Execution

 It's something that everyone who plays a game can instantly pick up, but nobody is able to explain what exactly it is. It even has a pretty mysterious name: Execution. No matter how nebulous the term is, a game designer must always pay great attention to execution, and while it's easy to delegate the job of execution to the developers, a designer must always remain aware of it.

How much of a game's quality is based on its execution? It's hard to tell, but i've heard of games whose concept did not excite me but when playing them, i actually enjoyed them, and vice versa. Actually, i can conjure a staggering amount of examples where the opposite is true, where a game's concept excited me only for the way it's made to promptly kill that enthusiasm. If i had to answer the question of how important execution is though, then i would describe the relationship as such: if a game was a person, then its concept would be the DNA and execution would be the entire rest of its life, from its beginning to every single step of its growth to its end. 

So, what exactly constitutes as execution? Well, as i said before, execution lies mainly with the developer, but the game designer also has to worry about execution. Let us review an example and i will use an example from my designs, since i am familiar with them. Let us say that you are designing a minecraft server. Your concept is that you would like your players to trade with each other. Now it's time to define execution, which i will divide into two levels. The first level is high or conceptual execution. In our example, conceptual execution was my decision to take the resources needed for every player and scatter them across the world in a way where only a single kind of resource would generate in a single area, called a resource node, with different nodes covering the entire map. The second level is low execution, which is the closest to a developer's execution a designer will ever be. Low-level execution included questions such as how big will the nodes be? How many of them should there be? It would be a nice idea to place nodes that contain resources needed to craft a single item as further apart from one another. It would be a nice idea to tie certain resources with certain terrain, like gun ore to mountains and coal/sulfur to the ocean. These little decisions all add up and give shape to the game's/mechanic's/concept's character through execution. 

Doing execution well is an rational skill in game design. Execution greatly impacts ease of play/access, quality of life and other aspects of game design which can be less subjective. A game designer must learn from other designers' execution in order to complement their own designs with execution decisions which resonate with the concept and the game's goals. Actually, a game designer, first, must build a sense for execution. When i am playing a game, the first thing i take notice is how it feels to play. This feeling is then compared with the feeling i got from playing other, similar games, letting me understand how certain execution decisions make the gameplay feel different. This is what i meant when i said that games, mechanics or concepts have "character". This feeling that a player gets once they play the game is what i call the game's character and just like how decisions shape a person's character, so do the designer's decisions shape the game's character.