Purpose: Everything Exists for a Reason

Purpose-based design#

At the very core of this design technology is the role of purpose. The purpose is the most important thing. For any project.

Other words for purpose would be intention, meaning, reason, or simply: "Why do this project? For what reason?"

The goal is to discover the purpose as clearly as possible, then use it to guide every design decision in the project, no matter how small or big, significant or insignificant. Everything is dictated by purpose. Everything that is in the project has a reason to be there, and a reason to be there in a certain way.

• Everything that happens, happens for a reason.
• Everything that exists, exists for a reason.
• Every decision has a clear, verifiable reason behind it.
• Every action has a reason behind its execution.

That's the mindset in short. The complications in the details are what actually decide whether it works properly or not: how to apply it, why it works and what to expect from it. The rest of this part is about those details.

Why purpose matters so much#

Without purpose, there is no way to find the best option during a design decision. You'd be moving blind. You'd be far more likely to make poor decisions, get lost and confused, and end up deeply disappointed when a decision turns out to be bad, without even knowing why.

In other words, ignoring this stuff KILLS projects. It ruins them, makes them worse and renders them a useless waste of time. Both the developer and the players are left with a product that enriches neither of their lives. Garbage. Junk.

Let me spell out the chain, because it's easy to nod at this and move on. A design decision made without purpose is a guess. A game is made of thousands of design decisions, and each guess has a chance of pulling the game away from what it was meant to give. Those small pulls add up, and they hide inside each other: a bad camera choice makes the controls feel worse, which makes the difficulty feel unfair, which makes you add an easier mode, which makes the challenge meaningless. Nobody can see that tangle while building it, because there's no reference to check it against. You only find out when the game is finished and people play it and leave, and by then the months or years are spent.

Given that game development can take years, that is really bad. You're left with your dream not realized, your needs no closer to being met, and a project that took a lot of energy and time with nothing to offer. Only lots of disappointment and a "learning experience" that tells you that you failed this time, but not why. We humans are not immortal. Every moment counts, and we can't afford to waste our time and energy creating garbage.

I've seen many people and groups develop projects without this knowledge and create really bad games as a result, making poor design decisions in every way possible, and eventually quit game development thinking it's not for them. They end up frustrated, sad and angry, even though their original intentions and dreams were good.

As a player, it's equally frustrating to watch someone work on something through trial and error, make design decisions that work against their own game, and end up with a broken mess that isn't even enjoyable or usable. Nobody wins. Not the creator, not the user. Everyone leaves disappointed. I feel sadness, anger and frustration when I see someone create something with good intention and fail at the design, because I can't enjoy what they made, and they can't keep going long enough to make something better.

That kind of trial-and-error development is neither the most effective use of time nor the most accurate way to realize dreams. There are far better ways, and this book will show them. I'd feel a lot of happiness if developers took them to heart and applied them to their projects.

Purpose is the source of motivation#

Purpose is also the ultimate source of motivation. Understanding the purpose lets a creator work on a project and endure hardships and obstacles like nothing else, with a burning passion and a feeling of importance that gets you out of bed every morning to work on it.

The opposite is just as true. If the purpose is lost, or not understood clearly enough, or a better, cheaper, more convenient alternative for meeting it shows up, there's no source of motivation left to keep working on the project, let alone finish it.

This explains something many developers experience and blame on themselves: the project that started with a lot of excitement and slowly became a chore. Usually that isn't laziness or a lack of discipline. The excitement was the purpose talking, and somewhere along the way the project drifted away from it. Features got added because they seemed expected, the scope grew in directions the original inspiration never asked for, and the project stopped being the thing you wanted. Your motivation didn't disappear for no reason. It noticed the drift before you did.

The fix isn't to push harder. It's to go back to the purpose, find out where the project drifted from it, and cut or change what doesn't serve it. When the project lines up with its purpose again, the motivation tends to come back on its own.

Purpose also works as an unbreakable compass whenever the project is at a crossroads and you have to choose one option or another. And whenever there's doubt about what to do next, the purpose is a reminder, a light that shines in the right direction and eventually reveals what to do, even when information about something important is vague or missing. Purpose as a Compass shows how to use it this way, every day.

Purpose in a team#

If you're working in a group or a team, the role of purpose is critically important. It's what lets everyone on board understand why the project is being made.

Think about what happens without it. Every person on the team has their own guess about what the game is for. The artist paints for one game, the programmer builds systems for another, the writer writes for a third, and the marketing describes a fourth. Each of them is doing good work, by their own guess. The result is a game that pulls in several directions at once, and nobody can say why it feels off, because each piece looks fine on its own. Arguments come next, because without a shared reference every disagreement becomes a contest of opinions and seniority instead of a question with an answer.

With a clear purpose that everyone understands, disagreements change shape. "I like A, you like B" becomes "which of these serves the purpose better?", which can be tested and answered. People stop fighting each other and start looking at the same thing.

As a designer, if I'm working on someone else's inspiration rather than my own, I need to know what it is, or I won't be able to extract a clear purpose to drive, motivate and understand the project and push it to completion. That's why the questions in Three Projects, Two Designers dig so deep into the partners' feelings and needs. You can't serve a purpose nobody has told you about.

Where purpose comes from#

So, everything that happens, happens for a reason. Purpose always has an origin. To understand that origin, you have to understand human beings and what drives them.

That's what the next chapter is about. It's the part where, depending on what you've been told in school, by your parents or by your friends, things might get a little mind-blowing. Stay with it. Everything else in this book stands on it.