What Games Are

On Player Characters and Self Expression [Game Design]

"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.)

Theatrics And Charlatans [Marketing Stories]

The game and music industries have two things in common. The traditional primary market for both tends to be younger, and video plays a key role in inspiring those markets. Video is arguably more important for games because the final product is unknowable until you play it. Video makes even more sense in the age of Youtube, filling in a role that magazine previews used to perform. Live broadcasts of conferences are now for everyone. Trailers and tech demos are easy to share and dissect, often in high definition. And finally there are interviews, previews and video podcasts. 

This makes it important for a game maker to have a sense of theatre. To be able to sell a market on the vision of a game, to speak excitedly and inspire is best done with your voice, your sound and your passion. It's amazing how far your message might travel in this way, especially to markets who don't have the inclination to read. It gives you the opportunity to tell your marketing story, but it also brings with it the temptation to act the charlatan. 

Games Don't Tell Stories. People Tell Stories.

I posed the title of this post as a topic at GameCamp.

The idea is this: We get very heated on the discussion of whether games are a storytelling medium or not, with members from all four lenses often talking at cross purposes. Games historically do a bad job of telling stories but sometimes do a good job of catalysing memorable experiences. Those experiences then go on to be formed into stories by players, post hoc. 

What do you think?

Pilots, Not Heroes [Players]

Consider the player as 'pilot' rather than 'hero'. Pilot means machine operator, she who drives the car, manipulates the crane or remote controls the quadrocopter. Her doll is a device, a conduit for action, an extension of their own hand. And as a pilot sometimes this means dangerous or pressured situations. Piloting is therefore immersive.

Sometimes pilots do amazing things like land a plane in the Hudson. This we call 'heroic', but we need to careful about equivocating that kind of hero with a dramatic hero. Dramatic heroes are complex, motivated, a part of the story to which they belong and inextricably bound by the inevitability of its plot. This may be the intent of your narrative, to make the player feel this way, but you don't really get to do that.

You get to present the situation, the storysense, the doll and the rules and encourage them to believe in its reality. Some players will play in the spirit of the game, others will play it literally. They always do they so on their own terms and that's outside your sphere of influence. It's the creative constant of 'self', one of six that bind all games. The player is only ever herself, not the person you might wish her to be.

Most Players Are Unreliable [Fundamentals]

There’s a very simple reason why the deep multiplayer experience of the future that many designers dream for never comes to pass. It’s the same reason why Draw Something has lost millions of users. It’s also why turn-based games usually only have niche appeal. It’s because players are unreliable, flaky, forgetful and selfishly motivated.

Any kind of game that relies on players to interact with one another exposes itself to this issue. The player who forgets to take her turn, the player who realise she’s hit a loss point and decides she doesn’t want to play any more, or the player who uses play as a conduit for inappropriate behaviour has a disproportionate effect on the experience of everyone else.

The games that successfully navigate this issue do so by keeping the format of the game short and allowing for substitution. Perhaps Left 4 Dead does it best, swapping players for characters at a moment’s notice so that at least your game can continue even if your partner disconnects.

Player unreliability is why meta-games fail where single player games succeed, why pen and paper roleplaying games find it hard to gain mass audience while World of Warcraft draws millions upon millions. It is simply easier to motivate a player to play if she knows that her game will always be waiting for her. No kind of game is more frequently thaumatic than a single player game, if only because you can drown out the rest of the world and its Xbox Live chatter.

This is why single player games remain the most important innovation of the videogame age.

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

Marketing Stories Are Not About You

It's really tough to design a game, prototype it, ship it and fix all of its bugs. It feels like that should be the end of the story and that - if you do all of the above well - rewards should be yours. Execution, not ideas, etc.

And yet in all likelihood the media and the public will react with apathy. The fault is likely not with your coding skills, production values, the quality of your music or your design. It's with your approach. You are telling a story which is all about you.

'Me Me Me', your story cries, look how cool I am. Look how quirky I am. Look how awesome I am. Now pay me. That’s a product story, but it’s not a marketing story. A marketing story is about them, not you.

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. 

Why Must Orcs Die? [Signifiers]

Orcs Must Die is a great indie game in which, as the title says, you kill a lot of orcs. Buy it, play it, it’s well worth it. But why must it be orcs that die?

Why not someone else for a change?

The Two Viralities [Marketing]

When people talk about virality, what they generally mean is whether a game spreads by word of mouth or not. However in recent years virality has taken on two different and often contradictory meanings.