Celia Wagar's CritPoints

There are 4 categories of knowledge: Known Knowns, Unknown Knowns, Known Unknowns, and Unknown Unknowns.

When you are a subject matter expert on something, like a competitive game, or coding, or a lawyer, doctor, or scientist, your knowledge is a known known. You know how much there is to know about the subject, and you are aware of exactly what parts of that subject you have in memory. This is a Known Known.

When you are an experienced professional, like a painter or an athlete, you have an intuitive understanding of your craft that you can’t necessarily explain to other people. You know these things from practicing them, but you aren’t even aware of what has become habit for you. This is an Unknown Known.

When you are a student, being taught by someone who has more knowledge than you, your teacher is able to show you all the things you have yet to learn. You don’t have this knowledge yet, but you know it is out there. This is a Known Unknown.

When you are blissfully ignorant and have no idea that a subject even exists you don’t consider what might even be out there. You don’t know about it, and you aren’t even aware what you’re missing. This is an Unknown Unknown.

Game design is an Unknown Unknown. People don’t know that they don’t know. There is precious little information on game design that exists out on the internet, in published books, or taught in college courses. Instead, people tend to stick to what can be definitively taught, which is game development rather than game design. I’ve seen some people dismiss game design as something that’s just a matter of allocating enough iteration time and budget to a particular part of a game.

For many industry professionals, people writing books on game design, and teaching university classes, game design is an Unknown Known. These people have crystalized intelligence on game design, a compilation of just-so stories learned from experience. Where they have more fluid intelligence on game design, they can’t articulate it, because they don’t have inventory of all the things that they know.

People know how to code. People know how to make visual and written art assets. People know how to use the game engines that we’ve developed. People know their experiences of designing games. Imagining something outside of these things is a lot harder. The best game design education that colleges can currently provide to students is, “Here’s someone who worked on games that can tell you about their experiences, now make your own game and learn from that process.” (Making your own games is still a completely essential part of the process of getting anywhere in the games industry of course, so it would be a lot worse if colleges didn’t do at least this)

So why is this? The most likely cause is that the video games industry goes through a round of layoffs every 2 years, so talent doesn’t stick around, so that design experience doesn’t accumulate, and design knowledge is a bunch of “just-so” stories rather than an overarching system of values and methodologies for designing games to fulfill a specific purpose. Our talent doesn’t get the chance to grow and develop.

In contrast, we can see other game design spaces where people are allowed to have longer and more stable careers that they’re more capable of developing and articulating a coherent philosophy of design, such as Magic the Gathering. Mark Rosewater has written SO SO SO MUCH about how MTG is designed. He regularly podcasts breakdowns of their goals and struggles for each set, and the direction of the game overall, as well as what specific mechanics and tunings for creatures are intended to accomplish and what effect that has in the broader scheme of the set and game. It’s no coincidence that so many people that are highly involved in the MTG go on to become competent game designers. When you speak to the players of MTG, there is an incredible amount of design literacy present. They know the color pie. They know why things are costed the way they are. They know specific power and toughness breakpoints that matter.

Another great example is Masahiro Sakurai, who sunk an incredible amount of his own time and money into producing as comprehensive a guide to video game design and production as he could. I don’t always agree with Sakurai’s direction for the games he makes, but I firmly believe that he is a game design genius with an encyclopedic and meticulous knowledge of how a mechanic can be implemented, and the systemic relationships between mechanics, which is what makes his games feel so polished and rich.

In other mediums of art, we can see coherent theories that explain the tools of the medium, such as the 12 principles of animation for animators, or the various types of film theory for film-makers. You can sit down and learn the rules of perspective, or some guidelines for composition. You can learn color theory and construction. But the equivalents to these for game design either haven’t been articulated yet, or are buried in books that no one reads. I believe that all the lessons we need to learn about games are out there already, contained in the games themselves or scattered across articles, books, and GDC talks, but extracting those lessons into understandable repeatable methods and developing frameworks that give us insight into designing new and unique games purposefully is still not a part of the mainstream discourse, or even college studies in game design.

After teaching the Mastering Game Mechanics bootcamp for the 3rd time, one of the most frequent pieces of feedback we got was that the course helped people go from designing as just vague hunches or intuition to designing confidently with clear goals and a framework for making decisions. We helped them develop a fluid intelligence for game design. For these students (many of whom were fresh out of college, but some were also working professionals or senior designers), we moved this subject from an Unknown Unknown to a Known Unknown. In the long run, I hope to move the whole subject from an Unknown Unknown, lurking outside of human knowledge, to a Known Known, something thoroughly understood that people can speak confidently on, and ideally establish a wider game design literacy across everyone who experiences games.

This has been my mission for as long as I have been writing, and I’m beyond proud to be making headway on my goal with the incredible team at Game Design Skills.