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by Ernest Adams |
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[ Lea
esta página en el español. ] Computer games are made to fulfill
dreams.
Some games are
light entertainment, designed to while away a few minutes with a puzzle or a
simple challenge. For those kinds of games, there’s no need to discuss a
design philosophy in detail. But the
fundamental goal of a larger game, as I said on my home page, is to take
you away to a wonderful place, and there let you do an amazing thing. Books and movies
can’t do that. They can take you away to a wonderful place, but they can’t
let you do an amazing thing. That’s the power of interactivity. That’s what
makes this medium unique, and that’s what makes it important. Therefore, the
design of a game begins with the question, “What dream am I going to fulfil?” Perhaps it’s a
dream of exploring a dungeon infested with monsters. Perhaps it’s a dream of
coaching a football team. Perhaps it’s a dream of being a fashion designer.
But before you do anything else, you must dream the dream. Understand it.
Feel it. Know who dreams it with you and why. Interactivity is the raison
d’être of all computer gaming.
The next question
is this: “What is the player going to do?” We concentrate so
much on the artwork, the sound, the music, the motion capture, the video,
that it’s easy to lose sight of this question. Interactivity is the raison
d’être, the reason for being. We have to know what the player is going to do.
What actions, what activities, will fulfil the
dream? In addition to
actions, the player also has goals. It may be that the game is really a
software toy, and is meant to be played with without goals. But in
traditional gaming, the player is trying to achieve something, a “victory
condition.” For goal-oriented games, defining the victory condition is
closely related to defining the actions taken to achieve it. In any game more
complex than a puzzle, the player is playing a role. It may be a medieval
adventurer, a military commander, a business tycoon, an athlete, or it may be
something abstract and almost indescribable. (In the coin-op game Tempest,
the player was a sort of two-legged spider with a machine gun.) Defining that
role -- its goals, its limitations, and above all its actions -- is the
second step in game design. A game takes place in a
world.
Any computer game
takes place in some kind of a world, by which I mean a physical space, but
also an intellectual space, an emotional space, an economic space, and an
ethical space. The physical
space describes all the sights and sounds, the things that the player can
see and hear and touch and speak to in the world. Pictures and sounds and
language are used to portray the world, and to
create not only its physical appearance but also its tone and mood. The
definition of the physical space helps to establish the intellectual,
emotional, economic, and ethical spaces. The intellectual
space describes the thought processes that the player will take, the
things that she will be required to think about. These can be extremely
complex or extremely simple; they can be extremely abstract or extremely
concrete. But all games have an intellectual space, a set of rules and ways
of reasoning about the game. The emotional
space describes the kinds of emotions the player should experience and
the kinds of emotions the characters in the game will display. Fear, triumph,
sadness, amusement, and suspense are common elements of the emotional spaces
of games. All too often, so is frustration, although rarely by design! The economic
space describes the flow of resources into, around, and out of the game.
This need not be money; it can be ammunition, armor strength, “health points,”
magical power, or any other valued resource which changes in response to the
player’s actions. The economic space includes a
mathematical model which describe how these variables change, and
designing that model carefully is vital to creating the game’s balance. The
victory conditions are usually defined in with reference to elements in the
economic space. The ethical
space describes the system of ethics in place in the game. If a game
involves concepts that people have moral feelings about (theft, destruction,
killing, conquest, democracy, protection of the innocent, and so on), then it
must reward, punish or ignore the player’s choices when confronted with a
moral decision. Sometimes simply ignoring an action sends a powerful moral
message in itself. This is just the beginning.
There’s a vast
amount more to computer game design. A game’s design is informed by its
intended audience, by the features of machine it is being made for, by the
budget and schedule for its production, by the strengths and skills of the
people who are building it. All these things affect the way a game is
designed, but the questions above are the ones I think about first. If there
is ambiguity or uncertainty about their answers, the game is in trouble. The
answers may be revised in the course of production, but they should always be
clearly known by all the people building the game. Only through a collective
understanding of the dream can they work together to fulfil
it. |
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