The Learning of Design

This weekend, I was visiting with friends, and ended up talking about how I learned to make games. I constantly tell my friends, family and complete strangers how much fun game design is, and that they should give it a shot. The short answer is that I studied game design in college, and took classes, but that's far from being helpful.
I learned from a variety of sources, but mostly by listening to the masters, and practicing. In my opinion, taking classes for game design can only help you so much. A lot of what I learned was from reading articles and forum posts by game designs. Mark Rosewater (Lead Designer for Magic the Gathering) has been putting out weekly articles about design for over a decade. While many of his articles are specific for Magic, he also has regular pieces on more general design. Additionally, his MTG specific articles still describe the processes that he and the other designers went through to create the product.

Beyond that, Blizzard "Blue Posts" and Riot "Red Posts" on their respective forums show not only the personality of the designers, but also how they interact with their audience, how to present changes and content, and ways to frame a design based argument. While the forums can sometimes devolve into troll-fests, designers often keep cool heads and are able to explain the rationale behind their decisions.

Reading the developer blogs or forums of major studios, reading articles, listening to podcasts or watching videos is an excellent start. For me, the most valuable part of these pieces are one-liners of advice. For example, when designing an RPG "Never say no. Say 'Yes!' or 'Roll for it!'" Other phrases such as "Restrictions breed creativity." or "When in doubt, playtest again." are not true instructions on how to create games, but instead give you a jumping off point, and keep you thinking about games.

While I want to avoid sounding pretentious, Game Design is an art. Creating a game is an inter-departmental affair, with writing, visual art, the mechanics design being only some of what needs to be done. While the story, flavor and art are not always done by the game designer, it is important for the designer to have a working understanding of those areas, so that they can integrate the other portions of a game into the mechanics.

Because of this range of knowledge that is important for game design, my recommendation is taking classes equally across the spectrum, with some of the most important being creative writing, art, psychology and logic. The first two help you understand other aspects of games, and the later two make you think about how people think and interact. Without understanding all of this, your game will be not as good as you could make it.

If you're a student interested in game design, and you're looking for a class to take, nearly anything can be relevant. As a game designer, you will be making an interactive art, and so any study of how humanity functions or functioned is relevant. While you might get more direct information from a class on logic, and how people approach puzzles, if you take a class on the Italian city-nations of the renaissance, you'll learn about how people thought and acted, and you can see how they have changed, or how they didn't. The extra perspective makes your understanding of your audience (Humanity) better.

Of course, in addition to taking these sorts of classes and studying the works of other designers, the best way to get better at making games is to go out and design games. Sitting down and developing an idea (even a bad one) is the an excellent method for improvement. Play-testing and revision are even more helpful than coming up with a new idea, because it  places restrictions on you, which forces you to become more imaginative.