[00:18] TubaGas: www.urbandead.com
[00:23] Chris: lmao
[00:23] Chris: i think the designer to game barrier has been destroyed*
[00:24] TubaGas: yeah
[00:24] TubaGas: possibly
[00:25] Chris: that’s great news

So, what is the Designer-Game barrier, and why is it great if it’s destroyed?

(*and why don’t i think it’s been completely destroyed anymore)

The Death of the DGB

The Designer-Game barrier is the collection of technical obstacles that separate the concept a game designer comes up with from its actual implementation.

The majority of past video games (90s and earlier especially) have been limited by the capabilities of the hardware they were written for. While they often tried to represent parts of a physical world (i.e., dungeons, outer space, etc.) they would have to resort to gross simplifications. A person’s health would become a number, the world would be reduced to two dimensions, etc.

While some of these simplifications existed so that the game player wouldn’t be hopelessly overwhelmed by uninteresting information, some of them (the graphic simplifications especially) existed just because computers couldn’t do any better. One obvious example is Half-Life and Half-Life 2. The graphics aren’t better in HL2 because the designer decided they should be; they simply reflect the improvement in the ability of computers to reach the designer’s expectations.

There are two main parts to this barrier. What we have been talking about with Half-Life and Half-Life 2 has to do with the limits of the technology–one half of the barrier. Half-Life 2 pushed the edge of graphics capabilities available on computers to create a greater sense of realism. This part of the barrier comes from technology–the fact that computers couldn’t create anything half as realistic as what’s in HL2 until very recently (no wordplay intended).

Why Urban Dead?

You may ask, why did I mention Urban Dead in the beginning of this article? It’s not, after all, a game that is pushing any graphical limits whatsoever. If the Designer-Game Barrier is preventing the designer from designing a good game here, it’s not because computers are incapable of drawing the graphics the designer wants.

Rather, this is the second half of the barrier; the part that prevents amateur and independent designers from creating a good game. Most professional game builders have the advantage of working with amazing programming staffs; the people who produce games like Oblivion and Half-Life 2 are extraordinarily talented coders. Independent designers, on the other hand, don’t have the resources to create such things. As a result, toolkits that help these designers build games have been springing up like hotcakes.

The fact that a regular individual can now, without the need of a super skilled programming staff, produce something we call a game, is a great thing indeed. It means that to some extent, the barriers to enter the game creating business have fallen. Much as the Internet and personal computers allow musicians to produce and distribute music without going through large record companies (though they can only do this to a small extent), modern tools that make it easier to program and design are enabling designers* to begin to participate in the gaming market.

Here we should add that we are not yet at the point where anyone can enter the market. Certainly, PHP helps create games in a way that wasn’t available when graphics had to be handled with the hardware, and editors for modern-day games often make it much easier to create mods and create entirely new games out of old products. However, while this is easier, it’s not easy; the barrier hasn’t fallen yet, but the availability of new game creating tools that are easier to use means that we will see the creative outputs of many people who formerly could not apply their talents to video game design.

(*Amateur/hobbyist programmers have long had the ability to create games; in fact, the video game industry began not as the creation of big companies, but of programmers. If, however, say a comic book artist wanted to use their talents in story writing and art to produce a game, they would have much more limited options in, say, the 80s and early 90s.)