Creative Direction - Part 1 of 2: Values Centered Conceptualization
Reflecting on Creative Direction based in a practice of Game Design, this is my current process that I’ve employed across my more recent projects, as well as how and why my process has developed this way. For this first part of two, I will focus on how I approach conceptualization - specifically how I try to encourage my team to define our project so that I can try to foster a maximally creative, collaborative, and exploratory process, while providing enough structure to get the ball rolling.
Creative Direction at 10,000 ft
Creative direction, at the highest level is a design problem - it’s about giving form to the gestalt ahead of the details; it’s about unifying the direction of various creative disciplines so that the final game embodies a cohesive vision, a consistent tone, a synergistic collection of micro decisions that come together to manifest a harmonious aesthetic. Whether at the indie scale, when an entire project’s team could be a single individual, or at the large commercial scale where teams could be large enough that no single person knows every other person on the same project, the goal is the same - to get all of the arrows pointed in the same direction.
Much of my practice in creative direction has been on the smaller end of scale, but on my last commercial project where I was leading a creative team of 2 other developers, 7 3D artists, and 3 2D artists, I had the opportunity to meaningfully interrogate my creative direction process separate from my game design practice for the first time.
Over time, what I’ve found to be effective for me and the projects I’ve led is a values centered conceptualization; whereas for my personal projects, I focus on storytelling through meaningful play. What I want to share is what those ideas mean to me, what makes them effective for me, and why I’ve ended up here after 7 years of indie design and development. First, values centered conceptualization.
Values Centered Conceptualization
What I mean by “values centered” is that the inceptional definitions of the game are grounded in statements that help the team judge it down from the lowliest detail all the way up to how it’s largest conceptual pieces play off of each other. The values can have an ethical angle, or be the “value” proposition to the end user through the lens of business or product design, or artistic/expressive/experiential value through the lens of game design. Because every game and every project is different, it’s more important to make sure that the values are grounded in the contexts (social, cultural, temporal, geographic, situational, market, community) that are relevant to the specific project than it is to employ an exhaustive rubric that accounts for every context.
After grad school, I had the opportunity to participate in NYU Game Center’s summer incubator program, during which various industry experts came and held seminars on various aspects of their practice that the program felt would be useful as we launched our professional indie careers. One expert whose seminar has been invaluable to me was given by Margaret Robertson, then the Game Director at Playdots, Inc., where she talked about how it was important to define a project before anything else so that is possible to evaluate not only the final product, but every step, every decision, and every element along the way on whether or not it is in service to what is at the heart of the project.
The exercise Margaret described had a number of facets and lenses by which the project could be defined. This is intended to allow individuals from different corners of the project, from the art, to design, to business, to marketing, to development, to all weigh in from their vantages to define the identity of the project, and identify and resolve potential conflicts ahead of time. The product would be a living document that represents a collaborative agreement that all parties agree to pursue, which will continue to be edited in real time as strategy or circumstances changed or challenges pop up.
Then, Why Values?
Where my values centered approach differs from the approach that Margaret shared is that it holds as few elements as essential as possible, and limits the identity of the project to assessable criteria. This has a handful of upsides for the small to mediums size projects that I’ve been a part of.
It takes a lot of the stress out the exercise by removing the expectation that the entire scope of the project has to be defined and conceived before any work has been started.
It privileges an exploratory and iterative approach where a short list can provide enough structure and guidance as constraints to help define a direction without getting to a point where it starts feeling like a burden. This is especially helpful when a project is exploring new ground or when a team is breaking out of its comfort zone.
It helps create a narrow set of first principles by which success and progress can be measured against, and a limited set priorities so that conflicts can be adjudicated.
Reducing the collaborative commitment to conceptual and abstracted values can hep facilitate interdisciplinary conversations as the values are interpreted from different perspectives.
At its best, it’s intended to empower team members to exercise their judgement and explore their left and right limits of latitude in the execution of the vision. This approach encourages a greater degree of collaborative ownership and buy in because it leaves room for the project to be everyone’s baby.
Defining Values
The key to getting the most out of this approach is making sure that the values that define the project meet the following criteria:
Clear - The value itself has to be unambiguous in what it means. It’s helpful to know exactly what it is as well as what it is not - it should leave no doubt as to what it aims to achieve, and the scope within which it applies.
Tip - avoid broad terms or platitudes; it doesn’t help to define your game as “fun”, “exciting”, or “engaging”.
Interpretable - The value should avoid being overly prescriptive on how it should be manifested. The point is to leave enough room for team members to bring their own flavor to the execution.
Tip - this is not the time to define styles, approaches, or solutions ahead of problems; so no need to commit to a cyberpunk style, a toon shader, or a character designs in the style of Shinichiro Watanabe.
Contextual - The value should try to stay within the terms of the context for which the project is intended. If it’s experiential, it should be framed from the players’ perspectives. If it’s a value with an ethical angle, it should be defined in the terms of the cultural/market/community/temporal/geographic terms the game will live.
Tip - a sport may be worth defining with safety in mind, but a digital RTS probably isn’t; define what is most important, and leave the rest for later - you can always add more later.
Interstitial - It can be helpful to define values deliberately in the spaces where potential conflicts in goals might emerge. The values are meant to be tools for problem-solving so it might as well as lean into the areas in which it’s likely to be the most helpful.
Tip - try to add clarity around where things might be at odds with each other - if budget and scope are at odds / if design sensibilities are in conflict / if the strategic landscape and financial goals are at odds, address it.
Values in Action
I used this process in a recent project, and it was that project’s specific conditions and context that helped crystallize these ideas into the version that I’m sharing now. We tried a more granular project definition exercise at the beginning, but it became clear early on that it wasn’t achieving the desired results - there was so much we didn’t know because we were developing for a new market segment; then there was that the core of the team didn’t have enough of a shared or even overlapping high-level professional vocabulary to define project in terms that were meaningful to each other; and possibly most importantly the skills coverage was so spotty that conflicts in values weren’t found until issues came to a head.
After some time into process, we recognized that we weren’t aligned in our vision for the project so we hit the pause button and tried the exercise again. This second time around, we had the benefit of already knowing areas of conflict as well as where our challenges, limits, and constraints laid, so we were able to make do with a more truncated definition, and I feel like we were much better off for it.
For some additional context, the project involved a certain cryptographic asset that shall not be named, which even at this point in the project was beginning to be looked at with suspicion by the gaming public. This was well before this battleground had formed its final ideological camps, but we knew even in those early days what we were wading into. We knew what we wanted to accomplish there, and that became the first value that we committed to.
Here are the core values that we took with us into the project and why they were helpful over the course of the project.
“We are building a community pursuing play, not profit. We are a commercial project and we need to succeed financially, but the goal is to build a game that attracts players that want to engage for the sake of the experiences we build, not just as a speculative fad.”
This was helpful because in the space we were designing for, this was central conflict that emerged from the technological and cultural affordances of the technology we were engaging with. This was central to our identity and defined what kind of community we we would go on to build.
“We want whimsy, we want playful, we want weird. We’re making something sweeping, and epic, and romantic in vision, simple in scope, and honest in design.”
This declaration allowed us to negotiate the subjective. The core team was small enough that we had to hire a significant amount of external artistic talent; by defining the subjective aspects of our project, we were better able to decide which artists were good fits for what we were building and who was working in styles that could push our designs closer to our ideals. And during conceptualization and exploration, it helped to have a consistent value set that we could refer back to together as we refined our ideas.
“We want casual strategy. To us that means that the game has clear heuristics, simple interactions, and elegant depth. This for players that want a little crunchiness in their leisure, not giga-brains and spreadsheet warriors.”
Particularly early in the game’s design life when we were churning through prototype after prototype, it was important that we privileged the sublime and aspirational over the explicit and actionable. This value was clear enough that it helped us ruthlessly prune branches from the possibility tree while we were in an exploratory phase, but at the same time, it was vague enough that it left room for the design to evolve with every set of hands that worked with it according to their interpretations and contributions.
Making Room for (Everyone’s) Creativity
Hopefully based on this limited value-based definition, you can already imagine what was going to be built and how you might interpret these values through the lens of your own practice and discipline. At the same time, I’m confident that if 10 teams worked off of these values, the results couldn’t be more different. Obviously there are contexts in which narrower and more granular definitions would be more beneficial, like when a AAA studio is committing to a new intellectual property in their existing niche. However, outside of those situations, a looser grip can still give enough structure while increasing collaboration and distributed ownership, let you explore more freely, and create opportunities to find inspiration at the intersections of different perspectives.
