as we’ve discussed, a game is comprised of internal rules which govern how things work inside the “magic circle” (the space that the game creates). but a player also brings external knowledge to the game: her sense of how things work outside the circle. the rules of a game are often abstract (because games are abstract, like language), and while the player will eventually internalize those rules, it’s the player’s external knowledge – which is all she has when she first sits down to play – that informs her expectations.[1] things can get stuck when the player’s external knowledge and the game’s internal rules are at odds.
here’s an example: the other day i played this knytt story. there are ladders in that level i have to climb: the way i climb them is by standing at the bottom of the ladder and pressing DOWN. huh? as a player and author of knytt stories, i know that there are certain screen transitions that authors can rig to trigger when the player hits DOWN. but had i played fewer knytt stories, it would never have been my intuition to climb UP a ladder by touching the DOWN key. (my solution, as a designer, would have been to make the ladders into surfaces the player can climb using knytt’s climbing ability.)[2]
where design is at its strongest, the game’s internal rules align with the player’s expectations. let’s talk about r. hero.
john van ryzin’s h.e.r.o. made appearances on many computers, but the one i know is the vcs (or atari 2600) version. in it, an adventurer named roderick hero explores mine shafts with dynamite and a propeller on his back, his goal to rescue trapped explorers. some of the rooms contain a visible light source: a lantern mounted on the wall. if r. hero bumps the lantern, it snuffs, plunging the screen into darkness. on some screens, the lantern’s positioned unavoidably at the entrance, giving the player just a brief glimpse of the room before it goes black.
though the walls can’t be seen, they’re still there, and the player can map out the room by feeling along them, like in any kind of darkness. there are also, though, walls that are deadly to touch (games about spatial navigation tend to use hazards to negotiate how the player navigates that space). for the game’s sake, it would be unfair to let the player bumble into a killwall in a darkened room. the game’s solution: the deadly walls have lava running through them. that’s why you shouldn’t touch them! it’s also why they glow red in pitch darkness, letting the player see them even when the lights are out.
this makes sense to us. that the walls are rich with lava explains two things at once: why they’re fatal to touch and why they can be seen in pitch darkness. something that gives off light can be seen in the dark, right? and the game is consistent with this logic: when r. hero drops a lit stick of dynamite in a dark room, we can make out the walls by the light of its fuse. this seems like a tiny thing, the logical thing, but that’s what good design is: supplying the player with a metaphor by which to understand the otherwise abstract mechanisms of the game (like a killwall that’s always visible).
here’s a more complex example: you start galaga with a single ship and two in reserve. three “lives,” right? but the ship you’re flying can be captured by the enemy, in which case you move on to your next “life,” your next ship, if there is one. shoot the enemy that stole your first ship to rescue it. now you’ve got two ships, side-by-side, that move and shoot as one: double the fire-power, but double the size, making it easier to get hit. fortunately, a hit just destroys the struck ship, returning you to your normal firepower and size.
we’ve grown used to the abstract concept of “lives.” but the collection of rules i’ve just described are all built around a single metaphor which exists to explain this abstraction to the player: you’re in control of a fleet of three ships, not one ship that reassembles itself when it’s blown up (but only twice). given the understanding that each “life” is a single ship in your fleet, all of the interactions in the above paragraph are not only believable but easier to learn and keep straight.
this is really good design.
[1] depending on how experienced the player is with games, some of this external knowledge may be rules to other games: it’s easier to approach super mario bros. 3 when you’ve already played super mario bros.
[2] i know why the author didn’t do this, of course: giving the player the climbing ability would mean having to slap down “unclimbable” flags on all the surfaces in the game that aren’t ladders. but as someone who’s done just that in her own knytt stories, i think it would be worth the work for a game that plays more elegantly.
16 comments
The former example reminds me of something in Spelunky: in dark rooms, all of the trap blocks (Arrow, Spear Totem, Smash) are triggered by motion – be it the player, a foe or an object. Furthermore, they all have an eye or eyes engraved on them. In dark rooms, there is a tiny flame inside their eye engravings. This not only explains why the traps are able to see the player in darkness, but also provides a reason for why the player is allowed to see the traps at a distance as well.
This is a great post Anna, and I’m so glad that you’ve decided to start sharing your thoughts on game design in more detail.
I was little confused however over what type of design you were talking about in any given instance, ‘game’ design or ‘graphic’ design, or if you considered these the same thing.
To me, good graphic design in games is the kind that helps players understand the rules, the game design. In other words, the sensual layer should serve as a gateway to the intellectual layer.
Do you agree with this division or do you see graphic and game design in a more holistic way?
This seems to be more about the interaction between gameplay rules and flavor, and how one benefits the other. The normal for a game is for an item to have a gameplay effect and flavor vaguely tacked on it – the rare times flavor influence gameplay are valued by players.
An example from a newer game – the pyro’s flamethrower in Team Fortress 2 has a blast of air as its alt fire. It can be used to deflect projectiles, push enemies off perches, and in the latest update, douse friends that have been torched by opposing pyros.
Charles:
Seen on a higher level, what auntie was describing wasn’t how to do individual things, but how to make them work together elegantly. Whenever two or more things interact(in this case: game design and player expectations), there are at least three aspects: the quality of the individual “parts” and the quality of the interaction between both (how well they play together).
To extrapolate it to a game in general: doing all the individual aspects of designing a game well, isn’t “all” yet… there is also the question if all those aspects play well together. This isn’t just important for avoiding “flaws”… if you play the “interaction”-game really well, you can via efficient interaction of gameparts do stuff, which the parts alone cannot do on their own. So, getting the aspects of a game to fit to each other isn’t just a matter of avoiding errors – you can use it to your advantage.
game design entails many different ways of thinking about how the player will approach and understand things: i consider visual design, sound design to all be part of the DESIGN of the game. they’re all things the game author needs to keep in her head, even if the author is actually a team of people all doing different things.
it’s the graphic and sound layer, yeah, that is often used to construct the metaphor: the lava walls in h.e.r.o. glow (or rather flash two different shades of) red, establishing properties of heat, light and danger. but that’s part of the design of the game, indivisible from the rules “touch this and die” and “visible in darkness.”
Anna, you are much appreciated. I stumbled upon your site when Jenn Frank linked to you on her site a about six months ago, and you opened up my eyes to a world of gaming I was only dimly aware of beforehand.
Now you’re doing such a fine job on helping me understand what exactly makes some games good games and some games bad. This is great you see because I’ve been trying my hand at some very basic game creation as of late.
If anything at all comes of it (that’s at all of worth) it’s more or less thanks to you.
aw, thanks.
Thanks for the clarification!
I didn’t mean to suggest that the visual/audio elements aren’t important in the development of a game, especially a video game. I suppose I just use the term ‘game design’ to to mean specifically the crafting of rules and ‘game development’ to refer to the whole process. In the end it’s just a matter of semantic taste.
I guess where I might disagree with you is that the rules of a game and their visual and aural representations are always “indivisible”. From my perspective rules are much more fundamental while elements of the representational layer are more conventional.
Take your example of the glowing red walls. They could just as easily glow blue and as long as the player came to associate that color with danger they would serve the same purpose in the game. It’s more elegant in a graphic design sense to make dangerous things red, because people associate red with danger outside of games, but ultimately it has no effect on the game’s possibility space.
This is all details though, I agree wholeheartedly with your larger point!
Ms Campbell has said a bit about this, but it might do to go into a bit of detail on the analogies in good move-mapping in a fighting game. in Street Fighter II, the commands to most special moves are somewhat sensible in that they mimic the motions and concepts of the moves. When you hit QCF+P, Ryu or Ken physically swings his arms down and forward and attacks using his hands. And so on.
For other games, it often seems like the designers put little thought into what their commands are supposed to represent; it’s a fighting game, and fighting game commands are complex, so they design random command of an appropriate complexity to the significance of the move.
Again, the concept of The Videogame has become so abstracted as to stand in the way of easy communication.
The bit about Galaga sounds interesting. I’m not sure that I’ve played that much of the game.
I’m always on the lookout for better solutions to the problem of lives being difficult to comprehend in a realistic manner, although I’ve heard that Prince of Persia: Sands of Time did a great job. I also liked the recent Queens by noonat.
The question may sound naive, but perhaps one solution is making a game not primarily being about “killing each other” :)
(That does not mean that there may be no combat or similiar – just that the result isn’t death)
P.S.: Here’s a really stupid example which does it without really changing much. Remember all those old beat’em ups, right? So, lets say our hero goes into the streets with 3 “hospital checks”. If he gets beaten up, he obviously cannot continue the fight, so he goes to hospital and pays with one of his checks. While on the mission, he may also rarely find additional “hospital checks”. If he runs out of checks and gets beaten up, well, obviously then there is no way to continue the mission and the game ends :)
Regarding not-killing, yeah, that’s ideal. When are the choices we make in life defined so starkly that failure results in death — even a metaphorical death? One that we can practice over and over until we can avoid it in the way we have been proscribed to regardless of all the other choices in our life?
I don’t want to get too obnoxious about this, as right now the metaphors available are somewhat limited by the narrow band of communication between the player and the designer. I don’t know that the problem is really so much one of breadth of action, though, as it is about the poignancy of every decision might make within the given system. How do you make every choice feel on some level significant?
For a counter-example of the inherent value of breadth of action, see Grand Theft Auto. You can do all kinds of stuff (within a limited, clumsy, black-and-white scope), but it’s almost all meaningless. Even if you destroy something, it’ll be magically fixed in a few minutes.
I realize that the meaninglessness of the violence was originally the point of the series. Facile social commentary! Irony! Ha! It’s kind of moved past that, though.
I guess the point is that death is fine, sure, if it serves not just a mechanical but an expressive purpose. Whether one desires or intends it or not, mechanics do all speak something; ideally the designer will maximize the bandwidth of the conversation by paying attention to the impact of every mechanism — if not consciously then subconsciously, or unconsciously — on the themes or values or ideas that the designer wants to explore with the player.
If your goal is to distill the essence of Pac-Man, then okay, death is an important part of that. Notice, though, how in Championship Edition the role and implications of death are changed to suit the new focus of the game.
One trackback/pingback
[...] H.E.R.O In Darkness (AuntiePixelante) [...]
post a comment