Genesis of a game design, and the "schools" of design methodolgy

If there is one question I need to find the answer to before I can be comfortable working in development again, its this: what is the basis of a good game design? Where does one start, and what progression does one take?

From my perspective, it seems many designers subscribe to what I would refer to as the "Cool Stuff Happens" school of game design. They begin with an idea of something happening on-screen, and work from there. This would be the attitude most people begin with when tranistioning into the industry - hence the slew of "you play a grizzled new york cop/toughened space marine/hardened mafia boss" designs. The game mechanics are built around this - "he steals a car to escape, so we need a driving mechanic" etc.

The problem with this attitude is that it skips almost everything that makes interactivity unique as a genre - it bolts game mechanics on to a narrative-based, mostly-visual experience, and as such stands little to no chance of innovating in those mechanics, or even ensuring that those mechanics are tailored to the overall experience of the game.

A more sensible approach, and one I imagine plenty designers use, is to come up with a new gameplay mechanic and build a gameplay experience to surround it. This is an interesting way of working, but I have to question its ability to truly capture the potential of our interactive digital medium as a whole. It could be that a game built around one simple mechanic becomes very gimmicky. This is a very old-fashioned way of working. Board games are often built around a single gameplay mechanic, and to produce a game in a similar manner would seem to imply that what we are striving for is little more than a fancy, glitzy board game.

The school of design I would like to experiment with would be that of beginning with an overall "feeling" I wish the player to have from their experience and finding ways to leverage that experience onto the player using gameplay mechanics. I do fear that this could lead to too much time spent "borrowing" existing gameplay mechanics, but I feel that this is the system that would unlock the most of gaming's true potential, and achieve more ludo-narrative resonance (a subject which I really must write more on in the future).

Looking at existing games in this context, it is interesting to see how they stack up.

The Grand Theft Auto series seems to mostly have been based on giving the player an experience of complete, unadulterated freedom. Much like sitting a small child on a large play mat marked like a city (such as the one I had as a small child) and giving them toy cars to play with (as my parents did), the first thing players did was to begin moving the cars at high speed, smashing them into one another, and tearing up the city in a most unrealistic manner (as I did, complete with brrrrmmm noises - both when I was a small child with the play mat, and as a young adult playing GTA for the first time). This, I feel, is why people are often so torn on the subject of GTA IV - the game aimed to leverage the same mechanics to tell a slow, structured tale, which felt at odds with the experience those mechanics were tailored to deliver.

The term "survival horror" would imply that Resident Evil 4 was attempting to create a sense of tension and panic within the gamer, and the gameplay mechanics seem to support this - an awkward, vision-restricting camera might seem like an odd choice, but it kept me wondering about what was just out of my view. Restrictive ammunition in a game so heavy on its combat mechanic might seem like a bad choice, but it made me think carefully about every shot I took. What I am curious about, however, is why "survival horror" games have a combat mechanic at all. That seems at odds with the experience - if the experience is intended to be one of creeping fear, why let the player fight back at all? Surely conquering an enemy quels fear?

I believe that, by starting a game design from the more esoteric angle of the "feel" of a player's experience, we can achieve far more in gameplay than we could by making cool stuff happen on screen. Of course, I appreciate that we work in a competitive industry that is very much about shifting units from store shelves - and you can't always encapsulate a player experience on the back of a game box. I'm also aware that we have to always be sure to keep the player experience vague, and design from an overall "feel" perspective rather than direct the player's actions and behaviour. After all:

"[Games] are at their best when they say something about the player, not the designer." - Will Spector

But if handled properly, a game design beginning from the overall "feel" of a player experience could offer a chance to innovate and adapt gameplay mechanics to our needs, and create a deeper and more meaningful experience for players.