Game Design and Music: learning quickly going slowly

Today is the first article in what I hope will be a recurring series about music and game design, where I explore different connections among the two fields and I talk about what music can teach us when making games. Obviously the two have a lot in common: they are creative fields, based on structures and patterns created over the years, that take advantage of the functioning of the human mind to evoke certain emotions. Indeed music composition can resemble the act of designing a game, but this will be the argument for another article. Today I will tallk about how learning to play an instrument has helped me improve in other areas of my life, including game design.

A life to play

I started playing piano very late in my life, I was 21 years old. Learning an instrument as an adult can suck sometimes, as everytime you play, you are reminded of all the the time you have wasted starting this late in life, you have to study on books with drawings for kids and you have to accept that there is a limit to how good you can get. But it also has a lot of advantages: you can reflect upon your methods to learn faster and more efficiently, you can watch and understand many videos to be more intentional with your practice, you can aim to your real objectives in life.

I learned many things about our brains and how to make the most out of training time, but the most important lesson is simplest one: to learn a new melody, play it as slowly as necessary to avoid making any mistake, then, when you are confident, increase the speed little by little. The idea is to let the brain memorize what the fingers have to do, without memorizing any mistakes, and then train it to play it faster and faster. It may seem obvious at first, but we have a natural impatiance when learning new things, a tendency to try to speed up the process that often results in less learning and a lot of frustration.

How do we translate this in game design?

The iterative cycle

Those familiar with game design will notice that the act of improving something little by little by continous repetitions resembles something often found in game production: the iterative design process.

The iterative process is a design philosophy in which games are designed, tested and adjusted continously throughout the development. The idea is that after designing anything, the designer should playtest it as quickly as possible, and, based on that test, adjust the design accordingly to then test again. This is opposed to the so called Waterfall Model, in which the game is designed and then passes through all the different stages of development without ever coming back to a previous stage (like a waterfall).

So, if the iterative cycle in game design resembles the learning process of a piece of music, what lessons can we learn? First of all, we have to adjust the suggestion I gave for music, as there is no such thing as designing a game slowly, or rather, it doesn't seem like a great suggestion. We have to go back to the original idea behind the suggestion to play slowly, that is, to minimize the number of mistakes. So we could assume that we have to minimize the number of false assumptions and mistakes we make while designing a game. But it's actually more complicated than that: you have to play it as slowly as necessary, never slower than that, otherwise your learning process will slow down too. On the other hand, you must not hurry and go too fast, or you run the risk of learning the wrong things. This is also true for game design: if you change or implement too little, your iteration cycles will become too slow, wasting a lot of precious time. On the other hand, hurrying and changing too much can create a lot of confusion, as you don't know what works and what doesn't. After a playtest you should always wonder what is the right amount of changes to inform your process while keeping a coherent and understandable structure. If speed equals number of changes, then the end result of an iterative process will be the game with the right number of changes compared to your starting idea, exactly as the end result of learning a song is playing it at the right speed without making mistakes. Hence the idea is to slowly add things to your game until it reaches its goal in terms of design vision and entertainment.

Focus points

While learning a new song, there will often be some points where you repeatedly make mistakes at the speed you chose for the rest of the song. If you slow down the entire song you will waste a lot of time repeating things you already know how to play. If you play only the challenging parts, you won't learn how to connect them with the rest of the melody. The simple solution is to slow down and play only the challenging part while also including the bar preceding it and the bar following it.

Likewise, in game design, you don't have to iterate on the entire game, but there will be some features that may require a different "speed" in the iterative cycle. You should concentrate your efforts on that feature alone, without forgetting to include the other mechanics of your game that connect to that feature, to understand the impact your decisions have on your game as a whole. Obviously games have many moving parts and it's difficult to always understand the connections between the mechanics and which should take priority in your iterative process, but I hope these suggestions will come in handy.

The crazy pianist

There is a last thing I want to address before leaving. Today i suggested to avoid changing too much in your game in an iterative cycle, but I don't mean avoiding drastic changes. Actually, in many stages of design, it is suggested to make drastic changes to learn as many things as possible. What I do mean is to avoid changing many things at once: make drastic changes, but one at the time, to understand their concequences on your game.

It would be the equivalent of scanning through a score to find the parts that could be challenging and trying to play them in many different ways to make sure you have learned them well. Often when I want to be sure about certain parts of a song, I will play them with my eyes closed, or inverting the hands, or while singing or with people watching and so on. Drastic things I do but always focused on specific parts while also trying to avoid mistakes and confusion.

Playing and playing

That's all for today, I look forward to writing another article about music and game design. After all, they both are about playing, so it shouldn't surprise that they are connected. I'd like to point out that when learning a new skill or approaching a new field, it's always a good idea to understand what is its "speed", the thing that you want to increase but that causes mistakes, and apply the same logic seen today.

See you next week, when we'll all suck a little less!