Facebook games are often sneered at for their design by hardcore gamers, but Zynga chief games designer Brian Reynolds says that many in the industry are starting to feel the exact opposite. With the ability to put games out in front of people in months rather than years, he says that designers are perhaps more important in social games than AAA games.
“One of the things I do is I recruit very senior game designers into Zynga and what I’ve found is a growing interest that people are realizing that there’s actually more game design to be done. This is work at the cutting edge of a new space,” said Reynolds. “A game designer is actually more important on a social game than on a triple-A game because on a triple-A game you spend a lot of time making technology and tools and gigabytes worth of animations and things like that, and I can remember whole months going by where they didn’t need me to do any game design whereas on social games it’s a game designer’s paradise.”
“We invent new things and try them out very quickly. I tell the young game designers, ‘Listen, you come here, you’ll have ideas, and then 2 months later they’ll be in front of millions of people.’ On a live game it might be a little bit longer but even then 2 months is actually the slow version and that’s if it’s a really big idea. This is a great place to come if you want to try new ideas and see results quickly and if you want to see things shipped and in front of players,” Reynolds continued. “This is an industry now where we’re able to talk to audiences that we’ve never been able to talk to, much larger audiences. People that we were never able to interest in games are now interested in games. I was talking this week with a very veteran and well known games designer and he was saying, ‘Wow, I’m really jealous of you guys because you’re achieving what’s been my lifelong dream, which is to make a game that tens of millions of people can play’.”
“So I feel like when game developers actually take a look inside they like what they see. I got into this the same way I got into every kind of game I’ve ever made, which is, they were the kinds of games I was playing. In 2008 I got into Facebook and I was like, ‘Wow, this is awesome. What is this This is mind-blowingly different.’ And then I found out you can make games on Facebook and I was like ‘Sign me up’,” concluded Reynolds.
Source: IndustryGamers {link no longer active}
