game design

Breaking the Frame

  • Reading time:1 mins read

I just realized how much Builder was subconsciously influenced by Portal. I honestly didn’t even think about it at all. But Valve’s design pervades almost everything about the game’s structure, down to the build/destroy thing (as opposed to red/blue portal stuff), and the way that the design is broken down into… sort of puzzle rooms.

And the whole game is sort of about escaping from this cozy gamey situation. And all the way the game teases you about what may be beyond that facade. Then at some point you — well. At some point everything becomes clear, and that’s when things become really interesting.

It says something about Valve’s design sensibility that I find myself aping it without even knowing I’m doing so.

If you have yet to play Builder, go and do so. If you downloaded it early on, you might as well upgrade; there are always little improvements. Meanwhile I’m working on a way to make the game easier for everyone to experience.

Builder: The Game

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Level 2 of Builder -- a leap of faith!

Builder.

Build footholds. Destroy obstacles. Be observant.

Read the setup instructions. Play. Donate, if you wish.

Picking the Lock-box

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

Desktop Dungeons brings with it the old discussion about unlockable content. It’s designed as a short game; Rogue by way of Minesweeper. Finish the game under the right conditions, and you get more conditions that facilitate further unlocking. The game is hard, so you’re only going to beat it some percentage of the time. As you get better — or at least get further into the unlocking process — the game gets harder, forcing the player to put in that much more effort for the next unlock.

It’s a regular progression: play, play, play until you play well enough to meet a condition; then move on and play some more. There’s always another carrot, until finally there isn’t. And look at all the time and energy you’ve invested to get there.

Since I downloaded the game, I have found myself in a feedback cycle. I imagine it’s the impulse that a compulsive gambler feels. Hey, it’s only another ten minutes; I’m on a roll now; I know I can beat that boss if I just choose the gnome and conserve my potions. And so okay, I die. But this next time I’ll make it for sure.

This isn’t healthy. By no measure on Earth is this healthy. And yet for about ten years this has been a popular way to extend the life of simple games. You might call it a sort of meta completion compulsion. Often large-environment games will riddle their worlds with stars and packages and honeycombs to collect, and unless you track down every last one you’re not playing the game right. Often hardcore skill-based games will hand out letter grades for performance, and unless you earn the highest grade in every challenge, you’re not playing the game right. In either case, you’re probably missing out on something. This unlockable business comes from the same place, but translates a little differently.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Mobility (Tangent)

  • Reading time:1 mins read

The last few days I’ve been playing through old Castlevania games – first Harmony of Dissonance, then Simon’s Quest, then Castlevania. Now I’m working on Aria of Sorrow.

The structure to Simon’s Quest – I’d never noticed before, as the game is so obtuse in directing the player around; if you know what you’re doing, the game has some genius level design, both within the mansions and in the overworld. The game is always directing you where you need to go next, and unless you’re a dunderhead and fight the obvious clues the game goes by very quickly, and rather elegantly. The only catch is in how well the game obscures some of its “keys” – the crystals and Dracula’s Heart, in particular.

The elegance here shows up Dracula’s Curse all the more. I should really finish cursing that game out. So to speak. I wonder if anyone would be interested in publishing my manifesto.

Touch Generations

  • Reading time:13 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation, under the title “FEATURE: A Short History of Touch”.

A few years ago, Nintendo launched the DS with a vaguely unsettling catch phrase: “Touching is Good”. Their PR team sent disembodied plastic hands to everyone on their mailing list, in the process creeping out Penny Arcade. As creepy and forward as the campaign was, it had a point. Touching historically has been good, for the game industry.

On a whole, videogames are an awfully lonely set of affairs. They paint an alluring well, then give the player rocks to throw, to see what ripples. From Spacewar! to Pong, you’re always shooting or batting or throwing some kind of projectile, to prod the environment. Even in some of the most exploration-heavy games, like Metroid, the only way to progress is to shoot every surface in sight, with multiple weapons. Little wonder art games like Rez are based on the shooter template: it’s about as basic a videogame as you can get. See things, shoot things, you win. If things touch you, you lose. Except for food or possessions, generally you can only touch by proxy; toss coins into the well; ping things, to see how they respond. To see if they break.

The Pathology of Game Design

  • Reading time:18 mins read

Originally published by Next Generation.

As I entered adolescence, my mother decided in her wisdom that I was destined to be an actor. That I showed no particular enthusiasm or indeed talent did not dampen this enterprise for years to follow. One summer, between calls for music videos and hypothetical summer blockbusters, I chanced into a tryout for a hypothetical Blockbuster ad. To the best I can recollect, the company was adding Genesis and Super Nintendo games to its rental library, and to demonstrate the premise was sending out a net for the archetypal game-playing teenager.

Thus I found myself lost across a desk from a pockmarked man with a mustache. When the man asked me to show him my “videogame” acting, I hunched over and concentrated at a spot a few yards ahead of me, miming my button presses with an imagined precision. I knotted my brow, maybe gritted my teeth or moved my lips as if to mutter. You can imagine where the scene goes from here. The director keeps asking for “more”, growing frustrated in proportion to my unease. He wants me to thrash in my chair, slam the buttons like a jackhammer, contort my face, and show him my best Beverly Hills orgasm. I am amazed; he patronizes me; I get to go home. Later I met the man they cast as the teenager; he was in his late twenties and had a habit of performing rude gestures to passers-by.

Fifteen years later, despite what seem obvious advances in technology and design, people don’t really see videogames any differently.

Gestures and Measures

  • Reading time:8 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part eleven of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation.

About a year ago NextGen published an article in which I groused about the early speculation about the Wii. The point, I said, wasn’t that we could now have real-time lightsaber duels; it was the extra layer of nuance that the Wiimote added on top of our familiar grammar – kind of the way analog control made 3D movement a hair less awkward. The point of motion control, I said, wasn’t to replace current control systems; it was to augment them, thereby to make them more flexible. A little more powerful, a little more intuitive.

Well, I was half right.

Cultivating Fear

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation, under the title “How to Make Fear“.

With Halloween at hand, surely there must be some way to warp the festive energy to our own analytical ends. Just see what happens when you invite us to a party! Don’t fret, though – though full of long words, our museum of terror takes the well-oiled form of a top ten list. We know how you like your information, and it’s in bite-sized individually wrapped treats. Please… be our guest.

The Crying Game

  • Reading time:14 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part six of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation under the title “Can Videogames Make You Cry?”.

A few weeks ago, Bowen Research published the results of a survey, on the role of emotion in videogames. Hugh Bowen polled 535 gamers on their own views and history, with the end goal to rough some kind of an objective analysis out of their subjective experiences, and thereby maybe to shed some light on what emotional effect videogames have had in the past. The paper is well, and humbly, written; its conclusions, though, are less than revelatory: the only genre that tends to elicit reasonably complex emotion is RPGs (presumably Japanese ones), while other genres all inspire at least some basic kind of motivational urge in the player – be it rage or fear or what have you. Meanwhile, the paper is full of comments about Aeris, and the profound affect of her death on people who had never played Phantasy Star II.

The problem, I suppose, is in the question being asked: “Can videogames make you cry?”. It’s a binary question about a complex issue, much like asking whether Americans are happy and then concluding “sometimes!” And indeed, Bowen’s answer seems to be “well, yes… probably. In theory.” A second issue is the way Bowen approached the issue as a matter of statistics – and then based his analysis on the subjective responses of a skewed sample. “Gamers”, as with any obsessives, have by nature a peculiar perspective of their medium – a medium which, furthermore, is not yet refined as an expressive platform.

The question should not be whether videogames are capable of eliciting complex emotion – as, given the complex analog weave of our brains, anything can result in an emotional response of any depth and sophistication. Rather, what Bowen might have asked is how innately bound any emotion is to the current fabric of videogames (that is, whether it has anything to do with what the medium is trying to accomplish), how much emotional potential videogames might ideally hold, and – assuming some degree of innate potential – how best to insinuate emotion into the framework or theory of a videogame. Or rather perhaps, how best to cull emotion from that same framework.

The Secret of Pac-Man’s Success: Making Fun First

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [name redacted]

The radios were on the seats, this time. Most of the radios remained in place. On the screen to the right, An isometric illustration of Pac-Man greeted newcomers. A scruffy middle-aged man fumbled behind the podium. Brandon and I chose seats close and to the right of center. When most of the seats were filled, the man behind the podium turned on his microphone; it was Iwatani. He introduced himself, and his topic, in an English which might have carried him through the lecture, were he able to keep it up.

He wasn’t. To fill in the language gap, Iwatani was given a tag-team of feuding translators. Every few minutes, one woman would trade off for the other. It was a little bizarre to listen to, as it was clear that neither translation was as accurate or well-phrased as it could have been. One of the women tried at least three times, and ultimately failed, to pronounce “Galaxian”. Neither seemed to notice Iwatani’s well-organized slides, which almost narrated his lecture on their own. According to Brandon, who chose to listen to the Japanese channel on his radio, there was a point when one of the translators shouted at the other to “shut up”.

( Continue reading at Insert Credit )

I have an orange.

  • Reading time:1 mins read

I got my first issue of Game Developers magazine today. I’ve not really leafed through it in much detail, although I notice an ad for those new Nokia phones that Sega’s planning to support. Actually, there seems to be a pretty big focus on cell phones in this issue. And Lara Croft. Hrm. Tetsuya Mizuguchi appears in a few places with his frosted hair. The cover story is on facial animation and… what appears to be some PC strategy game with which I’m not really familiar.

Also included with this issue was a brochure for the upcoming Game Developers Conference in March. Guh, it’s that soon?

I dreamed in completely non-fluent Japanese, last night. I think I was on a train the whole time.

… I seem to be unusually sensitized right now. Everything feels and sounds and looks about five hundred percent stronger than it should. I hope this calms down, soon. It’s… not very comfortable.

End of report.

Edit: The editor-in-chief of this magazine is female!

Arr.

  • Reading time:3 mins read

It occurred to me just now that I approach games like a designer. Every game is a learning experience for me, and is judged in terms of the quality of its construction and its original content. It’s as if I’m giving the final okay on every game I encounter. Yes, this design came together well. Yes, I’m proud of this one. No, go away, Acclaim. I almost never even think to examine a game from the outside. I generally need to get inside the heads of the design team in order to appreciate the work. I absorb developer interviews. Every detail about the design process which can be revealed. I revel in picking apart. For ultimately, I guess that I want to understand the essence of the medium.

… I just find this revelation to have its subtle twist of irony, at the moment. Maybe it is about time. Heck, it was about time for something. And this is something. Further, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for most of my life. From my first experiences with videogames, my thought has been “I can do that” — and further, that I probably could do it better. I didn’t want to just play these things; I wanted to be a part of the process.

I’ve never been an outsider, in terms of videogames. It’s one of the few realms in which I can say this with no hint of equivocation. They’re one of the few things I get, inside and out — probably more so than a large segment of the people actually producing the things today. So why haven’t I been doing anything about that? And I don’t just mean blabbering my views, which I do endlessly anyway (albeit never in any official form). Hell, this is an art like any other. It’s obvious I’ve been itching to flex my muse, and it’s obvious that I’m never going to be satisfied until I at least try my hand at something bigger than Crullo: Adventures of a Donut.

… Although, hey…

I think I’m needed. And I think I’ve got something to say. And I know I’m good enough to do something about that, if I just keep true to myself.

I was saying that next year was going to rock, and I’ve been saying it for a while. And now I know the reason. I might be taking a bit of a stand here, but I do believe I’ve found my calling. It’s hard not to feel enthusiastic about that.

This is going to work. It’s as simple as that. I’ve never been so sure about anything.