In a previous post I talked briefly about how the experience and expectations of players influenced game designers and game developers, to create games for the people who were already familiar with other games and their habits. But there is another problem: what about the expectations of the designers themselves?

Designers have been playing games too. Disappearing bodies, health bars, WASD controls, all of these things are elements of games that designers often fall back too. And there are tons of them. Pick up any random shooter and you will find at least 20 of these cases that would not be believable in the ‘real world’. And let’s be honest; I can’t do it either.

But it is not just the designer himself who causes this. There are programmers who tell you what they are capable of (or everything they are not capable of), producers, investors and marketeers that ask you to come up with cheap solutions so that the job can be done faster and there are gamers who will always expect a certain level of familiarity. In only a few cases, designers have almost absolute freedom in what they design – too bad that in these cases, designers create what players want and that is, unfortunately, mostly what they expect.

So what is it for me? Is there a way to overcome these game habits and create something that is more believe able than any other recent video game? Let’s hope so…