If a game feels unfair then few players want to play it.
What players see happening in the game and how they interpret it can often be at odds with what the game maker knows goes on under the hood. Fairness is subjective: a game is only fair if its players believe it to be so. To the player it really doesn't matter how the game engine does what it does, whether it's actually balanced or full of hacks that break balance in their favour. They only know what they see and what they think they see. That can be very hard for the maker to understand.
Designing for fairness sounds like a simple principle, but because it's about feelings rather than facts it's actually very complicated. Particularly for multiplayer games.
Games usually consist of interconnected and repeating patterns of play which group together to form larger movements. Some designers take this idea further by saying that smaller and larger patterns have much the same shape. So a loop generated from a single action such as hitting an opponent and a movement of play (such as killing a boss) are basically the same thing. One is just a larger version of the other.
Some people argue that every kind of interactive software experience should be called a 'game'. For some, it's a statement of inclusiveness as a way to explain why games are brilliant. For others, it's about being part of a marketing story about games, for visibility. Mostly it's about pushing boundaries and escaping limits, but the thing is: All eventually fall victim to equivocitis.
Like Douglas Adams's joke about Man proving that black equals white (only to be killed at the next zebra crossing), equivocitis is the disease of bending definitions and words to connect the unconnected or gather the un-gatherable. It’s using equivocation to prove a point, inferring single-case exceptions to bridge ideas and ‘prove’ to the reader that the thing you believe might be real is actually so.
We need to inoculate ourselves against this plague because it’s the main reason why the debate over games, their status as an art and their future goes nowhere.
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.
Duke Ellington’s point was simple: Across all genres and eras, music needs to swing. It’s a creative constant. I make a similar point about fun, arguing that it too is a creative constant and a game is not a game if it lacks the joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics.
But some kinds of fun are more appealing than others. Some are innately fascinating and inspire the play brain to play, where others just don’t. I call it the law of fascination.
Game developers ask ‘what is fun?’ and academics often answer that fun is seemingly simple but actually fiendishly hard to explain. Everything is potentially fun and trying to encompass it all in one statement is impossible.
When any debate becomes so wide, the intent of the original question is lost. Developers are not really asking ‘what is fun?'’ in the universal sense. They’re asking why does their game suck. Pragmatically then, fun is:
The joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics.
However the idea that fun can be reduced to 9 little words is just the sort of thinking that makes some people angry, because it sounds like (and is) a hard limit on what games can be.
Perhaps the greatest lament of all is the one about why the adventure game died. Once hugely popular, adventure games started to fall out of favour in the mid 90s and by the turn of the millennium were essentially dead. However they did not die because of a grand conspiracy on the part of publishers to kill them (as is often asserted).
Adventure games contributed hugely to the development of the video game as an art form, but there’s a basic reason why they went away: They were bad games.
In games, like any art, nothing is as it appears, not even something as straightforward as Mario’s jump. What initially seems to be the simplest action in all of gaming is actually fiendishly hard to bring to a finished state. Taking the time to get the basics right marks out a polished game from a typical one.
So the question for your game is, irrespective of budget, time or platform, have you got the jumps right?
A good game design needs to be as clear as possible, to the point of obtuse, so that a player can understand it. She needs to know what actions she can take, what effect they will have, and what kind of responses she is likely to receive. This is what game designers mean when they talk about the player’s agency.
The opposite of clarity when the game is hidden. The player is unsure of what actions she can take, what their effects might be and what kinds of response she is likely to receive. This is what I label opacity and the primary cause of opacity is arcane actions.
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