. They wanted to be as big as Hollywood, they became as [...]
January 14, 2007 at 11:48 am |
Right on the money, Ernest is a fraud. The problem is that nobody calls him on it, too many people are bamboozled by his bullshit. Thats why he keeps yapping at all these industry events and keeps giving designers a bad name. I detest fraudsters.
January 15, 2007 at 5:04 am |
I’m working as a design consultant part-time for an Indian firm, and I think its possible for me to add a lot of value to the project for less than 3% of the budget. When you’re working internationally, you need documentation to centralize the production, but the key is to be as concise as possible, and encapsulate different gameplay quantas (linear levels, or interacting systems) so the relevant content creators can go straight to information thats pertinent to them. I also insist of running things as a Wiki, since updates are a requisite.
The most important thing however, is that the designer stays in tight communication with the producer and evaluates a lot of the assets, and all of the playable content. Its possible to give feedback and conduct an iteration that way.
January 15, 2007 at 1:31 pm |
Analytik – arguing on the Internet is quite useless so I’m not surprised by Ernest’s brief reaction. Additionally, his arguments would hardly be accepted without a concrete proof that he can walk the walk (that is a published game illustrating his design skills).
January 17, 2007 at 10:03 am |
People actually hire Ernest Adams? Jesus.
January 17, 2007 at 9:34 pm |
WoW, I was dropped into this subject by an accident, but I confirm that the marketing department needs a “phonebook style” thick bullshit documentation that the developers can not use. But the marketing people will only spit the money if they see the report on the results, the bulky documentation.
So, Ernest Adams would be useful barrier interchange, a person that can assure that the producer will invest and on the other side that the developers will not be bothered by investor asking questions that the developers can not understand. It will be useful if it stays like that.
Only very little top-managers can appreciate research and development, like Louis Gerstner did, so thebuerocrats need reports on development and reports on proceedings and reports on reports.
January 17, 2007 at 9:42 pm |
to add: do not hide before the fact that the only process which generates money are the sales – which, coincidentally – the marketing is RESPONSIBLE for.
Yes, marketing evil are necessary people. (and vice versa)
January 18, 2007 at 8:15 pm |
Good designers are hard to come by: yes.
And that Ernest stuff – anyone even vaguely aware of the EA/Bullfrog fiascos knows he stumbled in and sunk a couple of otherwise promising prototypes.
I wish there was a prerequisite for games writers to actually demonstrate ability and substance before getting such wide press.
January 19, 2007 at 5:16 pm |
As a Project Manager and one who authors several of these documents throughout the development lifecycle, I have to separate the importance of Ernest versus the importance of project documentation.
The design document makes certain the requirements as stated in the charter/proposal are met, while nailing the scope of the project. Scope defines resources and timelines; resources and timelines define costs, marketing plans, etc. It also provides the publishers metrics the developer will be measured against, which in turn relates to any contractual obligations or extra compensation to which the developer is entitled.
This article is a good read because it has spawned good conversation, but I think the author is a little removed for what the design document is intended. Developers are not the audience for a design document. Design documents are just one cog in the life cycle – design docs beget technical docs, and I think the author had to work directly from the design document rather than having one speaking to his audience. This is a problem with the process more so than the document itself. And, just to add, I’ve never met a developer who has understood the importance of documentation. A developer just wants to code, which is what they do, and frequently the only thing they know how. That is why we have layers of hierarchy, for people to act as liaisons between multiple tiers.
I’ve heard Adams speak at conferences, and I admit his books are better than his in-person ramblings. But I can’t vouch for his professional competency. I do know, however, I respect someone like Warren Spector, or the Bioware doctors much, much more.
February 6, 2007 at 9:37 am |
The grim reality is self promotion is the real key to success in this industry. The more you write the less people care about what you have (not) done. Several notable people have less than impressive credit lists. But, if you write — either a book or a regular column on Gamasutra — you get the kudos. Funny someone mentioned Raph Koster above because he is another person who can talk the talk but not walk the walk. How do you mess up a funded Star Wars MMORPG that bad after “years of experience?”
February 14, 2007 at 10:43 am |
I think Gandalf has the best line about Adams.
‘Silly little Hobbits’
February 22, 2007 at 6:04 pm |
I also agree with the comments on Ernest, who to me, comes across as a a 1st rate writer/3rd rate designer who has done nothing. Kind of like Raph Koster…how can anyone fail upward so spectacularly? Those who can’t design, write articles for Gamasutra I guess.
Heya Snipehunter, answer my IMs one of these days, eh?
I disagree that design documentation is useless or an exercise in futility. I think, at minimum, it helps the designer sharpen his/her ideas.
February 22, 2007 at 8:58 pm |
>>
This is a moronic statement. Raph’s work with UO was fantastic and SWG is still running now isn’t it? It had its share of problems but in the end he went gold and launched a fairly successful MMO with solid revenue and subscriber numbers at the outset.
Raph has had more success on every project hes been a part of than more designers will ever have, so to claim he only ‘walks the walk’ is drivel.
July 8, 2007 at 6:41 am |
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August 23, 2007 at 5:18 pm |
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August 23, 2007 at 9:58 pm |
Yeah what happened to the updates? Did you run out of ideas, or did you get sued?
October 8, 2007 at 4:56 am |
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December 16, 2007 at 3:02 am |
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
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February 5, 2008 at 3:52 am |
design documentation is part of the cycle, you can’t avoid it.
i won’t say that it’s useful for every involved party, but it sure benefit some.
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June 2, 2008 at 10:14 pm |
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October 28, 2008 at 3:51 pm |
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May 26, 2009 at 4:23 am |
Ernest Adams is a great faker. He is extremely eloquent yet often rude.
he is not unlike a cow bird…taking from others and taking credit for what they have done. As someone else said, no one else seems to call him on on it..maybe it’s because the frauds are too long and too old to mention.
He thinks that he’s very popular–but not with people who’ve actually worked with him at Electronic Arts–
at EA he used the facilities, utilities and personnel to further the cause of the CGDC and CGC while denying the whole time that he was involved.
most days he was on the phone talking about the conference instead of working on EA projects-
Ernest is a huge laughing stock among his actual co workers–co workers who worked with him at EA where he has built a lot of his fake reputation. He’s the epitome of lazy, credit taking, yet extremely intelligent ’sounding’ bull shit artists. He’s a bit dangerous that way–if a person actually wants to pay him good money for his (completely) alleged “expertise”. He’s a philosophy major..so he knows how to use the language.
At EA, he often complained about a project (like Madden or other -as he called them-”testosterone filled fluff”–)but now I see he takes credit for managing whole aspects of the video production, script, etc.
He was more interested in his failed script of “Wild Fire”
it’s unbelievable the things he claims credit for and how
no one calls him on it–
and even I, am not using my real name..as I don’t want to deal with
the back lash…yet I want to at least say what others are thinking–
Get away from Ernest –unless you just want an engaging conversationalist–he’s not credible—just lovable IF you’re not paying him and have no one else or nothing else to kill time with.