The Dimensions of a Game World


A game's setting and world are defined by many different variables , each of which describes one dimension of the world, one of the aspects of the game's look and feel. To fully define your world and its setting, you need to consider each of these dimensions and answer certain questions about them.

The Physical Dimension

Game settings are almost always implemented as some sort of physical space. The player moves his avatar in and around this space, or moves other pieces, characters , or units in it. The physical characteristics of this space determine a great deal about the gameplay.

Even text adventures include a physical dimension. The player moves from one abstract "room" or other discrete location to another. Back when more people played text adventures, the boxes used to carry proud boasts about the number of rooms in the game. Gamers could take this as a very rough measure of the size of the world they could explore in the game and, therefore, the amount of gameplay that the game offered .

The physical dimension of a game is itself characterized by several different elements: dimensionality, scale, and boundaries.

Dimensionality

One of the first questions you have to ask yourself is how many dimensions your physical space is going to have. A few years ago, the vast majority of games had only two dimensions. This was especially noticeable in side-scrolling games such as Super Mario Brothers . Mario could run left and right and jump up and down, but he could not move toward the player ("out" of the screen) or away from him ("into" the screen).

It is essential to understand that the dimensionality of the game's physical space is not the same as how the game will display that space or how it will implement the space in software. Ultimately, all spaces must be displayed on the two-dimensional surface of the monitor screen, but that's a problem for a programmer, not a designer. How to implement and display the space are separate but related questions. The former has to do with technical design, and the latter has to do with user interface design.

Nowadays, a great many computer game settings have a three-dimensional space, even though the game might implement it in various ways. Starcraft , a war game, shows you plateaus and lowlands, as well as aircraft that pass over obstacles and ground units. Starcraft's setting is clearly three-dimensional, but the space is actually implemented in a series of two-dimensional planes or layers , one above another. Objects can be placed and moved within a plane with a fine degree of precision, but vertically, an object must be in one plane; there is no "in between." Flying objects can't move up and down in the air; they're always at the same altitude ”in the "air layer."

When first thinking about the dimensionality of your game space, it's tempting to immediately assume that you want it to be three-dimensional because that offers the greatest flexibility or seems more real. But as with everything else, the dimensionality of your physical space must serve the entertainment value of the game. Make sure all the dimensions will contribute meaningfully. Lemmings was a hit 2D game, but Lemmings 3D was nowhere near as successful because it was much more difficult to play. The addition of a third dimension detracted from the player's enjoyment rather than adding to it.

It's possible to have more than three spatial dimensions, but, in general, we don't recommend it. A computer can display a distorted approximation of four-dimensional space in the two dimensions of the monitor screen, just as it can display an approximation of three-dimensional space in two dimensions. However, because humans are not used to dealing with 4D spaces, most of us have a hard time navigating through them. If you want to include a fourth dimension for some reason, you might consider doing it as an "alternate plane of reality" rather than an actual four-dimensional space. In other words, you have two three-dimensional spaces that look similar, but there is something different about them. For example, the game Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver contained two three-dimensional spaces, the spectral realm and the material realm. The landscape was the same in each, but the spectral realm was lit by a blue light while the material realm was lit by white light; the actions available to the player were different in the spectral real from the material realm. Although they were both implemented in software by the same 3D models, they were functionally different places governed by different laws. In the movie version of The Lord of the Rings , the world that Frodo inhabits while he is wearing the Ring can be thought of as an alternate plane of reality as well, overlapping the real world but appearing and behaving differently.

Scale

By scale , we mean both the total size of the physical space represented and the relative sizes of objects in the game. If a game is purely abstract and doesn't correspond to anything in the real world, the sizes of objects in its game world don't really matter. You can adjust them to suit the game's needs any way you like. But if you are designing a game that is at least somewhat representational of the real world, you'll have to address the question of how big everything should be to both look real and play well. Some distortion is often necessary for the sake of gameplay; the trick is to do it without harming the player's suspension of disbelief too much.

With a sports game, a driving game, a flight simulator, or any other kind of game in which the player will expect a high degree of verisimilitude, you have little choice but to scale things to their actual sizes. In old sports games, it was not uncommon for the athletes to be depicted as 12 feet tall to make them more visible, but nowadays players wouldn't tolerate a game taking such liberties with reality. Serious simulations need an accurate representation of the physical world.

Similarly, you should scale most of the objects in first-person games accurately. Fortunately, almost all first-person games are set indoors or within very limited areas that are seldom larger than a few hundred feet in any dimension, so this doesn't create implementation problems. Because the player's perspective is that of a person walking through the space, objects need to look right for their surrounding area. You might want to slightly exaggerate the size of critical objects such as keys, weapons, or ammunition to make them more visible, but most things, such as doors and furniture, should be scaled normally. As screen resolutions continue to improve, we'll no longer need to exaggerate objects for visual clarity, unless we want to do so for a comic or cartoonlike effect.

If you're designing a game with an aerial or isometric perspective, you might need to fudge the scale of things somewhat. The real world is so much larger and more detailed than a game world that it's impossible to represent objects in their true scale in such a perspective. For example, in modern mechanized warfare , ground battles can easily take place over a 20-mile front, with weapons that can fire that far or farther. If you were to map an area this size onto a computer screen, an individual soldier or even a tank would be smaller than a single pixel, completely invisible. Although the player will normally be zoomed in on one small area of the whole map, the scale of objects will have to be somewhat exaggerated so that they're clearly identifiable on the screen.

One of the most common distortions games make is in the relative heights of people and the buildings or hills in their environment. The buildings are often only a little taller than the people who walk past them. To be able to see the roofs of all the buildings or the tops of all the hills, the camera must be positioned above the highest point on the ground; but if the camera is too high, the people would hardly be visible at all. To solve this problem, the game simply does not include tall buildings or hills and exaggerates the height of the people. Because the vertical dimension is seldom critical to the gameplay in things such as war games and role-playing games, it doesn't matter if it's not accurate, as long as it's not so inaccurate that it interferes with suspension of disbelief.

Designers often make another scale distortion between indoor and outdoor locations. When a character is walking through a town, simply going from one place to another, the player will want the character to get there reasonably quickly. The scale of the town should be small enough that the character takes only a few minutes to get from one end to another, unless the point of the game is to explore a richly detailed urban environment. When the character steps inside a building, however, and needs to negotiate doors and furniture, you should expand the scale to show these additional details. If you use the same animation for a character walking indoors and outdoors, this will give the impression that the character walks much faster outdoors than indoors. However, this seldom bothers players ”they'd much rather have the game proceed quickly than have their avatar take hours to get anywhere , even if that would be more accurate.

This brings up one final distortion, which is also affected by the game's notion of time (see the section, "The Temporal Dimension"), and that is the relative speeds of moving objects. In the real world, a supersonic jet fighter can fly more than a hundred times faster than an infantry soldier can walk on the ground. If you're designing a game that includes both infantry soldiers and jet fighters, you're going to have a problem. If the scale of the battlefield is suitable for jets , it will take infantry weeks to walk across; if it's suitable for infantry, a jet could pass over it in the blink of an eye. One solution to this is to do what the real military does and implement transport vehicles for ground troops. Another is simply to fudge it and pretend that jets fly only four or five times as fast as people walk. As long as the jet is the fastest thing in the game, it doesn't really matter how much faster it is; the "strike and retreat" tactic that jets are good at will still work. Setting these values is all part of balancing the game, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 7, "Gameplay."

Boundaries

In board games, the edge of the board constitutes the edge of the game world. Because computers have a finite size, the physical dimension of a computer game world must have a finite size also. However, computer games are usually more immersive than board games, and they often try to disguise or explain away the fact that the world is limited, to maintain the player's suspension of disbelief.

In some cases, the boundaries of a game world arise naturally, and we don't have to disguise or explain them. Sports games take place only in a stadium or an arena, and no one expects or wants them to include the larger world. In most driving games, the car is restricted to a track or a road, and this, too, is reasonable enough.

Setting a game underground or indoors helps to create natural boundaries for the game world. Everyone expects indoor regions to be of a limited size, with walls defining the edges. The problem occurs when games move outdoors, where people expect large, open spaces without sharply defined edges. A common solution in this case is to set the game on an island surrounded by water or by some other kind of impassable terrain: mountains , swamps, or deserts. These establish both a credible and a visually distinctive "edge of the world."

In flight simulators, the boundaries of the world are even more problematic . Most flight simulators restrict the player to a particular area of the real world. Because there are no walls in the air, there's nothing to stop the plane from flying up to the edge of the game world, and the player can clearly see when he has arrived there that there's nothing beyond. In some games, the plane just stops there, hovering in midair, and won't go any farther. In Battlefield 1942 , the game tells the player that he has left the scene of the action and forcibly returns him to the runway.

A common solution to the edge-of-the-world problem is to allow the flat world to "wrap" at the top, bottom, and sides. Although the world is implemented as a rectangular space in the software, objects that cross one edge appear at the opposite edge ”they wrap around the world. If the object remains centered on the screen and the world appears to move beneath it, you can create the impression that the world is spherical. This was used to excellent effect in Bullfrog Productions' game Magic Carpet . In another Bullfrog game, Populous: The Beginning , the world was actually displayed graphically as a sphere on the screen, not just a wrapping rectangle.

Questions to Ask Yourself About the Physical Dimension

  • Does my game require a physical dimension? What is it used for? Is it an essential part of gameplay or merely cosmetic?

  • Leaving aside issues of implementation or display, how many imaginary spatial dimensions does my game require? If there are three or more, can objects move continuously through the third and higher dimensions, or are these dimensions partitioned into discrete "layers" or zones?

  • How big is my game world, in light-years or inches? Is accuracy of scale critical, as in a football game, or not, as in a cartoonlike action game?

  • Will my game need more than one scale, for indoor versus outdoor areas, for example? How many will it actually require?

  • How am I going to handle the relative sizes of objects and people? What about their relative speeds of movement?

  • How is my world bounded? Am I going to make an effort to disguise the "edge of the world," and if so, with what? What happens if the player tries to go beyond it?

The Temporal Dimension

The temporal dimension of a game world defines the way that time is treated in that world and the ways in which it differs from time in the real world.

In many turn -based games and action games, the world doesn't include a concept of time passing, days and nights, or seasons and years. Everything in the world idles or runs in a continuous loop until the player interacts with it in some way. Occasionally, the player is put under pressure by being given a limited amount of real-world time to accomplish something, but this is usually just a single challenge, not part of a larger notion of time in the game.

In some games, time is implemented as part of the setting but not part of the gameplay. Here time creates atmosphere and gives the game some variety, but it doesn't change the way you play the game. This usually feels rather artificial. If the player can do exactly the same things at night that she can during the daytime, and no one ever seems to sleep, then there's little point in making the distinction. For time to serve the fantasy, it must affect it in meaningful ways.

Baldur's Gate is a good example of a game in which time is meaningful. Baldur's Gate is a very large role-playing game implemented according to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules. At night, shops are closed and the characters in the game run an increased risk of being attacked by wandering monsters. It's also darker and hard to see. Taverns are open all day and all night, which is reasonable enough, but the customers don't ever seem to leave and the bartender never goes off shift. In this way, the game's use of time is a little inconsistent, but the discrepancy serves the gameplay well because you can always trade with the bartender and pick up gossip no matter what time it is. The characters do need rest if they've been on the march for a long while, and this makes them vulnerable while they're sleeping. In the underground portions of the game, day and night have less meaning, as you would expect.

Variable Time

In games that do implement time as a significant element of the gameplay, as in books and movies, time in the game world usually runs much faster than in reality and often jumps , skipping periods when nothing interesting is happening. Most war games, for example, don't bother to implement nighttime or require that soldiers get any rest. In reality, soldier fatigue is a critical consideration in warfare, but because sleeping soldiers don't make exciting viewing and certainly aren't very interactive, most games just skip it. Allowing soldiers to fight continuously without a pause permits the player to play continuously without a pause also.

The Sims , a game about people living in a house, handles this problem a different way. The simulated characters require rest and sleep for their health, so The Sims depicts day and night accurately. However, when all the characters go to sleep, the game speeds up considerably, letting hours go by in a few seconds. As soon as anyone wakes up, it slows back down again.

The Sims is a rather unusual game in that it's chiefly about time management. You are under constant pressure to have your characters accomplish all their chores and get time for sleep, relaxation, and personal development as well. The game runs at something like 48 times as fast as real life, so you can play through the 16 hours of daytime in about 20 minutes. However, the characters don't move 48 times as fast. Their actions look pretty normal, about like real time. As a result, it takes them 15 minutes on the game's clock just to go out and pick up the newspaper. This contributes to the sense of time pressure. Because the characters do everything slowly (in game terms), they often don't get a chance to water the flowers, which consequently die.

Anomalous Time

In The Settlers III , a complex economic simulation, a tree can grow from a sapling to full size in about the same length of time that it takes for an iron foundry to smelt four or five bars of iron. This is a good example of anomalous time: time that seems to move at different speeds in different parts of the game. Blue Byte, the developer of The Settlers , tuned the length of time it takes to do each of the many tasks in the game to make sure that it would run smoothly. As a result, The Settlers is very well balanced at some cost to realism . However, it's doesn't disrupt the fantasy because The Settlers doesn't actually give the player a clock in the game world. There's no way to compare game time to real time, so in effect, the game world has no obvious timescale .

Another example of anomalous time appears in Age of Empires , in which tasks that should take less than a day in real time (gathering berries from a bush, for example) seem to take years in game time according to the game clock. Age of Empires does have a timescale, visible on the game clock, but not everything in the world makes sense on that timescale. The players simply have to accept these actions as symbolic rather than real. As designers, we have to make them work in the context of the game world without disrupting the fantasy. As long as the symbolic actions (gathering berries or growing trees) don't have to be coordinated with real-time actions (warfare), but remain essentially independent processes, it doesn't matter if they operate on an anomalous time scale.

Letting the Player Adjust Time

In sports games and vehicle simulations, game time usually runs at the same speed as real time. An American football game is, by definition, an hour long, but because the clock stops all the time, the actual elapsed time of a football game is closer to three hours. All serious computerized football games simulate this accurately. Verisimilitude is a key requirement of most sports games; if a game does not accurately simulate the real sport, it might not be approved by the league, and its competitors are bound to point it out as a flaw. However, most such games also allow the players to shorten the game by playing 5- or 10-minute quarters instead of 15-minute ones because most people don't want to devote a full three hours to playing a simulated football game. This is also a useful feature in testing; it would take far too long to test the product if you had to play a full-length game every time.

Flight simulators also usually run in real time. But there are often long periods of flying straight and level during which nothing of interest is going on; the plane is simply traveling from one place to another. To shorten these periods, many games offer a way to "speed up time" by two, four, or eight times ”in effect, making everything in the game world go faster than real time. When the plane approaches its destination, the player can return the game to normal speed and play in real time.

Questions to Ask Yourself About the Temporal Dimension

  • Is time a meaningful element of my game? Does the passage of time change anything in the game world even if the player does nothing, or does the world simply sit still and wait for the player to do something?

  • If time does change the world, what effects does it have? Does food decay, and do light bulbs burn out?

  • How does time affect the player's avatar? Does he get hungry or tired ?

  • What is the actual purpose of including time in my game? Is it only a part of the atmosphere, or is it an essential part of the gameplay?

  • Is there a timescale for my game? Do I need to have measurable quantities of time, such as hours, days, and years, or can I just let time go by without bothering to measure it? Does the player need a clock to keep track of time?

  • Are there periods of time that I'm going to skip or do without? Is this going to be visible to the player, or will it happen seamlessly?

  • Do I need to implement day and night? If I do, what will make night different from day? Will it merely look different, or will it have other effects as well? What about seasons?

  • Will any of the time in my game need to be anomalous? If so, why? Will that bother the player? Do I need to explain it away, and if so, how?

  • Should the player be allowed to adjust time in any way? Why, how, and when?

The Environmental Dimension

The environmental dimension describes the world's appearance and its atmosphere. We've seen that the physical dimension defines the shape of the game's space; the environmental dimension is about what's in that space. Its two related elements, cultural context and physical surroundings, make up the visual implementation of the game's setting.

Cultural Context

When we speak of the cultural context of a game, we're talking about culture in the anthropological sense: the beliefs, attitudes, and values that the people in the game world hold, as well as their political and religious institutions, social organization, and so on. These characteristics are reflected in the manufactured items that appear in the game: clothing, furniture, architecture, landscaping, and every other man-made object in the world. The culture influences not only what appears and what doesn't (a game set in a realistic ancient Egypt obviously shouldn't include firearms), but also how everything looks. The appearance of objects is affected not only by their function in the world, but also by the aesthetic sensibilities of the people who constructed them: A Maori shield will look entirely different from King Arthur's shield.

The cultural context also includes the game's back story. The back story of a game is the imaginary history, either large-scale (nations, wars, natural disasters) or small-scale (personal events and interactions) that preceded the time when the game takes place. This historical background helps to establish why the culture is the way it is. A warlike people should have a history of warfare; a mercantile people should have a history of trading. In designing this, don't go into too much depth too early, however. As we warned in Chapter 2, "Game Concepts," the story serves the game, not the other way around.

For most game worlds , it's not necessary to define their culture in great detail. If the game is set in your own culture, you can simply use the things that you see around you. The Sim City series, for example, is clearly set in present-day America (European cities are rarely so rectilinear), and it looks like it. But when your game begins to deviate from your own culture, you need to start thinking about how it deviates and what consequences that has.

Physical Surroundings

The physical surroundings define what the game actually looks like. This is the part of game design in which it's most helpful to be an artist or to work closely with one. In the early stages of design, you don't need to make drawings of every single thing that can appear in the game world, although sooner or later someone is going to have to. But for the time being, it's important to create concept sketches : pencil or pen-and-ink drawings of key visual elements in the game. Depending on what your game is about, this can include buildings, vehicles, clothing, weaponry, furniture, decorations, works of art, jewelry , religious or magical items, logos or emblems, and on and on. Man-made items in particular are influenced by the game's culture. A powerful and highly religious people are likely to have large symbols of their spirituality: stone temples or cathedrals. A warlike nomadic people will have animals or vehicles to carry their gear and weapons suitable for use on the move. (Note that these might be future nomads, driving dune buggies rather than camels.)

Nor should you neglect the natural world. Too many games set in urban or indoor environments consisting entirely of man-made things feel sterile, artificially clean, and devoid of life. Think about birds and animals, plants and trees, earth, rocks, hills, and even the sky. Consider the climate: Is it hot or cold, wet or dry? Is the land fertile or barren, flat or mountainous? These things are all parts of a real place, opportunities to create a visually rich and distinctive environment.

If your world is chiefly indoors, of course, you don't have to think about nature much unless your character passes a window, but there are a hundred other issues instead. Where does the light come from? What are the walls, floors, and ceilings made of, and how are they decorated ? Why is this building here? Do the rooms have a specific purpose, and if so, what? How can you tell the purpose of a room from its contents? Does the building have multiple stories? How does the player get from one story to another?

Physical surroundings include sounds as well as sights: music, ambient environmental sounds, the particular noises made by people, animals, machinery, and vehicles. Think about the sounds things make at the same time that you think about how they look. This will help you to create a coherent world. Suppose you're inventing a six-legged reptilian saddle animal with clawed feet rather than hooves. How does that sound as it moves? Its scales might rattle a bit. Its feet are not going to make the characteristic clop-clop sound of a shod horse. With six legs, it will probably have some rather odd gaits, and those should be reflected in the sound it makes.

The physical surroundings are primarily responsible for setting the tone and mood of the game as it is played, whether it's the lighthearted cheerfulness of Mario or the dimly lit suspense of Thief: The Dark Project . The sound, and especially the music, will contribute greatly to this. Think hard about the kind of music you want, and consider what genres will be appropriate. Stanley Kubrick listened to hundreds of records to select the music for 2001: A Space Odyssey , and he astonished the world with his choice of "The Blue Danube" for the shuttle docking sequence. You have a similar opportunity in designing your game.

Detail

Every designer must decide how much detail the game world needs ”that is to say, how richly textured the world will be and how accurately modeled its behavior will be. This is partly a question of "realism." Technical limitations and time constraints almost always determine a game's level of detail. No football game goes to the extent of modeling each fan in the stadium, and few flight simulators model all the physical characteristics of their aircraft. Detail helps to support the fantasy, but it always costs, in development time and memory or in disk space on the player's machine. In an adventure game, it should, in principle, be possible to pick up everything in the world; in practice, this just isn't practical. The consequence of this is that the player knows that if an object can be picked up, it must be important for some reason; if it can't be picked up, it isn't important. Similarly, in god games, it's common for all the people to look alike; they're often male adults. Bullfrog Productions once designed a god game with both male and female adults, but there wasn't enough time for the artists to model children as well. People simply had to be "born" into the world full grown. Lionhead's Black and White, on the other hand, managed to include men, women, and children.

Here's a good rule of thumb for determining the level of detail your game will contain: Include as much detail as you can to help the game's immersiveness, up to the point at which it begins to harm the gameplay. If the player is struggling to look after everything you've given him, the game probably has too much detail. (This is one of the reasons war games tend to have hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands of units. The player in a war game can't delegate tasks to intelligent subordinates , so the numbers have to be kept down to a size that he can reasonably manage.) A spectacularly detailed game that's no fun to play won't sell many copies.

Defining a Style

In describing how your world is going to look, you are defining a visual style for your game that will influence a great many other things as well: the character design, the user interface, perhaps the manual, and even the design of the box and the advertising. You actually have two tasks to take on here: defining the style of things in your world, and also defining the style of the artwork that will depict your world. They aren't the same. For example, you can describe a world whose architectural style is inspired by Southwestern pueblos, but draw it to look like a Warner Brothers cartoon. Or you could have medieval towns with half-timbered houses , but painted in a slightly fuzzy, Impressionistic style. You must choose both your content and the way in which you will present it.

Both decisions will significantly influence the player's experience of the game, jointly creating a distinct atmosphere. In general, the style of depiction tends to superimpose its mood on the style of the object depicted. For example, a Greek temple might be architecturally elegant, but if its style of drawing suggests a Looney Tunes cartoon, everyone will expect something wacky and outrageous to take place there. The drawing style imposes its own atmosphere over the temple, no matter how majestic it is.

Unless you're the lead artist for your game as well as its designer, you probably shouldn't ”or won't be allowed to ”do this alone. Your art team will have ideas of its own, and you should listen to those suggestions. The marketing department might insist on having a say as well. It's important, however, that you try to keep the style harmonious and consistent throughout your game. Too many games have been published in which different sections had wildly differing art styles because no one held and enforced a single overall vision.

Overused Settings

All too often, games borrow settings from one another or from common settings found in the movies and television. A huge number of games are set in science fiction and fantasy worlds, especially the quasimedieval, sword-and-sorcery fantasy inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons , popular with the young people who used to be the primary ”indeed, almost the only ”market for computer games. But a lot more people play games nowadays, and they want new worlds to play in. You should look beyond these hoary old staples of gaming. As we mentioned in Chapter 2, Interstate '76 was inspired by 1970s TV shows. It included cars , clothing, and music from that era, all highly distinctive and evocative of a particular culture. Interstate '76 had great gameplay, but what really set it apart from its competitors was that it looked like nothing else on the market.

Especially if you are going to do science fiction or fantasy, try to make it distinctively different. At present, real spacecraft built by the United States or Russia look extremely functional, just as the first cars did in the 1880s, and the spacecraft in computer games tend to look that way also. But as cars became more common, they began exhibiting stylistic variation to appeal to different kinds of people, and now there is a whole school of aesthetics for automotive design. As spacecraft become more common, and especially as we start to see "personal" spacecraft, we should expect them to exhibit stylistic variation as well. This is an area in which you have tremendous freedom to innovate.

The same goes for fantasy. Forget the same old elves, dwarves, wizards, and dragons. Look to other cultures for your heroes and villains . Right now about the only non-Western culture portrayed with any frequency in games is Japanese (feudal, present-day, and future) because there is a large market for games in Japan, and Japanese style has found some acceptance in the West as well. But there are many more sources of inspiration around the world, most untapped. Around 1200 A.D., while the rulers of Europe were still holed up in cramped, drafty castles , Islamic culture reached a pinnacle of grace and elegance . Muslims built magnificent palaces filled with the riches of the Orient and majestic mosques of inlaid stone. Yet this proud and beautiful civilization seldom appears in computer games because Western game designers haven't bothered to learn about it or don't even know it existed. Set your fantasy in Valhalla, in Russia under Peter the Great, in the arctic tundra, at Angkor Wat, at Easter Island, or at Machu Picchu.

Sources of Inspiration

Art and architecture, history and anthropology, literature and religion, clothing fashions , and product design are all great sources of cultural material. Artistic and architectural movements, in particular, offer tremendous riches: Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Palladian, Brutalism. If you haven't heard of one of these, go look it up now. Browse the web or the art, architecture, and design sections of the bookstore or the public library for pictures of interesting objects, buildings, and clothing. Photocopy things that attract your eye and post them around your workspace to inspire yourself and your coworkers. Collect "graphic scrap" from anywhere that you find it. Try old copies of National Geographic . Visit museums of art, design, and natural history if you can get to them; one of the greatest resources of all is travel, if you can afford it. A good game designer is always on the lookout for new ideas, even when he's ostensibly "on vacation."

It's tempting to borrow from our closest visual neighbor, the movies, because in the movies someone has already done the visual design work for us. Blade Runner introduced the decaying urban future; Alien gave us disgustingly biological aliens rather than "little green men." The problem with these looks is that they've already been borrowed from many, many times. You can use them as a quick-and-dirty backdrop if you don't want to put much effort into developing your world, and players will instantly recognize them and know what they're about. But to stand out from the crowd , consider other genres. Film noir, the Marx Brothers, John Wayne westerns, war movies from the World War II era, costume dramas of all periods . From the silliness of One Million Years B.C. to the Victorian elegance of Wilde , they're all grist for the mill.

Television goes through its own distinct phases, and because it's even more fashion-driven than the movies, it is ripe for parody. The comedies of the 1950s and 1960s and the nighttime soaps of the 1970s and 1980s all had characteristic looks that seem laughable today but that are immediately familiar to most adult Americans. That is one potential problem, however: If you make explicit references to American popular culture, non-Americans and children might not get it. If your gameplay is good enough, though, it won't matter.

Questions to Ask Yourself About the Environmental Dimension

  • Is my game world set in a particular historical period or geographic location? When and where? Is it an alternate reality, and if so, what makes it different from ours?

  • Are there any people in my game world? What are they like? Do they have a complex, highly organized society or a simple, tribal one? How do they govern themselves ? How is this social structure reflected in their physical surroundings? Are there different classes of people, guilds , or specialized occupations?

  • What do my people value? Trade, martial prowess, imperialism, peace ? What kinds of lives do they lead in pursuit of these ends? Are they hunters, nomadic, agrarian, industrialized, even postindustrial? How does this affect their buildings and clothing?

  • Are my people superstitious or religious? Do they have institutions or religious practices that will be visible in the game? Are there religious buildings? Do the people carry charms or display spiritual emblems?

  • What are my people's aesthetics like? Are they flamboyant or reserved, chaotic or orderly, bright or subtle? What colors do they like? Do they prefer straight lines or curves?

  • If there aren't any people in the game, what are there instead, and what do they look like and how do they behave?

  • Does my game take place indoors or outdoors, or both? If indoors, what are the furnishings and interior decor like? If outdoors, what is the geography and architecture like?

  • What is the style and mood of my game? How am I going to create them with art, sound, and music?

  • How much detail can I afford in my game? Will it be rich and varied or sparse and uncluttered? How does this affect the way the game is played?

The Emotional Dimension

The emotional dimension of a game world defines not only the emotions of the people in the world, but, more important, the emotions that you, as a designer, hope to arouse in the player. Action and strategy games usually involve a narrow emotional dimension, but other games that rely more heavily on story and characters can offer rich emotional content that affects the player deeply.

The idea of manipulating the player's emotions might seem a little strange . Most computer games are pretty lighthearted and don't take themselves or their subject matter too seriously. For much of their history, games have been seen only as light entertainment, a way to while away a few hours in a fantasy world. But just because that's all they have been doesn't mean that's all they can be. In terms of the richness of their emotional content, games are now just about where the movies were when they moved from the nickelodeon to the screen. They're no longer just a few minutes' amusement ; they are now capable of engaging their audience, and that means an emotional involvement as well as an intellectual one.

To affect a player's emotions, you have to make him care about something or someone, and then threaten that person or thing in a way that holds the player's interest. This is the essence of dramatic tension, whether we're watching Greek tragedy or reading Harry Potter . Something important must be at stake. The danger need not necessarily be physical; it can also be a social, emotional, or economic risk. Most of the young women in Jane Austen's novels were not in imminent peril of death or starvation , but it was essential to their family's social standing and financial future for them to make a good marriage . The conflict between their personal desires and their family obligations provides the tension in the novels.

A good many games set the danger at hyperbolic levels, with extreme claims like "The fate of the universe rests in your hands!". This appeals to young people, who often feel powerless and have fantasies about being powerful. To adults, it just sounds a bit silly. At the end of Casablanca , Rick said, "The problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world," but he was wrong. The whole movie, a movie still popular over a half century after its first release, is about the problems of three little people. For the duration of the film, these problems hold us entranced. It isn't necessary that the fate of the world be at stake; it is the fates of Rick, Ilsa, and Victor that tug at our hearts.

The Limitations of Fun

Most people think that the purpose of playing games is to have fun, but fun is a rather limiting term . It tends to suggest excitement and pleasure, either a physical pleasure such as riding a roller coaster, a social pleasure such as joking around with friends , or an intellectual pleasure such as playing cards or a board game. The problem with striving for fun is that it tends to limit the emotional range of games. Suspense, excitement, exhilaration, surprise, and various forms of pleasure fall within the definition of fun, but not pity, jealousy, anger, sorrow, guilt, outrage, or despair.

You might think that nobody in their right mind would want to explore these emotions, but other forms of entertainment ”books, movies, television ”do it all the time. And, in fact, that's the key: Those media don't provide only fun; they provide entertainment. People can be entertained in all sorts of ways. Movies with sad endings aren't "fun," but they're still entertaining. Although we say that we make "games," in fact, what we make is interactive entertainment. The potential of our medium to explore emotions and the human condition is much greater than the term fun game allows for.

All that said, however, bear in mind that most publishers and players want "fun." Too many inexperienced designers are actually more interested in showing how clever they are than in making sure the player has a good time; they place their own creative agenda before the player's enjoyment. As a designer, you must master the ability to create fun ”light enjoyment ”before you move on to more complex emotional issues. Unpleasant or painful emotions are a greater aesthetic challenge to address successfully, and they are commercially risky besides. For more on this topic, we recommend that you take a look at the book Creating Emotion in Games , by David Freeman (New Riders, 2003).

Questions to Ask Yourself About the Emotional Dimension

  • Does my game have a significant emotional dimension? What emotions will my game world include?

  • How does emotion serve the entertainment value of my game? Is it a key element of the plot? Does it motivate characters in the game or the player himself?

  • What emotions will I try to inspire in the player? How will I do this? What will be at stake?

The Ethical Dimension

The ethical dimension of a game world defines what right and wrong mean within the context of that world. At first glance, this might seem kind of silly ”it's only a game, so there's no need to talk about ethics. But most games that have a setting, a fantasy component, also have an ethical system that defines how the player is supposed to behave. As designers, we are the gods of the game's world, and we define its morality. When we tell a player that he must perform certain actions to win the game, we are defining those actions as good or desirable. Likewise, when we say that the player must avoid certain actions, we are defining them as bad or undesirable. The players who come into the world must adopt our standards, or they will lose the game.

In some respects, the ethical dimension of a game world is part of its culture, but we've broken it out for separate discussion because it poses special design problems. The ethical space of most game worlds is rather disjoint from ethics in the real world. Games allow, even require, you to do things that you can't do in the real world. The range of actions that the game world permits is typically narrower than in the real world (you can fly your F-15 fighter jet all you want, but you can't get out of the plane), but often the permitted actions are quite extreme: killing people, blowing things up, and so on.

On the whole, most games have simple ethics: clobber the bad guys, protect the good guys. It's not subtle but perfectly functional; that's how you play checkers. Not many games explore the ethical dimension in any depth. A few include explicit moral choices, but, unfortunately , they tend to be namby-pamby, consistently rewarding "nice" behavior and punishing "bad" behavior. Such preachy material turns off even children, not to mention adults. But you can build a richer, more involving game by giving the player tough moral choices to make. Ethical ambiguity and difficult decisions are at the heart of many great stories and, indeed, much of life. Should you send a platoon of soldiers to certain death to save a battalion of others? How would you feel if you were in the platoon?

Black and White was a game that included a certain amount of moral decision making. So are some role-playing games ”you can choose to play as an evil character who steals and kills indiscriminately, but the game becomes more difficult to win that way because other characters will refuse to cooperate with you and might even attack you on sight. Rather than impose a rule that says, "Immoral behavior is forbidden," the game implements a rule that says, "You are free to make your own moral choices ”but be prepared to live with the consequences!". This is a more adult approach to the issue.

All that said, we strongly discourage creating games that reward or even allow the player to do truly hateful things. One of the most repugnant games ever created was a cartridge for the Atari 2600 console called Custer's Revenge , in which the player's avatar, a cowboy, was supposed to try to rape a Native American woman who was tied to a pole. (The cartridge was independently published and was not supported or endorsed by Atari in any way.) This kind of thing is beyond bad taste; it's pathological. Games that expect a player to participate in sexual assault, torture, or child abuse will never sell well. They serve only to gratify their designers' sick fantasies while tarnishing the reputation of the rest of us. Although no one would condemn all cinema on the basis of one offensive movie, interactive entertainment is still a young-enough medium that it happens to us. Like it or not, what we each do individually affects us all collectively. The best way to avoid censorship is to exercise some judgment in the first place.

You must be sure to explain the ethical dimension of your game clearly in the manual, in introductory material, or in mission briefings. For example, some games that have hostage-rescue scenarios make the death of a hostage a loss condition: If a hostage dies, the player loses. This means that the player has to be extra careful not to kill any hostages, even at the risk of his own avatar's life. In other games, the only loss condition is the avatar's death. In this case, many players will shoot with complete abandon, killing hostages and their captors indiscriminately. In real life, of course, the truth is somewhere in between. Police officers who accidentally shoot a hostage are seldom prosecuted unless they've been grossly negligent, but it doesn't do their career any good. You can emulate this by penalizing the player somehow. To be fair to the player, however, you need to make this clear at the outset.

The ethical dimensions of multi-player games, whether online or local, are an enormous and separate problem. We discuss this at length in Chapter 17, "Online Games."

A Word About Game Violence

It's not part of our mission in this book to debate, much less offer an answer for, the problem of whether violent video games cause violent behavior in children or adults. This is a psychological question that will be resolved only after prolonged and careful study. Unfortunately, a good many people on both sides of the issue seem to have made up their minds already, and arguments continue to rage in the halls of Congress and elsewhere, supported for the most part by very few facts.

To you, as a designer, however, we do have a few suggestions. The essence of most games is conflict, and conflict is often represented as violence in varying degrees of realism. Chess is a war game in which pieces are killed ”removed from the board ”but nobody objects to the "violence" of chess; it's entirely abstract. American football is a violent contact sport in which real people get injured all the time, but there are no serious efforts to ban football, either. The only way to remove violence from gameplay would be to prohibit most of the games in the world because most contain violence in some more-or-less abstract form. The issue is not violence, per se, but how violence is portrayed and the circumstances under which it is acceptable.

Games get into political trouble when they have a close visual similarity to the real world but an ethical dimension that is strongly divergent from the real world. Kingpin was a game in which the player was encouraged to beat prostitutes to death with a crowbar, with bloodily realistic graphics. Not surprisingly, it earned a lot of criticism. On the other hand, Space Invaders involved shooting hundreds of aliens, but it was so visually abstract that nobody minded. In other words, the more a game resembles reality visually, the more its ethical dimension should resemble reality as well, or it's likely to make people upset. If you want to make a game in which the player is encouraged to shoot anything that moves, you're most likely to stay out of trouble if those targets are nonhuman and just quietly disappear rather than breaking apart into bloody chunks . Tie your ethical realism to your visual realism.

Computer games are about bringing fantasies to life, enabling people to do things in make-believe that they couldn't possibly do in the real world. But make-believe is a dangerous game if it is played by people for whom the line between fantasy and reality is not clear. Young children (those under about age eight) don't know much about the real world; they don't know what is possible and what isn't, what is fantasy and what is reality. An important part of raising them is teaching them this difference. But until they've learned it, it's best to make sure that any violence in young children's games is suitably proportionate to their age. The problem with showing violence to children is not the violence, per se, but the notion that there's no price to pay for it. For a detailed and insightful discussion of how children "process" violence, read Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence by Gerard Jones.

Ultimately, the violence in a game should serve the gameplay. If it doesn't, then it's just gratuitous and you should consider doing without it. A few designers, mostly young and male, seem to think that deliberately including gratuitous violence in their games is a gesture of rebellion against the antiviolence crusaders. We encourage these gentlemen to grow up and to remember who the game is for. Our customers don't buy games to see rebellious gestures; they buy them to be entertained.

Questions to Ask Yourself About the Ethical Dimension

  • What constitutes right and wrong in my game? What player actions do I reward and what do I punish?

  • How will I explain the ethical dimensions of the world to the player? What tells him how to behave and what is expected of him?

  • If my game world includes conflict or competition, is that represented as violence or as something else (racing to a finish, winning an economic competition, outmaneuvering the other side)?

  • What range of choices am I offering my player? Are there both violent and nonviolent ways to accomplish something? Is the player rewarded in any way for minimizing casualties, or is he punished for ignoring them?

  • In many games, the end ”winning the game ”justifies any means that the game allows. Do I want to define the victory conditions in such a way that not all means are acceptable?

  • Are any other ethical questions present in my game world? Can my player lie, cheat, steal, break promises, or double-cross anyone? Can he abuse, torture, or enslave anyone? Are there positive or negative consequences for these actions?

  • Does my world contain any ethical ambiguities or moral dilemmas? How does making one choice over another affect the player, the plot, and the gameplay?

  • How realistic is my portrayal of violence? Does the realism appropriately serve the entertainment value of the game?



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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