How Much Devs Should Play

tim-cain game-development game-design creativity workflow philosophy

Abstract

Problem: Should game developers play lots of games while making their own, or maintain a "clean palate" to preserve creativity?

Approach: Tim Cain draws on his PhD thesis adviser's wisdom, decades of RPG development experience (including Fallout), and concrete examples from programming and design to explore both extremes.

Findings: Both playing too little and too much are harmful. Too little means missing pitfalls, trends, and player preferences. Too much leads to feeling overwhelmed, losing originality, or slavishly chasing trends. The key is building a strong foundation, then pulling back during active production.

Key insight: Find your "happy place" — your personal design point of view — through broad play experience, then trust it during production without constantly chasing what everyone else is doing.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyrfV9-67OI

1. The PhD Thesis Analogy

Tim opens with advice from his thesis adviser in the early 1990s: look at enough existing work to get a good foundation, but don't feel obligated to consume everything. Just because someone worked in your area doesn't mean they did the right work. Understand what's been done, but don't worry about going in the same direction — you'll uncover different things.

This principle applies far beyond academia: to game development, art, programming, and any creative field.

2. The Danger of Playing Too Little

If developers play too few games, they:

  • Miss what players like and dislike — losing touch with their audience
  • Can't see where trends are heading — even if they don't want to follow them
  • Fall into known pitfalls — they might excitedly propose a feature, only to learn another game already tried it and it didn't work well. Playing that game could have saved months of wasted effort

Tim emphasizes the pitfall point as "probably the most important" reason to play other games. Seeing a feature fail in someone else's game lets you either find a better approach or abandon the idea before sinking time into it.

3. The Danger of Playing Too Much

The opposite extreme is equally problematic:

  • Ideas feel commonplace — "everybody's already done this" thinking kills motivation
  • Slavishly following trends — seeing what's popular and cramming it into your game where it doesn't belong
  • Getting overwhelmed — with 25,000 new games on Steam per year (700 per week), it's literally impossible to keep up
  • Chasing controversies — the gaming industry's weekly outrage cycles can distort your design instincts

Both "not doing something because others have done it" and "only doing something because others have done it" are bad outcomes of overconsumption.

4. Tim's Personal Approach

4.1. The Early Days (1980s–90s)

Tim played nearly every computer RPG that came out — which was feasible when at most one released per month. Even games he didn't play himself, he watched friends and coworkers play at Interplay's after-hours gaming sessions.

4.2. Finding His Point of View

By the late 1990s/early 2000s, after over a decade in the industry, Tim had developed his design lens:

  • Games with reactivity
  • Games with multiple solutions
  • Games where you create your own character

This became his "happy place" — his personal design POV, refined through years of broad play experience. He was 13 years into the industry before he started making Fallout.

4.3. During Active Production

Once a game enters production, Tim's play drops to near zero. Two reasons:

  1. No time — he gets deeply passionate and thinks about the game constantly, even at home
  2. No distractions — he doesn't want to get pulled into a trend or controversy that doesn't fit the approved design

When colleagues are incredulous that he hasn't played some new release, he points out they haven't played everything either — and once you have an approved design document and an assembled team, you shouldn't keep changing direction because of the latest game.

4.4. Pre-Production Research

Before production, Tim does research the landscape: checking game sites, reading reviews, and if something very close to his idea exists, playing it thoroughly. For merely similar games, he'll watch gameplay videos or ask friends about them.

5. This Applies Beyond Design

Tim stresses this isn't just a design question — it applies to art and code too.

He shares a programming anecdote: a colleague who first used only dynamic memory allocation (causing fragmentation), then swung to pre-allocating everything (causing buffer overflows), then tried both simultaneously (causing both problems). The programmer kept reinventing known solutions because he wasn't aware of established patterns — but also would have been paralyzed trying to learn every approach before writing any code.

6. The Recommendation

For aspiring and active game developers:

  1. Play enough games to figure out what you like — find your own style and point of view
  2. Accept this takes time — Tim spent 13 years building his foundation before Fallout
  3. Find your happy place — your personal design sensibility
  4. Then live there — don't constantly worry about what everyone else is doing
  5. You might be the next big thing — so stop worrying about missing the next big thing

7. References