"There is no such thing as a player character" is the kind of tagline that gets me into trouble in some places. So is "the emotional connection between player and character that many game makers believe exists in fact does not". Both contain a powerful subtext, questioning everything from a player's sense of identity to the validity of their experiences. Read the wrong way, they can seem to say that all the emotion you feel in playing games is made up.
Of course that's not my intent. When I say "there is no such thing as a player character" I don't mean that there is nothing. When I say play occurs through "dolls", likewise. My intent is to reinterpret the emotional experience of play within a game-native context, and so derive useful insight that could apply to all games. In otherwords, the emotions are real but our way of talking about them is broken.
This is an essay to fully explain this concept, to set what's really going on when most players play games in context, about the importance of identity and self expression. (Warning: this article is over 8000 words in length.)
I often say that videogames are not a storytelling medium. They can’t tell tightly structured tales because the player gets in the way, and this is why there are no great game stories.
However I also often say that videogames are a great medium for storysense. An excellent example is the new Call of Duty game, Modern Warfare 3. This article looks at how Modern Warfare 3 conveys its sense of story, and how it sometimes gets it wrong, as a lesson for what you might do in your game.
Games have their own visual rules which are often contrary to other kinds of camera. Camera design dictates how players see into the game world, and ultimately how they play, so without good camera design your whole game may end up unplayable.
It’s very difficult (read: expensive) to change a poorly designed camera without rewriting a game entirely. This is why I consider gamatography (like photography, but for games) to be the first design task on any project, the first spec to be written and the first code that needs to be prototyped.
There need to be clear rules that will govern the camera throughout the whole of the game, sooner rather than later. Do it right and camera acts as a foundation on which you can build. Do it wrong and you’ll create a user experience nightmare.
Some games are made of smaller games, like Wii Sports or the Total War games. Other separations are softer. Vehicle play in Grand Theft Auto feels quite different from on-foot, and GTA is essentially two games which link strongly.
When games mix they can create exciting new experiences, but many mixes just don’t work. Rather than being enhanced by their interaction, these games pull on each other, leaving the overall experience to be one of dysnergy, the opposite of synergy.
Perhaps the game design has forgotten the importance of the player’s role. Role is not a marketing issue. It is how players understand your game and why it's awesome
You might call it challenge, difficulty or a scenario, but a universal trait of great games is that they test players in some way. Games have a learning value (as Raph Koster so memorably chronicled) and a huge part of their fun comes from mastering them. From the simplex crossword to the massive complexity of Battlefield 3, games push the player to be better in some way. Even creative games like the Sims are test driven.
Yet it is a major fallacy to conclude that all types of test consequently make for good games. They don’t, and there are good reasons as to why. The psychology of play and boredom gets in the way, the lack of clarity in some kinds of test makes them frustrating and the overall opacity of their results leave players nonplussed.
This is an essay about optimality, the play brain and why successful games need to be far more abstract than they might appear.
What Games Are is about game design, game development, games as art, craft, culture and industry and how you can make better games. Follow through any of these links:
