Abstract
Problem: Game designers often enter projects with grand visions for story, setting, and mechanics — but the video game medium itself imposes constraints that other media don't share. How should designers think about these unavoidable compromises?
Approach: Tim Cain draws parallels to compromises in other media (TV show budgets dictating actor appearances), then walks through the technical and non-technical compromises unique to game development.
Findings: Compromises fall into three categories: technical limitations (graphics, collision, zone size), pacing and player behavior (you can't force attention or movement), and future-proofing (ensuring games remain playable years later). The key is to work with the medium rather than fight against it.
Key insight: Dangle carrots, don't swing sticks — encourage the player experience you want rather than forcing it, because fighting your chosen medium is a losing battle.
Every Medium Demands Compromise
Tim frames the discussion by distinguishing this topic from other kinds of compromise he's covered before — team dynamics, skill mismatches, or the advantages games have (player agency, nonlinearity). This video is specifically about things you cannot do or must do differently because you chose video games as your medium.
The TV Show Analogy
To illustrate that every medium has its own constraints, Tim uses TV production as an example. Actors are paid per episode and per speaking line. Budget pressures mean you might compress a character's three-episode arc into one episode, or reassign their dialogue to another character — not for creative reasons, but because the money saved can go toward special effects, location shooting, or music licensing. The original story gets reshaped by the realities of the medium.
Technical Compromises
Game design has an enormous number of technical compromises, arguably more than any other storytelling medium.
Graphics and Visual Fidelity
Your giant multi-tentacled blob creature? The lead programmer says you can have two tentacles. Your sprawling open zone encouraging exploration? It needs to be chopped into instanced sub-zones. Your dense jungle with swaying foliage in the wind? Too many polygons. Each of these forces a redesign — a different creature, a different zone structure, a different setting.
Mechanics and Spells
Even gameplay mechanics aren't immune. Spell ideas that are too computationally intense get redesigned. Tim emphasizes that the sheer number of technological moving parts in games means frequent redesign is normal, not exceptional.
Non-Technical Compromises: Pacing
Unlike movies, TV shows, or books, games cannot force the player's movement or attention. The player is the main character, and they will do what they want.
Carrots Over Sticks
Tim has watched designers throughout his career take a "design sledgehammer" to their games — locking players in areas, forcing encounters, preventing progress until specific actions are taken. He strongly discourages this approach. You're fighting against the very medium you chose.
Instead, encourage good pacing:
- Reward exploration
- Design combat to occur at natural intervals with appropriate difficulty and duration
- Use mechanics like random encounters (borrowed from D&D's dungeon wandering monster checks) to signal that the world is active and moving
Some players will still refuse to follow your intended path. Accept it. Most players will follow the carrots.
Future-Proofing
Games have a future-proofing problem that movies and books largely don't. A film from the 1930s can be digitized and watched today without issue. A game from the 1990s? Maybe, maybe not.
What You Can Future-Proof
- Input: Support keyboard and controller rebinding, because input paradigms change (WASD wasn't always standard)
- Visuals: Ship with graphics options so better hardware can take advantage of higher settings over time
- Aspirational settings: Tim recalls a 1990s flight sim that shipped with visual settings no card on the market could handle — but within a year or two, cards caught up
What You Can't
Some shifts are too fundamental: 2D to 3D, mono to stereo/5.1 surround. You can't just press a button to upgrade across those boundaries. Hardware and OS backward compatibility helps (some consoles play previous-gen games, some OS upgrades break everything), but it's not something the game developer fully controls.
Tim notes it's still remarkable that Windows games from the 1990s can often still run in the 2020s — partly thanks to future-proofing at the hardware and OS level.
The Bottom Line
Even solo developers who think "I can do whatever I want" face these compromises. Choosing to express yourself through a video game means accepting the medium's constraints. The best designers understand this early and design with the medium, not against it.
Source: Compromising For The Medium by Tim Cain