The Purpose of a Game Setting

Games exist to entertain , and the entertainment value of a game is derived from several sources: its gameplay, its story, social interaction (if it is a multi-player game), and so on. The setting also contributes to the entertainment that the game provides. In a game such as chess, almost all the entertainment value is in the gameplay; few people think of it as a game about medieval warfare . In an adventure game such as Escape from Monkey Island , the setting is essential to the fantasy. Without the setting, Escape from Monkey Island would not exist, and if it had a different setting, it would be a different game.

As a general rule, the more a game depends on its core mechanics to entertain, the less its setting matters. Mastering the core mechanics requires a kind of abstract thought, and fantasy can be a distraction. Serious chess players aren't interested in the shape of the chessmen; their shapes don't contribute significantly to the game. A serious chess player can have just as much fun with a $2 plastic travel chess set as with a $200 inlaid wooden board and solid pewter statues for pieces. As players learn to understand the core mechanics of other games, they stop thinking about the fantasy element as well. When players become highly skilled at a game such as Quake III , they no longer think about the fact that they're pretending to be space marines in a futuristic environment; they think only about hiding, moving, shooting, ambushing, obtaining more ammunition , and so on.

This process of abstraction ”ignoring the game's setting ”occurs only at a high level of play, however. To someone who's playing a game for the first time, the setting is vital to creating and sustaining his interest. One of the essential functions of a game's setting is actually to sell the game in the first place. It's not the game's mechanics that make a customer pick up a box in a store, but the fantasy it offers: who you'll be, where you'll be, and what you'll be doing there if you play that game.

The "Graphics Versus Gameplay" Debate

The relationship between the setting and the mechanics is the subject of considerable debate in the game industry, although it's usually characterized as "graphics versus gameplay." The graphics create the setting; the core mechanics, along with the user interface, create the gameplay ”the challenges the player faces and the actions he may take to overcome them. In the early days of video gaming, graphics were seriously restricted by the weakness of the display hardware. The gameplay, as implemented by the programmers, was the source of most of the game's appeal . With the growth of modern display technology, the graphics have taken on much greater importance, and creating them consumes a large proportion of a game's development budget. Some designers and programmers, especially those who've been around since the early days, have become rather annoyed at the dominant role that graphics now play. They insist that graphics must be subordinate to gameplay in game design, and as proof they point to examples of games with great graphics and very little gameplay that offer poor value for the money.

This was a serious problem in the early 1990s, when Hollywood studios thought they could take over the game industry because they were better able to create impressive graphics than the game publishers. However, they failed. Hollywood didn't understand software engineering, didn't understand interactivity, and, most important, didn't understand gameplay. The public refused to accept games with bad gameplay, no matter how spectacular the graphics were. After a few false starts, Hollywood learned to work with game publishers rather than trying to become game publishers, realizing that the two groups bring complementary skills to creating games.

We believe the "graphics versus gameplay" debate is no longer a meaningful one. The truth is that graphics and gameplay must work together to produce the total play experience. The graphics create the setting, which both sells the game and involves the player in the game's fantasy. The gameplay provides the challenge and things for the player to do. Both are essential to the player's enjoyment of the game. The graphics bring in the player, and the gameplay keeps him there.

Immersiveness and Suspension of Disbelief

A key part of the experience of reading a novel or watching a movie is suspension of disbelief. Suspension of disbelief is a mental state in which you choose, for a period of time, to believe that this pack of lies, this fiction , is reality. This applies to games as well. When you go inside the game world and temporarily make it your reality, you suspend your disbelief. The better a game supports the illusion, the more thoroughly engrossed you become, and then the more immersive we say the game is. Immersiveness is one of the holy grails of game design.

Movies and novels try to create the impression that what they depict is real, though fantasy and science fiction novels rather test our patience in this regard. Few movies and novels specifically allude to the fact that they are fiction; they try to preserve the suspension of disbelief. Some deliberately play with the idea. Both the book and the movie The French Lieutenant's Woman specifically alluded to the fact that they were works of fiction, wrenching the audience out of the work's Victorian setting to encourage comparisons with today's world. The movie The Stunt Man similarly kept the viewer ”and the movie's hero ”off balance, unable to tell whether what we were seeing was supposed to be reality or merely a movie being filmed.

More often, however, suspension of disbelief is broken by poor design. This might occur if one of the people in the story does something that is wildly out of character, or if something highly improbable happens ”a deus ex machina ”and we are expected to accept it as normal. Another thing that frequently destroys a player's suspension of disbelief or prevents it from ever forming is a lack of harmony, which we discuss next .

The Importance of Harmony

Good games and game worlds possess harmony , a quality first identified by the legendary game designer Brian Moriarty. Harmony is the feeling that all parts of the game belong to a single, coherent whole. In his lecture "Listen: The Potential of Shared Hallucinations," Moriarty explained the concept of harmony so well that, with his permission, we use his own words to describe it:

Harmony isn't something you can fake. You don't need anyone to tell you if it's there or not. Nobody can sell it to you, it's not an intellectual exercise. It's a sensual, intuitive experience. It's something you feel. How do you achieve that feeling that everything works together? Where do you get this harmony stuff?

Well, I'm here to tell you that it doesn't come from design committees . It doesn't come from focus groups or market surveys. It doesn't come from cool technology or expensive marketing. And it never happens by accident or by luck. Games with harmony emerge from a fundamental note of clear intention . From design decisions based on an ineffable sense of proportion and rightness. Its presence produces an emotional resonance with its audience. A sense of inner unity that has nothing to do with what or how you did something, it has something to do with why . Myst and Gemstone both have harmony. They have it, because their makers had a vision of the experience they were trying to achieve and the confidence to attain it. They laid down a solid, ambient groove that players and their respective markets can relate to emotionally. They resisted the urge to overbuild. They didn't pile on a lot of gratuitous features just so they could boast about them. And they resisted the temptation to employ inappropriate emotional effects. Effects like shock violence, bad language, inside humor.

You know, the suspension of disbelief is fragile. It's hard to achieve it, and hard to maintain. One bit of unnecessary gore, one hip colloquialism, one reference to anything outside the imaginary world you've created is enough to destroy that world. These cheap effects are the most common indicators of a lack of vision or confidence. People who put this stuff into their games are not working hard enough.

Harmony is essential for a good game world. With every design decision you make, you should ask yourself whether the result is in harmony with your overall vision. Too many games have elements that seem bolted on, last-minute ideas that somebody thought would be "cool" to include. Although every game design requires compromises, as we said in Chapter 1, "What Is Game Design?," an important part of your job as a designer is to minimize the false notes or off-key elements that compromises tend to create. Try to find a way to make everything fit together into a coherent, integrated whole.

A good way to identify games with harmony is to look for those that have lasted far longer in the marketplace than their designers ever expected. This means that something about the game is striking a resonant chord with its players, a chord that continues to echo. For example, people continue to make modifications to Half-Life that are actually more popular than new games because Half-Life is such an elegant, harmonious game. Tetris is another case in point. Action games come and go, but Tetris has stood the test of time and might outlive us all.