Popularity Is a Side Effect

The result, not the path#

Popularity, trends, tradition, profits, forecasts and statistics are all final results. They're not the process or the path that leads to that result.

To an unaware beginner, one feature of a popular game can look like the reason for its popularity. But games are never made of a single thing. Features can't exist in a vacuum, because in a game everything is interconnected. The features that ended up popular were originally developed together with everything else in that game, as a whole, and they all affect one another.

Take "hey, let's add multiplayer to our game, it's a popular feature!". The multiplayer that made the original game popular is now being taken out of its context, out of the environment where every other system in that game fully supported it. To expect it to work without that environment, possibly in a game structure that doesn't support it at all, is to risk months or years of work on a likely failure, without even knowing why it failed.

Game design that ends up popular requires all the elements of the game to be designed together, each part supporting the others toward a common purpose.

On top of that, popularity is earned by a design whose primary focus is creating value for the player. Popularity is only a side effect at the destination. It's neither the road nor the destination itself. The same goes for originality, profitability, trends and all the rest.

"Be original"#

I feel annoyed whenever artists sincerely advise aspiring artists to "be unique", "be original" or "stand out from the crowd". I'd like those people to understand that this isn't how they themselves became unique. Their originality was a side effect of the result they were aiming for, not the process that created it. Striving for innovation for the sake of innovation pulls in the opposite direction from making something genuine for a real purpose, which ends up innovative as a natural side effect.

Telling people to "be original" is counterproductive, because it encourages them to chase originality for its own sake. That only confuses and frustrates artists, designers and developers. I recognize the intention behind the advice is probably good, but this is what happens when it's given. It's destructive, not just useless.

"It will automatically make it better"#

Most often, unaware designers who add features out of popularity, or any of the other traps from Question Everything, do it without understanding why that feature made the original game better. They're only concerned that those things must be in the game, as if they'll "automatically make it better". Nobody asks why they were good for the original game in the first place.

Sometimes this way of thinking seems to work for a while. But when it eventually stops working, and it will, you're left with confusion and frustration: adding more content, more polish, more complex systems, more impressive graphics and more popular features seems to make the game no better. Sometimes it seems to make the game worse. The scary part is that this realization may only hit you years down the line, when you finally notice that something about all the work you've done is off/weird/wrong/contradictory. I've seen others go through this, and I went through it myself.

I'd like this book to keep that realization from taking so long, or from being needed at all. I feel frustrated and deeply sad when developers make games full of problems that come from the common mistake and only realize it far too late. Or worse, keep repeating it and spreading half-true ideas to everyone else, which end up having a huge destructive impact on the whole industry.

When I was starting out, there was no one to mentor me and no resource to warn me about this mistake. I learned it the hard way, creating things for years, only to notice through my own work that what I'd been told, and what I thought was the obvious way to make things, was making me repeat the common mistake, as many others still do to this day.

So I hope I'm making it clear just how dangerous this mistake is. Please do your best to avoid it.