The statistician in me has been in denial for some time about some growing evidence in favor of the wisdom of crowds. The cover of James Surowiecki’s book has caught my attention during nearly every visit I’ve made to the business book se…

I read through the Valve Cabal process and came to the conclusion that its little wonder it takes so long to develop Half Life. I’m surprised at their apparent lack of confidence in design. A strong design process should resolve the same conflicts they wait to see occur when viewing an end user playing their game. This sadly hints at the disease that is ‘subjective design’; where everyone in the industry from the CEO down and across, thinks they can ‘design’ a game. The acceptance of his attitude is the dam that stops the sea of design innovation. I’m not aware of other industries where non designers think they can design. What’s harder to accept is that this attitude pervades in an environment where game design has no clear language in the same way that film or literature has. I digress.

So, can you apply a democratic process to design within a realistic time-frame? A bottle neck for design … code implementation. Until the design has code support, a designer has no idea if the vision, with all its components will be a success. A strong design process should mitigate some risk, but not all.
Providing designers with tools that allow them to control and manage the design would be the most important step in allowing democratic success. It should go without saying, but trust, stable pipelines, and a clear, communicated design vision would also be required to support an empowering design methodology.

Two of the most successful games in recent memory may already have the solution … Burnout & GTA. What do they have in common? Renderware. What else? A set of design rules that can be updated and expanded to create a new game experience without re-inventing the wheel. Whether or not the design process is democratic remains to be seen, but I would guess this is definitely the case with GTA. The imbalance and often lack of common sense with some it its mission design suggests it has many cooks. In the case of GTA, it appears there is no head chef of mission design, something sorely needed to maintain consistency.
Another example exists but I don’t want to mention the developers name as I’m not clear on how open they are on their process. The developer spent money and time creating a game engine with a set of powerful tools that empower their design. My information may be out of date but its understood they started out with a programmer heavy team with some art support to help sell the concept to publishers. Sometime later the developer had a proprietary engine, not so dissimilar to Renderware. Less than a handful of Programmers continue to maintain the engine and occasionally code a new function to support a designers vision. I’m not sure how the art is integrated but I would imagine it could be outsourced with a two to three person team that drives the art direction.

So, what else would be required to truly encourage a design led industry? A stable graphical environment, backed by market acceptance, where technology is allowed to plateau so design can lead. It can be argued the market already accepts this if you consider the continued success of the Playstation2. Unfortunately the hardware manufacturers, encouraged by developers obsessed with technological innovation when they should be calling for design innovation, consistently seduce publishers who are willing to allie to the vision, strap on their seatbelts and climb the roller coaster once again.

Von Hippel’s theory of lead user innovation is really great, and his books on the subject are totally worth reading (though you can probably skip to the most recent).

Basically, he has spent the past couple decades trying to prove that the best innovations come from end-users whose needs aren’t being met by corporations. The end-user invents something that meets his/her needs, and it spreads organically to other end-users. Often enough, corporations adopt the innovation after the fact. Von Hippel has documented many cases of this occuring.

The best example in the video game industry is Counter-Strike — created by users, remarkably successful, and ultimately adopted by Valve.

I’ve considered this question too but, I have never got around to looking into it in detail. I don’t lean either way, yet. I also think about it more as democratic design. I recenly came across this book … its my first step in solidifying y thinking on the matter: http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm