The Anatomy of Game Design


Game design cannot be reduced to a set of discrete instructions and processes. There is no formula that you can follow and produce a perfect game design, ready for your programming team to code into existence. However, you can take advantage of a set of common principles that apply to all successful games , and doing so can save you a fair amount of grunt work. Designing a successful game is not just random chance ”although so many other factors besides design influence a game's success that it sometimes seems that way.

The Importance of Game Design

Game design (at least for the computer and console) is a very young field, and there is still much to be discovered . The movie industry and even the advertising industry know more about invoking atmosphere and mood than any game designer out there ”and more important, they know how to apply their techniques effectively.

Take McDonalds, for example: Have you ever wondered why they use a predominantly red-and-yellow color scheme? Psychologists report that the color yellow influences the perceived hunger level of the subject, while red increases anxiety and the need to hurry. The result, according to the psychologists, is that you order more food, eat it quickly, and leave. The reasons for this appear to be deep in our ancestry. Red is the color of blood, signifying danger, and yellow is a predominant color in foodstuffs. In his book ManWatching , Desmond Morris goes into this and many other aspects of human behavior in a lot more detail. It makes for interesting reading, and we recommend it to any serious game designer. It's useful for the game designer to consider the ways that humans interact with each other and the subconscious stimuli that influence them. This and other kinds of understanding will take game design to a new level, resulting in richer, subtler, and ultimately better games.

Even though some people view game design as a mystical art, they can be peculiarly inconsistent in their attitudes: Nearly everybody who expresses an interest in the subject believes that he could be a game designer. The skill of game design is, so to speak, invisible. It looks as if anyone should be able to do it. After all, it's just a matter of writing a simple story, knocking up a design document or two, and telling the programmers what you want, right? No. That's about as realistic as expecting that anyone who can use a hammer and a saw should be able to produce a violin. Good game design is, as we said, a matter of craftsmanship.

If you want proof, just check any magazine that reviews games and see how often it marks down games for poor design. Games might be technically superb and look wonderful, but if the gameplay isn't there, it's not a game; it's a pretty demo. Even the original Quake , while lauded for its amazing technology, was slammed for the poor quality of its single-player gameplay (after the stunned awe had worn off). Sure, it looked great, but running around shooting poorly designed and badly placed enemies wore thin very quickly.

The creators of Quake , id software, acknowledged that the first Quake was just a technology demo. The gameplay was improved in Quake II , which presented a good single-player game, but with Quake III , we're back to the technology demo again. It was left to third parties (such as Valve, which developed Half-Life using the Quake II engine) to take the technology and make a game with it.

Given the amount of money routinely sunk into these technological powerhouse products, it seems amazing that more money is not spent on producing a decent game design. In many cases, the game design is an amalgamation of the "best" ideas of the development team. This works so rarely that when it is successful, the process is widely publicized and the publicity gives the impression that this is the best way to design a game. You might have heard the saying a camel is a horse designed by committee. Nowhere is this more applicable than the game industry.

Of course, for every rule, you can find a high-profile exception ( otherwise , life would be a lot simpler ”and duller). The designers of Half-Life , a truly excellent game, used a process like this, dubbed the cabal process . Valve was incredibly fortunate to have the right people in the right place at the right time. Most developers can't count on such luck. Valve can't even be certain that the cabal process will work again. History is on their side, but as they say in the financial industry, past performance is no guarantee of future success.

So what's the upshot of this? Although game design is a creative process requiring the ability to dream and imagine amazing worlds populated by strange and wonderful denizens, a great many practical principles also can be extracted and analyzed . When you thoroughly understand the techniques of game design, your imagination and intellect will be free to work together and concentrate on what's really important: great gameplay. Of course, in an ideal world, original and innovative gameplay would be equally important. Unfortunately, most publishers don't want games that are too innovative; they want something just like a recent hit, with a few more twists .

Seeking the Key Elements of Games

Our approach in teaching you how to design games centers on the idea that games are made up of certain key elements, and that the games in a given genre tend to have many of those elements in common. These elements include such things as the rules of the game, the player's role (pilot, athlete, general, spy, and so on), the challenges the player will face, and many others that we will introduce as we go along.

This doesn't mean that we think all games in a particular genre should be alike ”far from it. Among cars , for example, all minivans (a genre of car, you might say) include seating for five or more people, have a rear door rather than a trunk, and stand up fairly high off the ground. Yet not all minivans look alike or have the same performance characteristics. The same is true of games. Two war games can include many elements in common and still have completely different settings, units, and strategies, and be balanced in different ways.

We encourage you to adjust our elements as you see fit. The last thing we want to see is more games with different graphics but identical play mechanics; there are too many of those already. During the heyday of the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo, we saw too many side-scrollers, games about running and jumping on platforms; nowadays store shelves overflow with too many first-person shooters in which players run through a 3D world firing at anything that moves. The game industry and our players don't need more games that look a little different but are essentially the same. That leads to creative stagnation among developers and eventual boredom and disinterest among customers.

The purpose of identifying common elements in a genre is not to encourage the development of cookie- cutter games, but to make sure that when you design a game, you have covered all the basics ”the essential components that a game in a particular genre should have and without which is incomplete.

Okay, that's far enough. Before we continue, we need to discuss exactly what we mean by game design. After all, one of the most confusing aspects of the study of game design is that there's no official definition agreed on by the whole industry ”different game designers might have different ideas of what comprises game design.

Laying Down the Ground Rules

For the purposes of this book, we have broken down game design into three specific areas: core mechanics, storytelling, and interactivity. Each is a distinct, complementary element of a game, and each makes up one part of a larger whole, as shown in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2. Core mechanics, interactivity, and storytelling.

graphics/01fig02.gif

Core Mechanics

The rules that define the operation of the game world make up the core mechanics of the game, or the foundations of gameplay.

The core mechanics are the translation of the designer's vision into a consistent set of rules that can be interpreted by a computer ”or, more accurately, rules that can be interpreted by the people who write the software that is interpreted by the computer. Defining the core mechanics is the "science" part of game design. It is important not to confuse this with the technology of computer gaming. Although the core mechanics are implemented by creation of a mathematical (or computational) model of the abstract game world, the core mechanics describe the way the game works, not the way the software operates. In a noncomputerized game, we would simply call these the rules, but the rules of computer games are far more complex than the rules of any board or card game.

This is the heart and soul of the game ”if the core mechanics aren't sound, you end up with a poor game. Unfortunately, this happens fairly frequently. It seems that the core mechanics are often the least-developed area in modern games. The reasons for this are many and varied, but the three most significant are as follows :

  • Designer ignorance of game mechanics

  • Marketing pressure

  • Conflicting demands for impressive technology and good gameplay

Of these three, we can help with only the first and the third. Designer ignorance is what this book is intended to address. The second, marketing pressure, is beyond our control, much to our despair on a number of occasions in the past. We will also address the third, technology versus gameplay, in this book, although it's also partly brought on by market conditions. The technology race is analogous to the Cold War arms race: Technology produces eye candy, eye candy grabs customers' attention, and, in the viciously competitive arena of the software store and magazine page, attention is the most valuable commodity. Games have limited development budgets , and the money tends to go toward areas that will produce the most visible results. If technology sells products, then products will focus on technology. The core mechanics are often given short shrift in consequence.

Storytelling and Narrative

All games tell a story. The complexity and depth of that story depends on the game. At one extreme, in adventure games such as Grim Fandango , the game is the story. At the other extreme, it's the player who tells the story by the act of playing. Even Tetris has a story ”a story created by the player as she plays.

Narrative , as we use the term , means that part of the story that is told by you, the author and designer, to the player. Narrative is the noninteractive , presentational part of the story. Tetris has a story, but it contains no narrative. Because playing games is an active process and listening to a narrative is a passive one, there is an inherent tension between interactivity and narrative. We discuss this tension in much more detail later.

Without a story, or some way for a player to implicitly form his own story, the game simply will not interest the player. As you probably remember from high school English classes, all stories feature dramatic tension: an unresolved issue, problem, or conflict that keeps the reader's attention and makes him want to read on. This is no less true of games than it is of novels or short stories. In the case of games, the dramatic tension often, though not always, arises from a challenge in the game that the player has not yet overcome . Whether the player makes up his own "story" or whether he reads or watches a scripted narrative, it's the primary hook that keeps the player playing. Many games try to aim for a middle ground: They provide a back story and let the player fill in the details ”quite often by completing missions that drive the plot along.

Narratives in games are often quite linear, unaffected by the player's actions and unchanging from one playing to the next . Many designers see this as a limitation, impeding the freedom of the player. In recent years , there has been a lot of discussion about nonlinearity in computer games and the improvements it would bring. As with many "new and improved" features of games, a certain amount of smoke and mirrors is involved in bringing nonlinearity to nontrivial narrative-based games. Automated storytelling is the holy grail of computer game design. Chris Crawford, designer of Balance of Power , has performed some work in this area with his Erasmatazz project (www.erasmatazz.com).

There is still a long way to go before we have (or can provide) fully dynamic computer-generated stories. In the meantime, we'll have to continue to use the old-fashioned methods and let humans write the stories. Unfortunately, the effort involved in creating a nonlinear story grows exponentially with the number of story threads and typically weakens the story's impact. Hence, games with strong storylines are usually fairly linear. In fact, some genres suffer from too much scripting. Examples are flight simulators and strategy games that attempt to give the player an illusion of freedom beyond the bounds set by the scripting and consequently fail when the player does something unexpected that breaks the linearity .

A linear story does not have to be a disadvantage . The Final Fantasy series of games allows little room for variation from the main story ”the only way to complete the game is to allow the story to carry you along, but they are still good games. Certain scripted events that are completely unalterable by the player push the story along ”and the main challenge for the player is to fit in with these events, to become part of the story. Although this makes the story feel a bit unrealistic , it is nonetheless convincing enough to enthrall the player. We don't yet have the technology to create engaging and fully self-consistent nonlinear stories. We'll probably start to see real generic story-telling systems at about the same time we can say, "Good morning, computer," and expect it to understand and answer us!

Interactivity

For our purposes, interactivity is the way that the player sees, hears, and acts within the game's world ”in short, the way the player plays the game. This covers a lot of diverse topics: graphics, sounds, user interface ”everything that comes together to present the gaming experience. As a game designer, you will not create all these items yourself, but you will specify how the interactivity will work. It's up to the specialized members of your team to make it happen.

Interactivity has been a buzzword connected with computers and games for some time. It's often overused or used inappropriately. A few years back, some people thought that they could create a new kind of product by prefixing the word interactive to just about anything: interactive movies, interactive television, and so on. Don't let that turn you off: Interactivity is not just a buzzword in game design; it's the term used for making the game playable .

Poor interactive design ruins many products. For example, a badly designed user interface severely compromised Warwind , an otherwise promising Warcraft derivative. Warwind required players to negotiate an impossibly nested series of icon-based menus using only right-clicks. We're sure you can come up with your own list of similar games in which you've found critical design flaws such as these.

Interactivity (in the nonbuzz sense of the word) starts at the user interface. The user interface defines the "flavor" of your game. For example, the gameplay of Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64 console is virtually identical to that of a 2D platform game such as the Sonic the Hedgehog games on the Sega Genesis (or Megadrive, to those of you in Europe). You run, jump, collect goodies , and avoid the baddies. The user interface ”the buttons you push to play the game ”made Mario 64 stand out from its peers.

Taking this to the extreme, there is nothing in Mario 64 that couldn't be implemented as a text-based game with type-in commands such as "run left," "jump right," and "take coin." Of course, it would be ridiculous to do this (even if the Nintendo 64 console had a keyboard) ”the game would have sold close to zero copies. But the example shows that even though every other aspect of the game might be well designed (as it was in Mario 64 ), a good game requires a good user interface. Derivative games that arrived on the scene after the release of Mario 64 didn't duplicate Mario 64 's excellent user interface and control system. Although they were similar in concept, they didn't reach that golden standard.

A game's graphics are also important parts of the interactive component, although designers disagree about how important they are. Unfortunately, the prevailing commercial pressure compels many designers to concentrate on appearances . In general, far too much time is spent on getting the look of a game right at the expense of tuning its gameplay. A lot of nostalgic gamers have called for a return to the values of the "golden age" of gaming ”the 1980s, when hardware limitations forced developers to concentrate on gameplay. Nowadays, however, the capabilities of new machines require that more effort be spent on presentation. The more effort spent on presentation, the more the player expects to see in the next game, resulting in a vicious positive-feedback cycle of player expectations boosting emphasis on presentation, which, in turn, boosts player expectations, and so on.

We've all had the experience of playing an action game really well, getting into a sort of "groove" in which your eyes and hands seem to meld with the machine. The best user interfaces allow you to immerse yourself in the game so deeply that you are no longer aware of the user interface at all ”the infamous Tetris Trance . That's what well-designed interactivity does for a 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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