Academic

Academic / Game Design — 10 Comments
21
Sep 10

A grammar of games

A common metaphor used by game designers is that game mechanics are verbs. Verbs are actions; each distinct action you can make in a game is one verb.

Children’s games are often named after their verbs. Consider: Hide and Seek, Tag, Rock Paper Scissors, Kick to Kick.

The primary verbs in Doom are LOOK, WALK and SHOOT. Immersive sims such as Deus Ex are characterised by their large variety of verbs, whereas the minimalist Canabalt has only a single verb: JUMP.

In fact, JUMP is one of the oldest and most adaptable verbs in game design. Corvus Elrod recently wrote about game verbs as carriers of meaning by describing how the verb JUMP varied across five different games.

Just for fun, let’s extend the language metaphor. Continue reading →

Academic / Game Design — 20 Comments
12
Jul 10

The game narrative triangle

There doesn’t seem to be a lot going on in the game scene right now (at least for people not interested in motion controls, ever-more-unsettling modern war shooters and misjudged forum policies), so I’m taking advantage of the quiet time to go back some of the basic structures in games. Today I’m taking a first-principles look at the kinds of stories videogames tell.

It’s generally agreed that there are two types of game stories: what the script says and what the player does. Or as Valve writer Erik Wolpaw put it in a presentation at the Game Developers Conference in 2008:

Games tell two stories: the story story – the narrative story that’s the sum total of a game’s cutscenes and dialogue; and the gameplay story – the story described by the actions the player takes in the game world.

Game designer Marc LeBlanc proposed the names “embedded narrative”, for the story set into the game by the designers, and “emergent narrative”, for the story that emerges from the process of playing.

There’s a third type of story in videogames, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Continue reading →

Academic / Experience — 8 Comments
14
Oct 09

A Framework for Review

Game reviews generally suck.  But, it’s entirely not our fault.  Here’s why, and here’s why it’s important.

We do what we can.  We write, we delete, we write some more, we tear at our hair, and we make a futile effort to shoehorn our experiences into what’s fundamentally a broken descriptive system.  When you get right down to it, what does an “A” really mean?  How comparable is Pathologic, with a score of 67 on Metacritic, to Rock Band, with a score of 92? Does the higher score mean one has greater objective worth than the other or that you should avoid Pathologic because “it’s a bad game”? Where does Wii Fit fit in, and what the hell do we do with Jam Sessions?

This rampant obsession with a single number as a representation of “worth” is probably the single most damning influence in experiential gaming today; it’s our personal albatross, willingly carried around our neck despite our knowing better.  I’m as guilty as the next person of relying on Metacritic to guide my dollar spend, but I know that it’s not right.  For every Braid that slips through the system by the skin of its teeth on sheer novelty value, there’s an enclave of amazing indie games that are supposedly not worth playing. Continue reading →

Academic / Culture — 12 Comments
2
Oct 09

Boring Art, Boring Debates

The ‘videogames as art’ debate has gone around and come around. Sure, we’re all bored with it, but is that a good enough reason to drop it permanently?

It’s no secret that videogames struggle for legitimacy. Every gamer has their own personal memory of their hobby scorned, buried deep in their unconscious, waiting for the right moment to erupt and turn them into a blubbering mess of Freudian analysis.

Personally, my own was born of a games journalist. Three years ago, Chris Buffa rightly took apart games journalism. It was inspiring stuff, but the most devastating quote encouraged videogame journalists to “keep in mind that no matter how successful you may think that you are, there’s a very hot person in a bar that’s going to laugh in your face when you inform them what you do for a living (they’ll be sober, by the way).”

Oh. Continue reading →