What Games Are

Great Story, Bad Game: Should The Walking Dead Be Nodal?

The Walking Dead is superbly written, well-voiced and complex. Its characters all have hidden sides. Its sombre music adds a quiet but persistent sense to the horror of its setting. It is beautifully animated, soulful and occasionally very sad. And it uses the fact that it is episodic well, foreshadowing events that might happen and taking account of different branches in the story that you may have chosen.

It’s really great. Until, that is, I play it for a little while.

Podcast: Are Games Made of Games

As an experiment, I've created an audio podcast of yesterday's post on recursion and chaos theory. Let me know what you think.

 

Are Games Made of Games?

You can also grab the MP3 from here:

Link

 

Are Games Made of 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. 

So, they say, games are made of games. Are they?

(Click here for the podcast of this post)

Your Game Is A Graph

Forget everything else for a moment and consider that your game is just a graph of users over time. There is more than one kind of viable graph, but knowing which kind you are aiming for is important. It should affect every strategic or marketing decision that you make. This week's news that Draw Something's user numbers have already dropped by 30% is significant, for example. It makes Zynga's purchase of it look like a lot of money spent based on misunderstanding that game's graph.

Do you know which kind of graph you are creating, and are you making the right choices to improve it? Are you targeting your monetization strategy in the right way, or are you basing it on a faulty understanding of its likely graph?

The Joys of Gaming [Game Design]

You need a good yarn to weave a dream (to steal a quote from Paul), and in a game you need solid fun to weave a world. However fun opens the door to many other joys.

Triple Town is about matching objects, but also the joy of city building. Rez is about targeting and shooting objects, but also the joy of synesthesia and uncovering a story. The Sims is about organising time and space, but also the joys and frustrations of living. 

Fun is merely where we start. What could we build on top of it?

Primer terms used in this post: Action, Art Brain, Boredom, Creative Constant, Dynamic, Fantasy, Fun, Lever, Lizard Brain, Meta-Game, Narrative, Numina, Play Brain, Rule, Storysense, Thauma, Toyplay, Traction

Games Are Not Experiences

E3, trailers and previews mostly sell games based on potential experience. Look at the haunting graphics of Journey or listen to a podcast about the epic scope of Skyrim, and the promise of experience is there. Come into our worlds, they say, they are thaumatic.

Sometimes they are, however those worlds which are successfully so are based on more than just experiences. Experient design’s goal may be to take the player on an emotional journey, but it’s the games that pay attention to what happens in between emotional events that truly are magical. Experiential highs are just one tool in the making of games, not what they are. 

The Difference Between Actions and Verbs [Game Design]

When designing games we often describe interactivity in terms of actions and verbs. We do so casually and interchangeably, but there is actually a difference between the two. It’s the difference between causing change within a game versus the physical inputs you use to make that happen.

Here’s what I mean:

The Narrative vs Mechanics Circus

Last month I contracted what seemed to be a simple cold which progressed into a bronchial infection combined with asthma that knocked me out for three weeks.

It was really bad timing because around the same time, Raph Koster posted a blog bombshell when he said ‘Narrative is not a game mechanic’. A fair few commenters arose in support or ire. Posts flew about whether the meaning of narrative was too broad or limited, whether this was really about a limited formal view of games versus their possibilities, and so on. Exciting stuff, but I couldn’t really get into it.

I’m still recovering, but being ill has given me the chance to reflect and remember that there’s a reason that I don’t normally use the phrase ‘mechanics’. There's also a reason why I tend to dismiss broad narrativism. It’s because both of them are part of a pretend debate over correctness, and each – in their own way – is just circular flame-bait, an ever-burning meme that goes nowhere.

The Four Lenses of Game Making

For years it’s been apparent that interpreting games and their makers through the opposed lenses of gameplay or story is inadequate. Such a one-dimensional spectrum breeds false oppositions (fun-or-art?) while either ignoring many games that don’t fit or reinterpreting them so they fit badly. The spectrum is too reductive and, while it is easy to summarise, it leaves out too much context.

Rather than talking about games in terms of two lenses, I use four (potentially five, but I’ll come back to that). Each represents a common set of assumptions and predispositions that I often see in makers, and there are correlations between them which makes for an interesting (though perhaps deceptively symmetric) diagram.

This post is long, but I’d like to take you through each in turn. I think you’ll find it useful.

The Storysense of Call of Duty MW3

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.

(PS: Watch out, there are spoilers.)