Game Design

Game Design — 7 Comments
23
Jul 10

Lay down your guns

Sculpture at the United Nations building, New York. Original image by freshwater2006 on Flickr.

I love violent games.

I love shooting. I heart punching. I make “brrrm!” noises when I move tanks around, and cackle gleefully when I make those tanks demolish other tanks or buildings. Who cheers for war? I cheer for war.

If it’s done well.

Luckily, violence is one of the easiest things to simulate in a videogame. People both inside and outside the culture of games wonder whether the popularity of realistic warfare simulators is a sign that today’s youth are becoming brutalised (as though people haven’t always been fascinated by war), but sit Jack Thompson, Michael Atkinson, Hillary Clinton and Joseph Liberman down in a Basic Game Programming 101 class and I guarantee you they will all start by making a 2D shooter (if they think nobody is watching). Continue reading →

Academic / Game Design — 18 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 →

Experience / Game Design — 4 Comments
11
May 10

Baby games

I’d always figured that videogame characters were so unlike ‘real-world’ people that they couldn’t prepare me for anyone that might be thrust into my life. But walking my nine-month-old daughter around my kitchen, like a living marionette, I was suddenly hit by how much these miniature humans have in common with the characters we play in our games. And it’s more than just their uncanny ability to double jump. Continue reading →

Experience / Game Design — 2 Comments
7
May 10

Who killed the high score? Part 2: RIPG

It seems as though point-scoring systems, once an indispensable part of videogames, have slowly been dying out. High score tables are far from extinct, but among the immersive single-player games that are considered the flagships of the medium – commercial colossi such as Half-Life, Uncharted, Fallout, Metroid Prime, Super Mario Galaxy and Grand Theft Auto, and critical high water marks such as Braid, Portal, World of Goo and BioShock – few use scoring in any significant way.

Why has the high score fallen out of favour? And are we overlooking an element of games that has not outlived its usefulness?

In Part 1 of Who killed the high score? I wrote about Halo 3‘s campaign scoring system, and how it greatly improved my experience of replaying that game. That got me thinking about another well-realised scoring system, in a game at the very opposite end of the developer budget scale: Spelunky. Continue reading →

Game Design — 10 Comments
1
May 10

Who killed the high score? Part 1: Combat Devolved

A familiar refrain in recent weeks, as everyone has been discussing the nature of games, is that videogames are no longer all about head-to-head competitions and high scores, as they were back in the heyday of the videogame arcade. While we often scoff at the ignorance of commentators who say you “get points” for killing enemies in, say, Grand Theft Auto IV – or pretty much any game that makes the news – it’s come up more than ever in the past fortnight, since Roger Ebert’s myopic dismissal of videogames-as-they-were-in-the-1970s-when-he-last-played-one has been countered by everyone in the entire world, all of whom have pointed out that most games aren’t about points or scores any more.

With typical obliviousness to the zeitgeist, and entirely by coincidence, I just discovered the campaign scoring system in Halo 3 – a game I’ve owned and played regularly for more than two years. Continue reading →

Culture / Experience / Game Design — 1 Comment
17
Apr 10

The game they let you play in heaven and make you play in hell

God damn it.

It’s 2am. I’m tired. My back hurts. My eyes hurt. I can’t think clearly. I want to go to bed. I can’t stop playing Fire Emblem, because it’s so much god damn fun I want to stab myself with a pencil.

Playing Fire Emblem is like being in an abusive relationship. It’s a frightening, nerve-sharpening, anxiety-inducing experience. The game makes you hate it for its cruelty, and love it for its rare, begrudging approval, and hate yourself for not being good enough for it. Continue reading →

Experience / Game Design — No Comments
9
Apr 10

Fighting the powers that be

Sleep paralysis is odd, scary and enthralling all at the same time. It’s a phenomenon that not everybody experiences, but if you don’t, I’m telling you, you’re missing out. You emerge from slumber to find you can’t move, sometimes feeling a presence in your house, occasionally being able to hear voices as you lie there impotent to movement. It’s like a waking nightmare while it lasts, but a blast to look back on. The powerlessness and confusion seem like things any sane person would want to avoid, but remember, I’m someone who wakes up convinced that people are talking in my walls. This kind of experience – one that steals away your agency, yet manages to still place you within a world you are involved in - is rarely, if ever, seen in games. However, the latest creation baring the Silent Hill moniker manages to submerse you in these types of feelings in an even purer form than past iterations of the series. Continue reading →

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