Becoming a Video Game Designer

Daniel Noah Halpern

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781982137939
• eBook ISBN: 9781982137946
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

A revealing guide to a career as a video game designer written by acclaimed journalist Daniel Noah Halpern and based on the real-life experiences of legendary designer Tom Cadwell of Riot Games—required reading for anyone considering a path to this profession. Becoming a Video Game Designer takes you behind the scenes to find out what it's really like, and what it really takes, to become a video game designer. Gaming is a $138 billion-dollar entertainment industry, and designers are the beating heart. Long-form journalist Daniel Noah Halpern shadows top video game designer Tom Cadwell to show how this dream job becomes a reality. Cadwell is head of design at Riot Games, the company behind award-winning blockbuster games like League of Legends, which has an active user base of 111 million players. Creating a massive multiplayer online game takes years of visionary R&D—it is a blend of art and science. It is also big business. Learn the ins and the outs of the job from Cadwell as well as other designers, including Brendon Chung, acclaimed founder of Blendo Games. Successful designers must be creative decision makers and also engineers and collaborators. Gain professional wisdom by following Tom's path to prominence, from his start as a passionate gamer to becoming one of the most revered designers in the business.

1 THE UNIVERSE, ALSO KNOWN AS THE GAME

Here are three moments, from three universes:

First: the Unkillable Demon King has taken the form of Orianna, the Lady of Clockwork, for battle. He knows they’ve won when he traps Kuro for his partner’s backdoor gank. It’s all over once they kill Baron and wipe the other team out of the top lane. Afterward, he eats a chocolate bar. This is 2016, or no time at all.

Then: Poncho jacks in after picking up the contract. Once she’s in the matrix, on the boat, she lowers the railing, deploys a launcher, launches herself to the airship. Three minutes through the door to do the job. At the elevator shaft she gets out the autocase, deck, and CCTV module, punches in “setpos 699-32-206” to aim the autocase, exits the aimbot, and enters the blink. The trunkline’s in the Psychocortical Practice Room, whatever that is; she connects the phone to the deck, downloads it, scrams. It’s only later, after she’s jumped back to the Farfig, that she realizes she’s forgotten to grab the autocase, left it behind. She’s getting older, a little tired. This is 1980, or no time at all.

And finally: 14.Bxe7 Qb6 15.Bc4 Nxc3 16.Bc5 Rfe8+ 17.Kf1 Be6!! That was, almost indisputably, 1956.

You are forgiven if you do not know where you are. Only with time will a universe teach you to navigate inside its borders.

The first universe you are observing is the world of Runeterra. Runeterra is the setting for League of Legends, which, in what is often referred to as the real world, is a tremendously popular free-to-play video game. League of Legends requires you to choose a “champion” as your digital proxy and then team up with four other players in order to kill five opponents, as well as avoid or defeat other murderous obstacles, all within a fantasy realm of dragons and swords and magic fireballs. This particular instant is split in two, half taking place in Runeterra and half back here on earth: the moment of victory by this world’s most famous professional League of Legends player, a young South Korean named Lee Sang-hyeok, also known as Faker, also known as the Unkillable Demon King, in the semifinals of the e-sports 2016 League of Legends World Championship.

The second universe begins in a place called Nuevos Aires and continues into a virtual reality within it. This is the video game Quadrilateral Cowboy, a cyberpunk hacking game that asks you to commit a series of heists on contract, using a computer you build to enter a matrix within the matrix—a digital world within its digital world. Your exploits begin on New Year’s Eve as 1979 recedes and the ’80s approach, somewhere within the early morning of cyberspace. You—as Poncho—get your assignment, case the job, log on with your portable deck and launcher and lantern, and enter the cyberspatial target. You have two friends and colleagues, Lou and Maisy; you have a square head and blue hair and a portable Vinylman to play your favorite records; you have three seconds to disarm the lasers and sneak in.

The third universe isn’t a universe at all, really. It’s chess. This is the moment a thirteen-year-old Bobby Fischer sacrificed his queen to his opponent, Donald Byrne, then one of the top-rated adult players in the country, a shocking and brilliant move that led Fischer to victory and to the beginning of his legend.

That is the experience of beginning to play a new game: What is this place? How does it work? What is the language they speak here? Gank, blink, check. Oh! He took my pawn! Oh look, I can fly if I eat the green thing. Oh look, if I hit the space bar I jump up. Oh, see that, I—wait, how did I die?

The gods and minor divinities who make these universes have many names, but the ones who choose how the universe, also known as the game, will work are game designers. How does the rook move, can you launch yourself through space, and, wait, how do you stop? Do you remain invisible when you hide in the weeds, and can you try to jump out to kill another champion from behind? Game designers invent the things you can do in games, and they decide what you can’t. They decide whether you can castle your king and rook just to the left, or both to the left and the right; whether you can pick up a vase and break the window of a doorless room you’ve been stuck in for too long. They create and adjust the rules of a universe you’ve chosen to enter. They decide if you can fly or not. They decide if you can talk to your friends or if you float around deaf and mute. They decide that you must murder an innocent little girl if you want the slug that lives inside her and which will give you great power to defeat your enemies. They decide that you cannot pass, that you cannot understand, that you cannot know, that you must die here, in this place. But they also decide that you can—you can understand, you can know. They make a door just for you and refuse to let you enter by it. They make a hole for you to jump through. They’re the reason so many people come here to live. That is, to play.

---

It wasn’t so long ago that most adult Americans considered video games nothing more than toys for children, time-wasters. Many still do, perhaps. Mindless, worthless, silly. Marginal to culture, or even entirely outside it. Corrosions to the social fabric. Incitements to carnage, instructions for nihilism. Violent delights with violent ends.

While the country was trying to decide whether video games represented something utterly unimportant or instead the utter and total destruction of society, something happened. Video games began to leave other entertainments behind. They started to make money—more money than books, music, or movies. They became the most popular and lucrative entertainment category in the country. They started to innovate—to use the form and technology of games to do things that other entertainment had never done before. They became something new.

Creating a video game requires a variety of skills, and so this growth, and this innovation, has a host of authors. Founders, visionaries; programmers and artists and writers; marketers and salespeople and quality testers and so on. But the technology and the art, the storytelling and the coding, exist outside of games: in dishwashers and phones and thermostats, in museums and galleries, in books and television shows. What doesn’t exist outside of games are games. That is: how the game works; what makes it a game. Above all, perhaps, what a new game needs are rules. Structures. Goals and objectives. How will it work? What are you trying to do when you play it? Where are you trying to go? What’s stopping you? What’s helping you? How do you navigate?

A video game designer answers these questions. A designer might choose whether you get two seconds or two minutes to complete a task. Or choose whether the rules of quantum mechanics apply in this new universe. Is there gravity here? Does gravity work the same way here as in our world? Should you have more teammates than enemies? Should you be able to detonate a nuclear weapon? Should you be able to run faster than the speed of sound? How do you win? How do you lose? Should you turn into a green walrus if you eat the red chickens? Should you be a good goose or a bad goose?

What would be more fun? This—or that? That—or this?

2 ACCUMULATING THE FACT

Tom Cadwell is head of design and R&D at Riot Games. Riot is responsible for League of Legends, which is to say responsible for a game—for ten years, the only one the company has made—that’s free to download and play on your computer but pulls in around $2 billion a year. Cadwell is also senior vice president of the company, with certain executive and management responsibilities, which he seems good at, though it’s being in the trenches, knocking around ideas about exactly how a game will work, that really lights him up. When I first met him he was thirty-nine, approaching forty: a large person, six foot three and 230 pounds (though on a fairly scientifically rigorous program to drop a bit of that weight), with short dark hair, pale skin, rectangular wire-rim glasses, and an extraordinary ability for creating systems that, translated through code and art and narrative and color and sound, come out on a screen as a game hundreds of millions of people might tell you, more than you really even want to hear it, is the coolest thing ever.

We met at Riot’s Santa Monica headquarters, which sit on a nondescript stretch of Olympic Boulevard, not far from the Pacific Ocean. The entrance to its suite of buildings isn’t imposing; it gives you no sense of how much it contains. In the foyer there are mounted screens displaying livestreams of the game itself, a few couches and tables. There are two twenty-foot-high black monoliths forming a narrow entrance to what lies within, and then, as you enter the place where the work is done, you’re greeted by a gigantic bear with glowing eyes, surrounded by other life-size inhabitants of Runeterra. Even so, none of that quite prepares you for the maze-like expanse beyond, scores and scores and hundreds and hundreds of large black computer monitors, in rows, in gigantic open room after room, with airplane-hangar-height ceilings, each monitor manned by someone hard at work to make this one game just a little better—just a little more fun.

How do they figure out what that would be? That is, what are the fundamental ingredients of a good game designer? To begin with: someone who loves games. Someone who plays games. Someone who can’t help but think about how games work. “I played thousands of games, or at least, close to a thousand, through my childhood,” Cadwell told me. We were sitting in a conference room on the Riot LA campus. “It might not have been good for much else, but it was excellent training to be a game designer.”

Cadwell is by nature a tinkerer, someone who likes to take things apart to understand how they work. The tinkering goes hand in glove with knowing: he is also by nature a knower. Someone who, if he’s going to do some gardening, is going to do extensive research into best practices and new innovative thinking in gardening techniques; someone who is not just going to hire a money manager to look after the wealth the rapidly expanding video game industry can provide without studying financial markets himself. He wants to know. And then he’s going to tinker some more.

“I just always want to understand how things work as systems,” Cadwell said. “Accumulate the fact. Figure out the pattern.”

Early on he fell in love with playing video games, and likewise early on he set about figuring out the patterns of video games, investigating their systems. Why was this one fun and that one not? He thought about that a lot. Wouldn’t it be more fun if this one could do that, and that one could do this? Why was this one so easy? What made that one so hard?

Cadwell was born in St. Louis and grew up there, for the most part. His mother had been an elementary school teacher before he was born, and then stayed at home as well as doing some substitute teaching and nonprofit education administration. His father worked for a company that made silicon wafers. When Cadwell was seven, he got a Nintendo for Christmas; a computer came a year later. “I got a 286, which was lightning fast at the time,” he said—this was the late ’80s—“and I just explored it. On the Nintendo, Super Mario Brothers was the one I played the most, some other stuff—the Nintendo classics—but really, Super Mario Brothers, that and Zelda.”

Cadwell speaks very fast, likes to pace when he’s talking about something personal or complex, has a face that gives a notion of what he looked like when he was seven. It’s not just that he spends his days thinking about games that provide a window into something boyish; it’s not just that he wears T-shirts and cargo shorts to work, either, or that he works in an industry that has long been portrayed as a thing for children. It has to do with his grin, his body language, his energy when he gets onto topics that interest him. The excitement, the thrill of building something in the world that he’s imagined in his head, is a particular type of joy not expressed much in adulthood. It has to do with the way he aims his focus on what he wants to explain, a childlike focus, in the best sense—pure and clear, like there is an object that exists in perfect abstraction in his brain and thus requires precision to be transformed from its blueprints into language. The way he sometimes closes his eyes to picture the concept he wants to describe. The way he grins only just slightly and, occasionally, flicks his eyes at you just for an instant to check if you’re with him, that you understand why the thing you and he are talking about is so great.

After Cadwell finished sixth grade, his father transferred to Seoul to build and operate a new plant in South Korea, bringing along the family of four—Tom has a younger sister—for a year. Cadwell had had some difficulty with the social aspects of school—he preferred reading and playing games on his own—but Korea opened him up, gave him a broader perspective. “I definitely had trouble relating to people growing up, and now I don’t as much,” he said, “and I think Korea helped me be more flexible and just gave me some understanding that we’re all different in our own ways. But games were always a refuge I could go to, and a place I could grow, or at least in some of them. Mostly I would just play the games intensely myself, and honestly I was kind of antisocial, and I think perhaps that I did reduce my social development, but I was left with a really deep understanding of why this game is fun and why this game is not fun and why I stick to this game and bounce from that game.”

When Cadwell returned to the U.S., in 1993, he had an easier time finding friends. And he found kids who shared his interests. “I’d hang out with the geeks and nerds crowd, as you might expect, given my profession, but also with kids who weren’t,” he told me. Not only that, but a revolution had quietly taken form and swelled up and come to St. Louis: Cadwell was now connected to the internet, which transformed the experience of games. Before, to play, say, Dungeons & Dragons, you needed not only your twenty-sided die and your Dungeon Master’s Guide but also live people who wanted to play and could get their parents to give them a ride to your house. Online, they were easier to find. This was the first age of dial-up, and Cadwell entered it eagerly.

Cadwell went deep into multiplayer real-time virtual world games, known as MUDs (“multi-user dungeons”). His first loves in the incipient world of internet MMOs (massively multiplayer online games, with very large numbers of players) were Toril and then Duris. (These were player versus environment, and then player versus player, combat-Dungeons-and-Dragons kinds of games.) He also liked finding communities that were inventing better and better ways to play the games: for instance, someone might invent a “macro,” or a shorthand command, that would allow players to almost instantly have their desires manifest on-screen instead of typing out an entire extensive command. (Much of video game hacking has to do with doing everything faster.) It makes sense that people building their own interfaces appealed to him. In general, he liked doing things his own way, opening up the bodies of games and dissecting and rearranging the constituent parts. He wasn’t a hacker, per se. “I messed around a little, but didn’t get too seriously in it,” he said, and entirely avoided the sort of black hat behavior the movies would start portraying, like phone fraud or breaking into servers. Still, he didn’t always follow the rules. The administrators of Toril kicked him off their servers for being too materialistic while playing a paladin, meant to be chivalrous and heroic; they flipped his class to a fighter, which, Cadwell said, “was unusable for the stats I had, so I was like, okay, cool. I guess I’;m done.” He might have been done with Toril, but that just meant there would be a new game on the horizon.

Cadwell entered MIT in 1997, planning a science major of some kind, interested in chemistry, or maybe engineering, though he eventually chose to concentrate in computer science. He also discovered a new game: StarCraft StarCraft had come out in March 1998, a real-time strategy (RTS) space-opera game that takes place at the other end of the galaxy (in the Koprulu Sector). The action commences in the twenty-fifth century; there are three species battling it out in space. The Terrans (humans), the Zerg (insects), and the Protoss (space elves with advanced technology) fight for dominance, with the player choosing one of the species to lead, directing a military campaign. The humans want to survive, the elves want to protect their world, and the insects just want to kill everybody. Fast reflexes help, but above all it’s a strategy game, now considered a classic of the genre.

“I was pretty terrible, and then I was pretty good,” Cadwell said. Pretty good: he was one of the best StarCraft players in the world. He maintained a blog on strategy, writing about mineral resources and land testing and deriving force equations. “So I was regarded as someone who understood a lot about the game and was, you know, pro-ish,” he told me. That went on for a while, until he realized the triumphs of the Koprulu Sector had hidden costs. “I quit playing after the beta,” Cadwell said, “because I was failing out of MIT.”

He was playing the game seventy hours a week. H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Chapter 1: The Universe, Also Known as the Game
• Chapter 2: Accumulating the Fact
• Chapter 3: A Scattered Dynasty of Recluses
• Chapter 4: The Infinite Hill
• Chapter 5: How to Make a Magic Circle
• Chapter 6: The Garden of Forking Paths
• Chapter 7: The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero
• Chapter 8: Metaphors Were a Weariness of the Flesh to the Poets Themselves
• Chapter 9: Manifestations of Imagination
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright