FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

Presenting a Game World

Because a game world is fictional—a fantasy world—the game designer can include imaginary people, places, and situations. The players can think of themselves as make-believe characters in a make-believe place. With conventional games, this takes place primarily in the player's imagination, although printed boards, cards, and so on can help.

Video games can go much further. By using a screen and speakers, video games present a fictional world the players can sense directly. Until recently, the poor state of computer graphics meant that the players had to use a lot of imagination, and of course, text-based computer games still intentionally rely on the players' imaginations. However, it has always been a goal of game developers to present game worlds that seem as real as the fictional worlds in television or film. Although we still have a great deal of work to do, this goal is in sight. Modern video games are full of pictures, animation, movies, music, dialog, sound effects, and so on that conventional games cannot possibly provide. In fact, video games have become so photorealistic in recent years that some designers now experiment with a wider range of visual styles such as Impressionism, traditional Japanese brush painting, and so on.

At the fringes of the video game industry, some people are also making games of augmented reality, or mixed reality, in which computers are used in conjunction with real-world activities to play a game. Such games often use cellular telephones, video cameras, or global positioning systems as well as web servers and a browser-based interface for some of the players. This book doesn't discuss how to design such games, but use the resources in the references if you're interested in learning more.