The Elements of a Game


In this section, we give a formal definition of a game and describe the elements that comprise one. Remember that we're talking about any kind of game, computerized or not. We continue to use these terms throughout the book.

Games , Toys, and Puzzles

A game is a form of participatory, or interactive, entertainment. Watching television, reading, and going to the theater are all forms of passive entertainment. In those media, the entertainment is presented to you, and you're not expected to participate. In some plays, the audience itself has a role, but even then the actors are in control. The content of the entertainment is the drama, and the way you perceive it is by watching it. This mode is fundamentally passive: They act, you watch.

A game is a much more complicated thing. When people play a game, they are being entertained by actively participating. Although we use the term interactive entertainment to refer to computer and video games, any game is interactive if you're taking part in it, whether it's softball or postal chess. Active forms of entertainment are slowly gaining ground over passive forms; people are starting to play online role-playing games instead of watching TV. People love the feeling of involvement and empowerment that gaming gives.

A game takes place in an artificial universe that is governed by rules . The rules define the actions or moves that the players may make in the game, and also the actions that they may not make. In a computer game, most of these rules are hidden. Because you can interact with the game only through the machine's input devices, and the machine can ignore inappropriate inputs, you don't have to be told the rules explicitly. Computer games generally allow you to try anything you want; you can presume that anything you can do, you are allowed to do.

When you're playing a game, especially board games and computer games, you're often playing a role of some sort . Defining the player's role is a key part of game design, and we'll discuss it in more detail later.

Other kinds of interactive entertainment are not games. A toy is an object that you play with without rules. You can play a game with a toy if you make up some rules to play by, but ordinarily a toy does not come with rules.

Unlike a toy, a puzzle does have one definite rule: It has a correct solution that you are trying to find. Puzzles are normally worked by one person. Typically, they require problem-solving skills and the ability to think ahead, but they don't involve any role-playing and are not set in an artificial universe.

Challenges, Gameplay, and the Victory Condition

The rules also define the obstacles, or challenges , that the players must overcome to win the game. The challenges, together with the actions the players can take to meet them, make up the gameplay . Defining and tuning the gameplay is the largest and most difficult task in designing a game; this is discussed extensively in Chapter 7, "Gameplay."

Included with the rules of most (but not all) games is a special rule that defines the victory condition : a state of affairs in which one or more players are said to be the winner. Usually, the first player to achieve the victory condition is the winner and the others are the losers. These kinds of games are said to be competitive ”that is, the players are trying to achieve the victory condition for themselves while preventing the others from doing so. Some games define the rules in such a way that all players must work together to achieve the victory condition; these are called cooperative games. If groups of players work together against other groups of players, the game is a team game. Most noncomputerized games ”and many computerized ones as well ”are multi-player games; if a game is played by one player alone, it is a single-player or solitaire game. Many video games sold at retail offer several different play modes: single-player, two-player competitive, two-player cooperative, and so on. Sports games are particularly well suited to these kinds of variations.

In addition to a victory condition, many games have one or more loss conditions . Sometimes the loss condition is implicit: If you aren't the first to achieve the victory condition, you lose. But in others, the loss conditions are explicit: Your character has died, for example, or you have run out of some vital resource.

Some computer games have no victory condition. These are often construction and management simulations such as Sim City . Rather than trying to "win" by achieving the victory condition, you can set your own goals for what you're trying to achieve. Or, you can just play around with the game without trying to achieve anything in particular. ( Sim City also has some scenarios with victory conditions.) These kinds of games are sometimes referred to as software toys .

Many single-player arcade games, such as Tetris , are peculiar in that they have no victory condition. They are effectively unwinnable; the game just gets harder and harder until eventually you must lose. You do, however, get a score based on your ability, and your goal is to be listed among the top players. In effect, the victory condition is to do better than other people who play the game, but you can never actually win the game itself.

Setting, Interaction Model, and Perspective

A game also takes place in a setting or world. A sport such as football, for example, takes place on a field with defined boundaries. A board game takes place on and around the board. Even simple games with cards, dice, or dominoes take place on a tabletop, and the players implicitly agree that the table is the only legitimate playing surface. Because a computer screen has the capacity to display anything, a computer game can take place in any setting imaginable. We talk more about game settings and worlds in Chapter 3, "Game Settings and Worlds ." For now, it's enough to know that a game's setting is part of its concept.

The way that the player interacts with the game world ”takes actions to overcome the challenge ”is called the game's interaction model . There are many different interaction models; some games have different models at different points in the game or allow the player to choose from a selection of models.

Two interaction models are particularly common in computer gaming. If the player plays in the game world by controlling a single character or piece that represents him, and if that character exists in a single place and can influence only the local area around him, that character is called his avatar . In Nintendo's Mario games, Mario is the player's avatar. On the other hand, if the player has the ability to view different parts of the game world, taking actions in many different places, the player is said to be omnipresent (even if parts of the world are hidden from him at times). This applies even if the player can act only by directing characters or units that belong to him; if he has the power to give directions to all of them independently, he is omnipresent. A good example of this kind of game is chess. The player can move any of his own pieces on the board, no matter where they are.

Perspective describes how the player actually sees the world on the screen. In war games, players usually have an aerial perspective above the battlefield. If the view is from directly above, like looking at a map, this is called a top-down perspective. Most old war games, as well as the original Sim City , used this perspective. Beginning with Populous , however, many aerial-perspective games adopted a more dramatic viewpoint. In this the view is at a 30- or 45-degree angle from the vertical, looking slightly across the landscape and not just straight down. The landscape is also rotated 45 degrees with respect to the bottom of the screen, so the player is always looking at one corner of rectangular objects such as buildings . This is called an isometric perspective. This viewpoint makes the player feel closer and more involved with events than the top-down perspective. It has the disadvantage that, if it can be rotated in 90-degree steps, the art team has to draw four different versions of everything that can appear on the ground, from each of the four angles.

Many games offer different perspectives or camera angles that the user can change. Not all camera angles suit all games; perspectives that are visually stunning to watch from can turn out to be impractical during actual gameplay. Madden NFL Football , for example, normally uses a perspective in which the camera is above and behind the ball carrier, looking somewhat downfield toward the goal. But it also provides a sideline camera, showing the field as it would appear to someone sitting in the stands. Although this is a very familiar perspective and is great for taking screenshots that look like real football on television, the game is quite difficult to play from this angle.

You're probably familiar with many common perspectives: first person , in which you look through the eyes of your avatar (most commonly found in first-person shooters such as Half-Life ); third person, in which you follow behind your avatar in a three-dimensional world ( Tomb Raider is one of the best-known examples); and side-scrolling , commonly seen in older video games such as Sonic the Hedgehog . With the introduction of 3D display engines, games can use any number of perspectives at no additional cost in art development time.

The Player's Role

When you're playing a game, especially board games and computer games, you're often playing a role of some sort. In Monopoly, you're playing a real estate tycoon. In Goldeneye, you're playing James Bond. Defining the player's role in the game world is a key part of defining your game's concept. If the player's role is difficult to describe, it might be difficult for the player to grasp as well, and it might indicate that there is a conceptual problem with the game. This doesn't mean that the role always has to be simple. In Madden NFL Football , for example, the player can be either a football player, a coach, or both. As the coach, he calls the plays that his team will run and makes player substitutions. As a player, he takes the snap, passes the ball, and runs with it. In fact, he's not controlling any single player; he's controlling whichever one happens to be in possession of the ball. On defense, he can switch from player to player to control whichever one has the best chance of tackling the ball carrier.

This works very well in a football game, where these roles, although different from one another in real life, are well understood by the game's audience and are exactly the ones they want to perform. But if a game takes place in a less familiar world with less familiar objectives, it's important for the roles to be clear. If the player's role changes from time to time ”especially involuntarily ”it's essential that the player know why it changed and be able to adapt quickly to the new circumstances.

The player's role also helps the player to understand what he's trying to achieve and what rules he's playing by. In Sierra Online's Police Quest series, for example, the player takes on the role of a real police officer. Real police officers can't just shoot anything that moves; they have to obey strict rules about when and how to use their guns. Tactical combat simulations such as Rainbow Six and Counter-Strike also implement these sorts of rules, placing the player in the shoes of a real Special Forces soldier. By telling the player what role he'll be playing, the player knows that his actions will have to be more cautious than in the usual frenetic shooter.

Modes and Structure

Some games, such as checkers, work the same way from beginning to end. The player is always trying to accomplish the same thing in the same way. Other games have distinct modes , in which the nature of the gameplay changes significantly from one mode to the next . War games, for example, might have a strategic mode in which you plan which battles you intend to fight and a tactical mode in which you actually fight the battles . Many things often change when the game switches modes: the interaction model, the perspective, the player's role, and some of the challenges.

In addition, many games have noninteractive modes that are interspersed with the interactive ones. War games, again, often have a briefing that occurs before the battle to explain to you what resources you have and what your objectives are, and a debriefing that occurs afterward to summarize what happened and tell you whether you won or lost.

The relationships between the modes and the rules determining when and why the game switches among them collectively form the structure of the game. The best way to document the structure of a game is with a flowchart , a series of boxes representing the modes with arrows from one to the next showing how the transitions occur. At the concept stage, this doesn't have to be detailed, but if you're designing a game with multiple modes, you should have at least a general idea of what modes you want and why.

Realism

When a game depicts a world, even an imaginary one, in such a way that the principles of real-world logic and common sense apply, we say that the game is realistic . Microsoft Flight Simulator , which tries to model accurately the behavior of real aircraft, is a good example. On the other hand, when a game has quite arbitrary rules and you cannot count on real-world common sense, as in Pac-Man , for example, we say that the game is abstract . We discuss realism in more detail in Chapter 3.

At the concept stage, you don't have to decide exactly how realistic your game is going to be. For example, in designing a war game, you might defer decisions about whether to allow friendly fire to harm your own troops. In real life, the military goes to great lengths to prevent friendly fire incidents, but tragically, they still do happen. In a war game, in which the player rarely has precise control over how each weapon is aimed, it might be placing too much of a burden on the player to handle the friendly fire problem. On the other hand, this might be an issue that you want to focus on. Play-testing can tell you whether it's manageable, but an experienced designer can usually predict gameplay problems before the game gets that far. At the concept stage, it's not that important to know whether your simulation will include the effects of friendly fire. It is useful, however, to have a general idea of whether your game is going to be abstract or realistic.

A Word About Story

Computer games lie in a peculiar middle ground between the purely passive, narrative media such as film and television and active, non-narrative games such as poker or dominoes. Some computer games, such as Tetris , have no narrative; others, such as the Gabriel Knight series, have a great deal. Some games tell linear, noninteractive stories interspersed with interactive episodes , others implement storylines that branch as the player makes decisions, and still others put their players in a setting where storylike adventures can take place and let them have at it. The relationship between the game and the story has been debated many times in the game industry.

It is our contention that, whether a game contains a great deal of narrative content or none at all, the player must ultimately live his own story through playing the game. The fundamental principle of computer gaming, its raison d' tre, is interactivity: providing the player with something entertaining to do . It is not the business of the game designer to tell stories, but to create worlds in which stories take place around an active player.

A common error made by beginning game designers is to concern themselves with the story too early in the design process. The first concern of the designer is not "What am I going to show or tell my player?" but "What is my player going to do?". When conceptualizing your game, you don't have to know exactly what narrative content you want to include in your game. If you are working on it now, you are focusing your attention in the wrong place. All you need to know is whether you want a story and, if so, what its overall direction will be. You should be able to summarize it in a sentence or two, for example: "Jack Jones, leader of a secret DEA task force, will conduct a series of raids against the drug barons, ending in an apocalyptic battle in the cocaine fields of Colombia. Along the way, some of the people he encounters will not be quite what they seem." Remember that errors in the storyline are much easier to correct than errors in the gameplay, and gamers will forgive them more easily as well. Make sure you understand your game first; then build your story into it.

We discuss storytelling and narrative at length in Chapter 4, "Storytelling and Narrative."



Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design
Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design
ISBN: 1592730019
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 148

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