Randy Smith is a lead game designer at EA's LA studio. His current project is a collaboration with Steven Spielberg.
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Videogames. There’s so much to love, and yet there’s so much to ridicule. As a player, encountering one of the old chestnuts is deflating. As a designer, I stress that all this reliance on unimaginative solutions blocks our ability to evolve beyond them. Just to keep it fresh, I’m going to avoid talking about crates. Harshing on crates is too cliché.

Health packs: One design challenge with combat gameplay is resolving the need to support partial failure against the need for fictional consistency. Suppose you’ve decided that gaping axe wounds don’t stick around and heal over the course of several weeks. Therefore it follows that eating fried chicken every 20 minutes makes wounds close up like a blessed miracle. I’m sure you’ve noticed that the regulars at KFC are always jumping around and whipping candles.

Vent gameplay: Everyone wants choice and freedom in their game. As an example, either you can confront the challenges or, since it’s such an open-ended game, you can avoid the gameplay entirely by pounding around in an enormous aluminium tube. Someday, to really capitalise on this design feature, we’ll figure out how to make a vent that takes you from the intro straight to the last room.

Swaying idle animations: Idle animations add life to scenes when characters are just standing around. It was clever when Sonic kicked the dust off his shoes the first time, but now all the townsfolk in Zelda are constantly swaying back and forth hypnotically. What’s the deal, do they have to go potty? Did they spend most of their lives on boats? Are they about to perform a cobra strike? They make me dizzy.

The handler: I know I’m just a lost, confused player, but maybe you could find some way to help me stay on track other than an invisible, omniscient being lurking over my shoulder and talking me through every situation I wind up in. It’s creepy. What if I have to go to the bathroom? “Look around, the flush button might be a floor switch. Push 1 because you only took a leak.”

Fighting is the only way we can think to get the player involved: Violence is bad. World leaders are blinded by bloodlust. Watch this half-hour movie about nuclear proliferation. OK, now strangle and knife a bunch of goons from behind. Shoot everybody. You’re saving the world.

Boss monsters that you can only hurt when they open their mouths: Actually, I kind of like that. What if they have armoured skin? It makes perfect sense.

Invisible walls: Don’t walk off the edge of the screen, that’s not where your character would go. He’s not interested in what happens outside the village right now. Play nice.

Crates: Personally, what I like to do is buy a giant ceramic pot, or a huge crate, then stick maybe one roast chicken in it, or ammunition for a gun I don’t own, then leave it around the apartment for those occasions when strangers who walk in to ask me about a cave in the hills need to start smashing my shit before they feel ready to leave. Oh right, I wasn’t going to talk about crates. But this isn’t about stacking them or pushing them on pressure plates. Totally different.

Quick-time events: I’m Jason Bourne. I can make a deadly weapon out of a box of tissues. I can improvise my way out of the tightest scrapes. Push exactly these buttons at the right time to watch this cutscene of me beating some guys up really fast. Games traditionally haven’t been able to figure out how to give players adequate control over beating guys up really fast, so we had to rely on cutscenes. But at least you get to push the buttons during the cutscenes. That’s because it’s your game.

Animals have pockets filled with gold and equipment: Is it really necessary to reward players for literally every accomplishment?

Data logs: It’s the future. When we need to capture some fleeting thought, we get out a fancy metal box the size of a briefcase, covered in lights and tubes. It can record seconds of speech with a crackling, tinny sound. Then we drop them to the ground and wander around the space station, because being organised is so 20th century.

The hero/loser: You’re the best field agent in our organisation. But you won’t get to evolve your character if you actually start off as powerful as we claim you are. So we’re sending you in with the weakest gun we have. And only a few rounds of ammo. When you get to the mission, try to look around for some body armour or something. Also, you should really acquire some skills. You kind of suck.