If, like me, you have a bunch of different gaming news sites in your RSS feed reader, you probably saw Richard Garriott’s name pop up in conjunction with a…rather inflammatory quote today.

Gamasutra: ‘I think most game designers really just suck’ – Richard Garriott
Gamespot: Garriott: ‘Most game designers really just suck’
Massively: Garriott: ‘I think most game designers really just suck’
Kotaku: Ultima Creator Richard Garriott Says ‘Most Game Designers Really Just Suck’ (They also managed to find a still of Garriott doing the “crazy eyes”. Classy.)

The source of all of this is Garriott’s recent interview with PC Gamer, in which he makes the following assertion:

“You know, I go back to the day when I was the programmer, I was the artist, I was the text writer, etcetera,” said Garriott. “Every artist we’ve ever hired ever is infinitely better at art than I ever was. I was never a good artist, or audio engineer, or composer. I was a pretty good programmer, but now all of our programmers are better than I am—but if I’d stayed in programming I could probably keep up.

“But other than a few exceptions, like Chris Roberts, I’ve met virtually no one in our industry who I think is close to as good a game designer as I am. I’m not saying that because I think I’m so brilliant. What I’m saying is, I think most game designers really just suck, and I think there’s a reason why.”

Chris Roberts, who worked with Garriott back when Origin Systems was producing both Ultima and Wing Commander, isn’t Garriott’s only exception—he also identified Will Wright and Peter Molyneux as examples of quality game designers. The majority, however, become designers because they lack other skills, according to Garriott’s analysis.

A close-up of the “founding document of Ultima”—a 1976 high school writing assignment.“If you’re not a good artist and not a good programmer, but you still like games, you become a designer.”
“If you like games, you eventually get to the point where you’d like to make one,” said Garriott. “But if you had this magic art talent as a youth, you can refine your skills and show a portfolio and say, ‘I’m a good artist, go hire me’ If you’re nerdy enough to hack into a computer, programming on your own, you can go to school and learn proper structure, make code samples and go ‘Look, I’m a good programmer, hire me.’

“But if you’re not a good artist and not a good programmer, but you still like games, you become a designer, if you follow me. You get into Q&A and often design.

“And the most valuable part of creating a game is the design, which the programmers are technically executing. And they’d be happy to just execute some of them. But in my mind, most artists and programmers are just as much of gamers as the designers, and I usually find in my history that the artists and programmers are, in fact, as good of designers as the designers. They’re often better, because they understand the technology or the art.

“So we’re leaning on a lot of designers who get that job because they’re not qualified for the other jobs, rather than that they are really strongly qualified as a designer. It’s really hard to go to school to be a good designer.”

The Ultima Dragons on Facebook have already discussed this half-to-death, with the consensus being that Garriott’s assertion is lacking in the Virtue which has LUM as its mantra. The much shorter discussion on the Ultima Dragons Google+ page is thus far rather more in agreement with the statement.

As Garriott himself notes in a comment left at the Gamasutra article:

My point was, that game design is the hardest, but also the most valuable skill to build in the industry. That every company lives and dies based on the talent of its game design team, and that as an industry we are not doing so well creating the talent we need in this industry, because educational systems have not caught up in this area as well as programming and art. I was not trying to toot my own horn, rather state that game design is hard. Ah well. 🙂

And for my own, I kind of agree with this summary of his remarks. They were maybe a little bit “off the cuff”, and were maybe a bit poorly-chosen, but his basic assertion seems to be similar to the lament that many of my co-workers had back when I was working the counter at a photography pro-shop shortly after finishing university. Most of them were freelance photographers, some very well-recognized and all very talented, and they all lamented the fact that advances in digital imaging technology meant that more people who really didn’t understand photography were getting their hands on high-end gear and failing to use it to its full potential. Photography, not (I suspect) unlike game design, isn’t something that’s widely taught…and, to a degree, it can’t be effectively taught. The principles can be taught, the concepts and theorems. Case studies can be performed, looking at the work of other great photographers, and these in turn can be emulated to some degree.

But there are men and women who can do more with a mobile phone’s camera than others can do with a high-end SLR, and that sort of talent can’t be taught, at least not directly. Not, of course, that many schools in the Edmonton area are even bothering to teach kids about the basics of photography, although I’m told it was once a much more common subject. And the same is true of game design; it isn’t something that’s being widely taught…although the times, they are a-changin’, bit by bit.

Still, teaching is just half the battle; studying everything that Raph Koster has written and created over the years will not turn you into the next Raph Koster. And even if game design education becomes more of a thing in the future, the problem that Garriott laments will still persist to some degree, because…well…some people have the talent, which education can shape, foster, and hone. And others…don’t, and never really will…not to the degree of a Garriott, a Koster, a Roberts, or suchlike.