Bad Design vs. Niche Design

'Bad' or 'Good' are really labels that mean nothing without context. It's just what the game sets out to do(explicitly or not) and whether or not it achieves it.

This feels like the age old discussion, is bad art still art? (the answer would appear to be yes)

If your worldview is that good/bad are purely subjective, then it's impossible to make value judgments about much of anything. Individual relativism is one hell of a drug.

3 hours ago, swiftcoder said:

This feels like the age old discussion, is bad art still art? (the answer would appear to be yes)

If your worldview is that good/bad are purely subjective, then it's impossible to make value judgments about much of anything. Individual relativism is one hell of a drug.

I wouldn't say that it's impossible; it's only impossible if you think a value judgment is meaningless if it doesn't apply to everyone. That is clearly not the case - it may not matter to the universe at large that I have certain preferences, but it sure matters to me, the person making judgments. The world is full of activists with belief systems that contradict those of other activists; their beliefs look like they're pretty meaningful to those who hold them. I am one of those people convinced that there aren't "objectively-correct" value judgments; and in spite of this, as those of you who have interacted with me in the chat would know, I have some pretty strong opinions on what we ought to value and what some of the consequences of having those values are.

Some people are frightened by the prospect that there may not be a "universally-correct"/"objective" set of values and I'm not completely sure I understand why. I'd argue (as some of the existentialists did) that good/bad being subjective and derived from individual values is not only obvious if you think about this subject enough, but actually liberating. It means we aren't confined to some "one true" way of looking at the world; we are free from the imposition of an objective value system from external reality. We have the freedom to form our own judgments and can therefore pursue an authentically individualist life.

All that all of this means for the topic at hand, I think, is that the "value system" (ie. the axiomatic value judgments that drive an individual's worldview) may need to be made more explicit if you're trying to convince others to share your judgments. Beyond that, having a diverse set of values driving our industry is something that I value. I suspect our field would be kind of boring if everyone shared the exact same set of artistic values.

2 hours ago, Oberon_Command said:

It means we aren't confined to some "one true" way of looking at the world; we are free from the imposition of an objective value system from external reality. We have the freedom to form our own judgments and can therefore pursue an authentically individualist life.

That's fine and all, but you can only hold a discussion in so far as all people involved in that discussion are willing to countenance the view points of the others involved. As soon as someone pulls the "all art is subjective" card, discussion is basically over.

There's generally very little disagreement that Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is a terrible, terrible game. But if someone wants to be that arsehole in an art discussion... they can make the case for it being a spectacularly ironic take on the state of the games industry, and as such a work of art to those that have the vision to appreciate it.

Disclaimer: I spent a lot of time kicking around the art world in my misspent youth, and then I went and obtained a philosophy degree. May contain traces of cynicism.

24 minutes ago, swiftcoder said:

2 hours ago, Oberon_Command said:

That's fine and all, but you can only hold a discussion in so far as all people involved in that discussion are willing to countenance the view points of the others involved. As soon as someone pulls the "all art is subjective" card, discussion is basically over.

Indisputably so. But I'd suggest that by that point the discussion was already over, anyway. If you have to fall back on "all art is subjective", there's probably not much to discuss. Just as "I have the right to do x" is an incredibly weak justification for doing x.

3 hours ago, swiftcoder said:

Disclaimer: I spent a lot of time kicking around the art world in my misspent youth, and then I went and obtained a philosophy degree. May contain traces of cynicism.

[Insert grinning smiley emoji here.]

Tic-Tac-Toe is the classic example of "bad game design". Neither side can win, it's always a tie. And there is no dynamic too it. I go, you go, until we tie.

Another example might be "Table Top Horse Race" with no rules beyond spaces to move once space per turn, and an equal number of spaces per horse. With alternating turns whoever moves first will always win in the end, with simultaneous turns it will always be a tie between all horses in the race.

It's easy to design a game that is not actually a game, and that will always qualify as "bad game design".

Many might also point to Atari's classic disaster "E.T.". Bad game design definitely exists, these are just some very easy to see examples of that.

I think a better question would be "at what level of complexity does a game design reach the point of becoming a matter of subjective opinion". Because, at a simple enough level like Tic-Tac-Toe or Table Top Horse Race it can be seen pretty clearly by anyone that "bad game design" does exist as a basic concept.

23 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

Tic-Tac-Toe is the classic example of "bad game design". Neither side can win, it's always a tie. And there is no dynamic too it. I go, you go, until we tie.

See, I'm not sure if it's true that it's objectively bad design. It's certainly not an interesting game for most adults, but Tic Tac Toe is an excellent game for younger children who haven't experienced much formalised play yet. It's very simple, and I was able to teach it to my four (now five) year old, where a "better" game such as Go or Chess would still be well beyond her grasp. She hasn't yet discovered how to always force a draw and so still finds it fun, and as it's a very small problem space she is able to reason about it quite well. It can also be played without any special equipment - just a stick in the sand will do. Also thanks to the small problem space, it's easy for an adult to "throw" (intentionally lose) the game sometimes without suspicion when playing someone who doesn't get grasp the nature of the game.

If you consider it a learning game for youngsters, it could be considered very well designed.

That is, of course, the classic purpose of Tic-Tac-Toe and why it endures even though, between adults, it will always end in a tie. But it is also an example of a game that isn't really a game. Like the horse racing example that I also used.

I do not know the games of other cultures very well, just the most famous ones like Go and Mankala. I am sure there are many games that are similar too this in other cultures. But, in western civilization, to answer my own question of "what level of complexity does it become a matter of subjective opinion", Checkers is probably the best example that I can think of from the games of western culture.

Checkers is the simplest game I can think of that is actually a game. It is also the next step up from Tic-Tac-Toe for you to teach and play games with a child. The difference is that Checkers is actually a game. It doesn't always end in a tie, or whoever goes first winning. Checkers is also a game that a child can fairly quickly learn well enough to beat an adult. You can only become so good at Checkers.

I just have to also mention this due to both the irony and relevance.

Back when my brother and I were making the IKNFL mod for Front Page Sports: Football we had this joke between us that the "worst possible game" either of use could think of was "Front Page Sports: Hunting". "Up arrow... Up Arrow... Right Arrow... Right Arrow... ENTER! Yeah!!! {Hands clapping...}"

It couldn't have been more than a year after this that Deer Hunter was released, and if I am remembering this right became the biggest selling game of all time. This was the moment that I truly learned that games are like music and, just like the Rush/Led Zeppelin crowd loves their music and mocks New Kids on The Block, there actually are also NKOTB fans who love them equally and dislike Rush, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd every bit as much as we dislike stuff like NKOTB.

So, my personal opinion answer to the original question is that you can only truly call it "bad game design" in a definitive way if it is not a game at all. The end result is always the same and the players cannot change that no matter what they do. Anything else, even ET or Front Pages Sports: Hunting... there is going to be someone, somewhere, who loves it.

Taking a step back from games for a minute.

You might have a chair that is a finely crafted work made from the highest of quality materials, has beautiful aesthetics, has exceptionally comfortable ergonomic qualities and it can be such an outstanding piece of work that it is regarded with high cultural value.

You could also have a rock as a chair. Less comfortable but generally functional if it's the right size.

I think it's fair to say that both of these examples are functional and if you were inclined to decorate your home using either, they would both be "niche" in that you're not going to see too many people decorating their houses with either of these products. The finely crafted chair might have had greater considerations put towards its design and is more advanced than the rock but the rock is not necessarily a "bad" design. On the other hand, any chair that collapses when sat upon, that would be considered a badly designed chair as it does not meet the basic functional requirements.

41 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

Checkers is the simplest game I can think of that is actually a game. It is also the next step up from Tic-Tac-Toe for you to teach and play games with a child. The difference is that Checkers is actually a game. It doesn't always end in a tie, or whoever goes first winning. Checkers is also a game that a child can fairly quickly learn well enough to beat an adult. You can only become so good at Checkers.

Tic-tac-toe is arguably as advanced as the rock but it is a functional game. Checkers is indeed more advanced but it too has actually been "solved" as such to always result in a draw as well. So, what I am to a child's ability in tic-tac-toe a computer oponent is (or can be) to my ability in Checkers. It's not a matter of bad design but certainly a matter of more advanced or more effective design, whether initially intended to be that way or not.

So I say that it's a matter of clarifying "bad game design" to mean that a game was not crafted in such a way that it has met its intended goal, which is presumably of entertaining an audience.

Mathematically "solving" a game too a draw is possible with many more simple games. But few, if any, people can actually execute that and make it happen. That is a different thing that something as simple as the Table Top Horse Race example where it is immediately obvious too anyone that it will always end the same. The player immediately perceives that it will always work out the same. That is a very different thing than the potential existing for someone to play a game perfectly every time, when almost nobody can actually do it.

It really depends on how the question is defined. The original post was saying there is no such thing as "bad game design" in a definitive sense. I think there is, but that it is a very narrow thing because people actually loved Front Page Sports: Hunting;-)

If you define it in a broader way, I would immediately point to Backgammon as being a candidate for "not actually being a game" even though it doesn't work out the same every time. Backgammon is not that difficult to completely master. There is rarely a situation where there is more than one correct thing to do based on the position on the board and the current die roll. Between two "perfect players" Backgammon is more accurately described as an Abacus than a game.

The farther you move the bar, the more debatable the subject becomes.

I don't really like the term "bad" design because it's too broad. "Bad" design is essentially design that you don't like.

Now, that could be because you don't the aesthetic of the design or the design is incompetent (i.e. they had a vision and executed it poorly).

Actually, Dark Souls is a good example of both of these.

While it obviously has a huge fan base (disclaimer: that includes me), there are also plenty of people who hated the game, not just for its difficulty, but for the design decisions around how it educates the player, the distance of the bonfires to bosses, etc. This is an example of people subjectively not liking the design, even though the Dark Souls fanbase will tell you those things are a core part of the experience.

On the other hand, even the most ardent Dark Souls fan would be hard pushed to defend its awful menu systems (see also: Far Cry 3). That's an example of poor execution.

This whole topic sorta seems like a philosophical nightmare. One could argue in circles if bad art is still art and worthy of recognition but people will still sneer in disgust if someone draws a stick figure cat on a piece of notebook paper and hangs it on the wall and calls themselves an artist(generally.)

It's sort of hard to articulate a real answer because you could make a wide range of criteria for what makes a "good" game. A lot of people complain about the Call of Duty series for example(ignoring the fact many of the games are quite different from each other) and yet they obviously were made by large teams of skilled developers, so does that make them good? Does a lot of sales make them good? They seem to be reviled often and yet sell a ton of copies. What makes a game like Subnautica good?

I think the only real basic tenant that you could argue with for a game being good design or not is that it needs to have had some love put into it, there's a lot of games out there that are obviously lazy, rushed, don't seem to do their own prescribed goal very well, etc. On that note I'd probably point out that you can't really treat design as a thing in and of itself, ideas are only as good as the implementation they end up in. It takes a well made game to demonstrate a good design, not just an idea.

5 hours ago, Satharis said:

This whole topic sorta seems like a philosophical nightmare. One could argue in circles if bad art is still art and worthy of recognition but people will still sneer in disgust if someone draws a stick figure cat on a piece of notebook paper and hangs it on the wall and calls themselves an artist(generally.)

The art world has become pretty inured to this sort of thing.

Personally I put "Bad design" down as "Things that hinder the core function or purpose of the project".

Tick-Tack-Toe or Rock-Paper-Scissors don't really have any 'bad' design points, but rather are examples of beautifully simple designs. Tick-Tack-Toe's game-draw 'issue' isn't a bad design in my view, but rather a fun quirk that makes it such a great logic and learning tool.

So we need to draw some lines and start to think about things like 'core purpose', how design elements relate to it, and whether a design actually improves or hinders things in that specific instance for a given project. And we also have to draw a divide between Mechanics design, and Interface design. You can have a great core mechanic of how things work, but the overarching design fails due to issues with how you interact with it, and you can have a great interaction design, but overall still fail because it doesn't really connect to any good core mechanics. - You can make the prettiest and most awesome button in the world to keep on your desk, but it isn't all that great of a project if it isn't hooked up to anything.

The bit of a niche market of "Frustratingly hard platformers" typically has a design mechanic that will include easy and very common ways to die. The fact that you are running along and die often due to things like falling down a bit, hitting the wrong wall tie, etc is not, in and of itself, a 'bad design' element, but rather it makes up a fundamental aspect of the project's core purpose. They're Supposed to be frustrating, as that's kind of the point of the game - Overcoming the insanely difficult puzzle and not dying. But design elements still must be judged on a case-by-case basis.

If you have a mechanic where the character may completely and totally randomly just die and you lose, regardless of any input from the user or choices they may have made, then odds are it is probably something readily filed under "Bad design". However if you break the design down that is essentially the core mechanic of slot machines and many addictive gambling related games. - You select your bets, pull the lever, and odds are you probably 'die', and you lose. But every now and then you don't lose, and that triggers all the special happy things in some people's brains.

Try to imagine a slot machine that allowed you to learn the 'exact right way' to pull the handle such that every single time you pulled it you 'won', and you could sit there pulling it exactly right each and every time for hours on end, constantly winning... Those slot machine mobile apps are weird enough for me to try to understand why anyone plays them (Since they don't actually have payouts, but you can still do in-app purchases), but I struggle to think of an audience who could be entertained by being able to constantly win something like that.

Then we can take sound core mechanics, and look at what happens when 'bad' UI design is applied to them. I think my most recent favourite example for this would be Subnautica and how its UI functions in its current state. Namely, the inconsistencies in backing out of menus/game states.

Hit tab to open or close your PDA - Simple enough...

But, if you watch live streamers try it for the first time (And I myself found this issue too), while you're on that 'menu' for the PDA/Inventory/etc screen, users naturally want to hit ESC to back out of it... But that just opens the "Game Menu/Pause Screen". This is something that you eventually can learn to get around, but it breaks a 'natural convention' in the computing world, which is why it is so common to catch new users doing it.

In and of itself, it isn't a 'bad' design, but rather it is more a 'less than ideal' design.

But things get worse...

Soon after starting the game you get a tool that allows you to open a 'building menu', which looks and feels a lot like the PDA/Inventory menu. That's obviously closed out by hitting the TAB key, as we've been 'trained' by the game with the PDA, right? ... Well, wrong. You click off to the side of the screen to close that one...

Eventually we get the Seamoth or the Prawn suit, vehicles that you can enter by clicking on them... But you exit them with the E key.

And it 'gets worse' when you get the large Cyclops and use the camera mode while piloting it - You right click to back out of it, or hit ESC... So in this case ESC doesn't open the Pause Menu, but backs you out of the camera to the main piloting station view, where upon ESC will then once again open the Pause Menu when pressed. Why? Because... Reasons?

Then there are bad design issues like the Seamoth, the first 'proper' sub you get training you to turn your lights on and off with a mouse button, and the game teaching you that some of the 'less than friendly creatures' you might encounter don't respond in all that positive nature to having new lights show up in their environment... But when you get to the Prawn Suit? Left click 'punches' with the left arm, right click with the right arm... And I have no idea how to turn the lights off in that thing. (But on the other hand, running around and punching/drilling the stuff that used to kill you and make you terrified of the sea does have a sort of giddy pleasure to it, so I eventually stopped caring about whether the lights were on and if I were hidden or not, and just adopted a "Bring it on motherf...." attitude.)

On top of that there are the 'bad designs' with inventory items, chest mechanics, and tools and the hotbar. Some objects will 'auto add' themselves to your 5 slot tool bar if you click on them, shifting all the other slots to the right. So you'll have your stasis rifle, knife, seaglide, scanner, and build tool in slots 1, 2, 3, 4,and 5, and an accidental click on the wrong thing? Well, now instead of 'deploying' the gravity net thing in the water, you've shifted things on your toolbar by one slot and put the gravity net in slot 1... So you have to go back and rekey all your tools.

Moving things between chests? Well that's a right click. But a left click will eat stuff, and it is mildly easy to accidentally eat a bunch of things early on rather than putting them in chests. Easy enough to learn around, but then you'll get the battery chargers... Which not only use left click to move things be the charger and your inventory, but unlike your inventory and storage chests the items in the chargers will STAY in their spots. If you wanted to move a bunch of batteries from a chest you would keep clicking the top-left one on the screen as the rest would move up/over to auto-compact the list.

Swapping batteries in your tools? Well, some tools will clearly show their battery level on screen when you pull them out, other's won't show it but still consume battery power and force you to manually check its level. And the list of different batteries you can swap to doesn't order itself with "Highest charged first", making it easy to accidentally pop a battery you just took from one tool into another. Plus the whole having to manually double check batteries/charge cells in your inventory when putting them in the charging station. (And lets not talk about the annoyance that is the Cyclops Engine Room when it comes to installing upgrades and swapping out power cells.)

Subnautica has a bunch of random different 'bad design' issues. It isn't a "Bad Game", the forty or so hours I've put into it since getting it a week or so ago would suggest that it very much isn't a bad game, but being a good and fun game doesn't exempt it from having bad designs included. Subnautica's "Bad Designs" are mostly down to inconsistencies, and 'false training' of the user compared to content that they will see later on as they play more. It isn't earth shattering-game breaking bad, but man it could be so much smoother and consistent to play if they had a little more User Experience design thought put into it.

On 3/4/2018 at 9:23 PM, ChaosEngine said:

I don't really like the term "bad" design because it's too broad. "Bad" design is essentially design that you don't like.

9 hours ago, Luckless said:

Personally I put "Bad design" down as "Things that hinder the core function or purpose of the project".

This is the main conceptual/linguistic issue afflicting this thread. There are two kinds of bad designs: subjectively bad designs that we don't like (more exactly, designs we find worthless) and almost objectively bad (more exactly, imperfect) designs that include counterproductive elements relative to their purpose.

The former can be brilliantly made (e.g. a reliable, high performance but blatantly street-illegal car) but still unpleasant and useless, and the latter can be appreciated despite their flaws (e.g. an adventure game that remains funny until an unavoidable bug makes it crash near the end).

Of course the intent of a designer is hard to guess and it's easy to project personal tastes into an "artistic" judgement.

For example, I'm extremely intolerant of glitches and artifacts in "realistic" 3D graphics, to the point of considering most recent games that are acclaimed for their great graphics a failure because there are sharp edges, interpenetrating polygons, texture blurring etc. here and there They look ugly and cheap, distracting me from what I should do as a player. What's the problem then, aiming for a pointless and unachievable goal (photorealism) at the expense of useful ones (gameplay etc.) or not being good enough at finding a less realistic style of rendering, assets etc. that doesn't have defects?

Thanks for the replies! (Wanted to get back to this earlier with specific points, but for simplicity I'll make this more general.)

Synthesizing from the feedback so far, we really have two forms of bad design: The thing which doesn't work or breaks when used, and then something more nebulous that seems to relate to a difference between expected function and actual function. The former's pretty cut and dry and for that reason not as interesting as the latter, where there is a lot of subjectivity & room for debate.

In discussions around game design, I'm often struck by the lack of a commonly agreed upon yardstick to base our evaluations on compared to other kinds of design. Mechanical design enjoys physics as an ultimate arbiter, for instance, with it probably safe to say that a plane with badly shaped wings may not control well or fly at all. It seems we can bound discussion of good/bad music around elements such as repetition (is one note repeated over and over music? Two? Three?), harmony and even frequency tolerances of the human ear (physics meets neurology).

And then we have fiction, which appears-- and I'm hedging greatly here-- to be measurable based on long held conventions: Plot is composed of events which are significant rather than trivial, relations between characters are consequential rather than irrelevant ("Luke, I am Boba Fett's father!"), and the entire tale culminates rather than just abruptly ending. If we compare the idea of "good story bias," which posits that we reject or accept real world information based on whether or not it conforms to narrative-like patterns, I think we can further argue that fiction conventions may relate to deeply embedded psychological expectations. (Thinking Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, which talks about common archetypes/narratives found all around the world.)

Finally we have painting, a minefield I'll steer clear of except to note that our standards seem to be so amorphous that random, computer generated pixels can be considered good art in a way that random notes and random bits of narrative don’t seem to enjoy. (Maybe this is because the way the brain creates meaning out of visual input is less discriminating?)

Crashing, broken things aside, I'm not sure where game design fits into all of this or, more importantly, *WHY* it fits into one category over another. Games may be ancient, but computer games are odd, hybrid things. Maybe they are as amorphous as paintings and we can't say anything useful about good or bad. But it would be fascinating to understand why.

6 minutes ago, Wavinator said:

It seems we can bound discussion of good/bad music around elements such as repetition (is one note repeated over and over music? Two? Three?), harmony and even frequency tolerances of the human ear (physics meets neurology).

A number of those seem cultural, rather than absolutes. You may find that someone trained in music theory in say, China, or Ghana, disagrees strongly with Western notions of harmony and rhythm.

12 minutes ago, Wavinator said:

And then we have fiction, which appears-- and I'm hedging greatly here-- to be measurable based on long held conventions...

Those conventions also tend to very centred on singular cultural tradition. Hell, Western literature critique is having trouble comparing male/female narratives, let alone narratives from other cultures.

All this to say, I think the same applies to game design. Attempting to define a single, global taxonomy of what constitutes "good" game design is... doomed to failure, either by bogging down in definition, or by producing a definition that is exclusionary to some portion of the audience.