If you make games professionally and continue to do so, there will come a point in your career when you will release something that’s less than you wished it were. You will fail publicly, and it will follow you around like a smelly dog. It’ll start when it shows up online, and then the rest of the world can see what most on your team have long known. Then, it will pop up every few years when someone wants to take an anonymous shot at you for reasons that are usually known only to them.

They hit you when you’re not down.

Every designer has had these games. It goes with the territory. Every designer, even the ones you cherish.

Will Wright - Sims Online

Sid Meier - CivNet

John Romero - Daikatana

The list could go on and on. And though you may invent genres and be considered a “game god” by many, it will happen to you. Eventually. Count on it.

It happens because you will take a chance on something that you don’t know as well as you know whatever you’ve been working on. You’ll step out of your comfort zone. You’ll stretch yourself and do great (Braid), okay, or you might just crash and burn. But you tried, and that public failure is the price of learning and also the price of sometimes great innovation.

For me, I stepped out of my element when I worked on Playboy: The Mansion. Ironically, it followed closely on the heels of the most critically successful game I worked on, Wizardry 8. The latter won multiple RPG of the year awards and consistently achieved high ratings (Gamespot gave it Editor’s Choice and a 9.1). It was what many on the team referred to as a labor of love.

Playboy: The Mansion was something new to me in many ways. It was in production when I got there, had a running prototype, and design docs (though they were not at all complete). Previously, I’d always worked from the ground up. It was a game that hooked into a life experience that I didn’t get (though I bet my current Playboy collection is bigger than yours). It was a “social sim” and potentially sandbox game. No one swung a sword for damage, gained levels or needed to rescue an NPC.

And so Playboy: The Mansion had a number of issues. Some of them you know if you’ve played the game. Others, you would only know if you were behind the closed doors of that development office. But really, none of these matter in the broader scope of things. I could list some of the weirder points that caused some of the game’s weirder points, but ultimately, as the lead designer, I own it. We--me and this game and you and your game-to-be--are forever hooked in a way that programmers, artists, producers and even junior designers on the same project never are. As a lead designer, when the fingers point, they point at you (and we always point them at the producer as a matter of course, but no one ever looks that way, damn it).

That ownership, that failure, comes with great benefits.

If you talk to enough game designers, you’ll discover that each of them learned so very much from their “failures.” You’ll also learn why they did it in the first place--because in the past, the same type of calculated risk taking had also brought them success. Trying to make a go of it as a professional game designer was still the single riskiest move I ever made in my life. I made the decision in Atlanta in 1989 while interviewing with IBM. I traded a life of seemingly steady, respectable work for something that sounded absurd just because (and this was the only reason) I loved making games.

And so, you take your risks, and you take your failures. They don’t feel good, but hold them close. The sum total of those failures is so much more than the single rating score or the game design that didn’t work like you hoped that it would.

And when the insults come as they inevitably will, remember what you have learned along the way, and remember that you are also in fine, fine company.