Students Blog

Game designers often have utopian visions while designing, however, they are often faced with technical or organization issues that severely limit their dreams of promoting diversity and game values. Organizational limitations include the loophole where one team member of a small team will make impactful decisions on their own. Ideally, a team of game designers should divide up the work according to their strengths while still making core game decisions collectively. Taylor gave an example of a designer creating busty-looking female characters that the rest of the team disagreed with, and yet they were left to use them. Other organizational problems are small teams working under the pressure of time. Teams that lack proper communication and feedback interaction concerning important game concepts are often too small a team with launching deadlines. Taylor stresses that this pressure makes ideal game designing worse. Technical factors of poor game design include financial, program and real time limitations. Often times, companies are faced with the issue of changing fundamental code when they see the game concept is poorly done. Taylor states that companies are even less so motivated to change the costly code when the reason to change it "does not seem to have a direct and immediate bearing on the revenue of the product." Real time issues apply to online games, especially ones with paid subscriptions. The chances of shutting down a real time game are almost zero.