Modern gamers might not recognize Don Daglow by name, but you will certainly feel his influence on the games you play every day. He designed some of the earliest RPGs (1975's Dungeon), strategy games (1982's Utopia), and MMOs (1991's Neverwinter Nights, not to be confused with the BioWare game of the same name) in the industry's history.
Drawing on a half-century of experience behind the scenes of gaming, he concluded a recent Game Developers Conference talk, attended by GamesRadar+, with two pieces of advice to devs today: get a rich family, and develop your own style. Admittedly, one of those tips is a bit more serious than the other.
"I have this as one of my last points, because it is something I wanted to make prominent," Daglow says. "Have a rich daddy." He quickly acknowledged that this part is a joke – at least mostly. "No, that only solves some of the problems."
Instead, his real point is this: "You want to create styles – don't reflect them." He points to the advice given on "singing competition shows," where performers are encouraged to make sure that people recognize their voice and style within the first five seconds of a song. "Lady Gaga is a great example of somebody who does this," he explains. "Billie Eilish does this." He also points to writers like American novelist Richard Brautigan. "You read five words of Brautigan, you knew you were reading Brautigan."
What does that mean for game designers? "It's often mood," Daglow explains, citing the works of Hideo Kojima. "If you play a Kojima game, you recognize pretty quickly it's Kojima. So what you want to do is think about – this is a thing you work on for years and evolve for years, and the answer now might be one thing, and five years from now it might be something different – but we're trying to be a flame that emits heat, not a mirror that's reflecting other people and absorbing heat. That's the whole point behind this idea of having a style, of doing something that makes your work feel unique, and that is the best way to be timeless anywhere in this business and in craft."
Daglow ended his talk with the assertion that "games matter." He asked, "How do we know that games matter? Because if you've done this for a while, someone at some point – if you're around gaming people – they will come up to you and say, 'Oh, you worked on that game. You were on that team. I love that game.' And they will tell you what they loved, who they played with, when and where they were, and they will tell you why they still care."
In my case, they may have played it when they were 11 years old, and they're now 50, but the nice thing is they still care, and then they want to tell you about it. They want to tell you why. Why are they doing that? They're doing that because it matters your work, the work of your teammates, matter, and that's why they want to tell you, if you're early in your career. This may not have happened yet. Once you've been in games for a while, it inevitably will happen when you're around games people, I think it happens for all of us, that we get that experience. And the longer you stay, the more it will keep happening. It's a glorious feeling, but that's what's important, is
This kind of interaction "validates the fact that what we do matters," Daglow says. "We are not just – because this is art – we are not just diverting people. We're not just keeping them from being bored, and we're not just entertaining them. It's something that, when we are at our best, it matters. That's how you know. Now if you believe that, and you buy that observation and that logic, then I have my challenge that I always like to give. That is, if we have the ability to do things that matter in people's lives, and we are so fortunate to have that opportunity, as all of us here do: build something great. Don't take that talent and waste it. Use it, and please build something great."
