Game Genres


It's nearly impossible to predict what new genres of games might arise in the future. American designers never anticipated the dance simulations that have recently come from Japan. Rez , the abstract music/shooting game from Sega, could be the first in another. There will undoubtedly be more as the medium expands.

One thing is certain: For interactive entertainment to grow, we have to be open -minded and willing to explore. Why didn't American game designers invent the dance simulation themselves ? Probably because the idea of making a game about little girls dancing was just too uncool. The notion that gamers are all adolescent boys is clearly outdated , yet many designers persist in building games as if they were the only market.

To invent a game in a genuinely new genre , you have to throw out all your preconceived notions about computer games and start from scratch with two simple questions: What activities do people think are fun? and Can that activity reasonably be turned into a computer game?

In the meantime, we'll discuss what we think will happen in some existing genres.

Action Games

The challenges in action games arise mostly from their twitch elements: motor skills, coordination, and timing. To a lesser extent, they also include puzzle solving and exploration ”figuring out where to go and what to do to survive and pass through the level. These are well- understood elements of an action game's design. Most of the advances in action gaming in recent years have been in the game's content rather than in the nature of the challenges it offers. Banjo-Kazooie , for example, was a very successful game about a bear (Banjo) carrying a bird (Kazooie) around in his backpack . This peculiar bird-bear avatar enabled the designers to create a number of unique moves that would have been incongruous if the avatar were just a bird or just a bear. Soul Reaver was a game about a maimed vampire with only a limited ability to fly. Toy Story , of course, was based on the movie and was all about toys in a suburban environment. This kind of imaginative thinking will keep action games moving forward rather than stagnating.

First-person shooters represented a big leap forward when they appeared, but what was new about them was mostly the quality of the display and the richness of the environment rather than the concept itself. Multi-player first-person gaming goes back at least as far as the early 1980s, when a game called MazeWars was programmed for the short-lived Xerox Alto workstation. Since then, most of the advances have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary: nonrectilinear rooms and stairs (the biggest differences between the original Castle Wolfenstein 3D and Doom ), a greater variety of weapons and enemies, and so on. We can expect to see continuing evolutionary advancements in the first-person shooter genre, providing better graphics, better sound, and especially better enemy AI.

Thief , one of the most innovative action games in recent years, turned the shooter on its head by actively discouraging shooting. It was still a first-person game in which the player was armed with a variety of weapons, but the goal was to steal things rather than to kill people, to get through as much of the game as possible without firing a shot. Stealth, not violence, ensured success, but the game still required both hand-eye coordination and puzzle solving in the best traditions of the action genre. We hope to see more action games that explore alternative kinds of actions and approaches to victory.

Strategy Games

By far the largest unexplored area of strategy games is the human factor. Armies are led by generals, and generals have human strengths and weaknesses that have a profound influence on their performance in the field. Determination, imagination , daring, lateral thinking, personal courage, and sheer analytic intelligence all play important roles in military capability. So does the indefinable quality of leadership, an attribute that determines whether men risking their lives will be confident or fearful, which can sometimes turn the tide of battle all by itself.

There have been efforts to quantify and simulate some of these qualities. As far back as The Ancient Art of War , players could choose to fight against simulated versions of Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, or Napoleon Bonaparte, each of whom was characterized as representing certain military attributes. We've also worked on simulating the psychological condition of soldiers themselves: Microsoft's Close Combat gave each soldier a state of mind that varied from courageous and confident to cowering in terror, unable to obey any order.

Nevertheless, there's a great deal more to be done in this area. In most computer strategy games, there's no such thing as psychological operations, nor do they simulate the element of surprise, diversionary tactics, bluffing, feigned retreats to draw out the enemy, or lame-duck tricks to give an impression of weakness. Computer games tend to simulate soldiers as robotic killing machines, obeying whatever order they're given, even if it is suicidal, and unflinchingly standing their ground to the last man. With more processing power and richer, deeper simulations of human reactions , we will start to see war games that depict battles as they are really fought.

Another weakness of real-time strategy games at the moment is an overemphasis on economic production models. Players concentrate on achieving economic efficiency rather than strategic or tactical superiority. They treat their units as cannon fodder, relying on overwhelming the enemy with sheer numbers rather than with military skill ”a tactic uncomfortably reminiscent of Field Marshal Haig at the Somme. Because they're only simulated soldiers, we don't have to care how many of them die, except insofar as it gives us fewer units to fight with. This represents an inaccuracy in the simulation. Real soldiers' morale is hurt when their leaders exhibit a flagrant disregard for the value of their lives, and their performance suffers accordingly . In the future, we can expect to see these details simulated properly, and players will have to take care of their soldiers to win.

Role-Playing Games

Computerized role-playing games still bear the marks of their heritage as pencil-and-paper, dice-based games. Many players like RPGs this way and enjoy fiddling around with their weapons, armor , and magic items to find the optimal combination of attack and defense potential.

Although there's a definite market for such games, we feel that the emphasis on statistics discourages a larger market, the casual player, from playing RPGs. Casual players want to have adventures and collect loot without having to study all the peculiar capabilities of their equipment or to spend a lot of time shopping for it at the local arms merchant. Other genres ”action games and action adventures ”offer that kind of gameplay, but for the most part, they have thin plots and little character development. We expect that the traditional numbers-oriented RPG will continue to exist but that a new type of RPG, a sort of hybrid between the action-adventure and the traditional RPG, will emerge over time to satisfy the needs of the casual player. It will have the plot and character-interaction elements of the RPG, along with the usual quest structure and character-growth components , but it won't require so much fiddling or buying and selling.

Sports Games

As we've said elsewhere, sports games don't have a lot of room for creative growth. The game is defined by the nature of the sport. There are new sports from time to time, but they're created by their enthusiasts , not by computer game designers.

Sports games, of course, will continue to benefit from improvements in display technology and other kinds of hardware, and voice recognition could be a lot of fun when you're able to call plays and shout to your "teammates" on the field. But the greatest challenge in creating sports games, and the place where we can expect to see the most improvement in the future, is in artificial intelligence, especially in team games such as soccer. Two areas in sports games need AI: strategy, which we might also call play-calling or coaching, and tactics, the AI that controls the behavior of individual athletes on the field, especially in response to changing or unexpected play situations. Athlete AI is starting to improve already. We seldom see athletes doing things that seem to be patently stupid anymore ”at least, not much more often than real athletes do things that seem to be patently stupid! Coaching is another matter, however. Games don't yet have the smarts to make up the tricks and clever moves that real coaches can devise , but perhaps they will in the future.

Vehicle Simulations

Although complacency is risky, if any genre of computer gaming can be said to be stable, it's probably vehicle simulations. Of course, there's much more that can be done, mostly in physics simulations and display technology, but, for the most part, vehicle simulations already offer all the gameplay that their fans could want. The aerodynamic models aren't realistic, but they're enough to provide all but the most demanding players with a feeling of authenticity. We could accurately model all the switches and levers in an F-15 fighter jet rather than just some of them, but doing so would make the game harder to play without adding enjoyment to the process.

The quality of the driver AI in racing games is pretty good at the moment. In racing, it's mostly every car for itself, and the cars have to stay in a restricted area, so the AI is chiefly needed for strategic decisions involving refueling, changing tires when rain is threatening , and addressing similar questions. We can probably expect to see this kind of decision making improve in the future. The casual player isn't likely to notice it very much, however.

Pilot AI in flight simulators could be improved somewhat, especially in cooperative missions. It's practically a foregone conclusion that if you're given an AI-controlled wingman in a computer game, he'll get shot down. It's not clear why wingmen seem to be so vulnerable. It could be that they're mostly designed to assist you rather than to protect themselves, so they take unnecessary risks.

Construction and Management Simulations

For the most part, construction and management simulations don't use 3D engines, but they demand a lot of processing power from the CPU to simulate whatever system they're modeling. As computing power increases , we can expect to see such games modeling larger systems, or the same kinds of systems but in more detail. We also expect that they will eventually switch from the isometric perspective that seems to be the current standard, to a fully 3D perspective that enables players to zoom right in on the world and observe things at close range.

As the demand for games grows, we might also start to see simulations for niche markets: small groups of people interested in a particular subject that doesn't necessarily have broad appeal . For example, there could be simulations about gardening , automobile traffic, wildlife conservation, or electrical power distribution. What really limits growth in this area is the cost of development.

Adventure Games

Adventure games have stagnated somewhat in recent years. They don't get as much adrenaline flowing as action games or vehicle simulations, and they cost more to develop than other slow-paced games such as war games or city simulations. Nevertheless, we're confident that they won't disappear entirely. A small but distinct market wants games with strong plots and interesting characters , and as gaming matures, this market will grow.

Part of the appeal of adventure games is in the beauty of their locations. Because they move more slowly, players have the time to admire the details of their worlds. As a result, many of them still use painted 2D locations rather than 3D environments. The best 3D engines still can't reproduce the lush detail of an open-air market, for example, in which every pomegranate and bolt of silk is lovingly rendered. However, this will change, and we expect that, in time, more adventure games will be moving to 3D-rendered worlds simply because they offer more freedom to the player and more camera angles to the designer. With a 2D background, every change of perspective requires a new painting; with a 3D engine, the perspective can be adjusted easily to fit the circumstances in the game.

Adventure games will benefit more than any other genre from advances in artificial intelligence. Good stories require believable characters, and to be believable, characters must speak and act normally.



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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