FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
The Concept Stage
Client 2: Do I take it that you are proposing to slaughter our tenants?
Mr. Wiggin: Does that not fit in with your plans?
Client 1: Not really. We asked for a simple block of flats.
Mr. Wiggin: Oh. I hadn't fully divined your attitude towards the tenants.
You see I mainly design slaughterhouses.
—Monty Python's Flying Circus, "The Architect Sketch"
In the concept stage of game design, you make decisions that you live with for the life of the project. This stage establishes things about the game that are so fundamental, changing them later would wreak havoc on the development process because a great deal of the work done to implement the game would have to be thrown away. It's like constructing a building: You can revise the color scheme and the lighting design while it's still under construction, but you can't decide that you really wanted an airport instead of a hotel once the foundations are poured.
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All game designs must begin with a game concept; that is, a general idea of how you intend to entertain someone through gameplay and, at a deeper level, why you believe it will be a compelling experience. Many different considerations influence your plans for the game concept. Part of creating a game concept includes deciding what genre your game fits into, if any. Defining and refining a game concept is described in detail in Chapter 3.
Once you know what kind of experience you want to present, you have to think about who would enjoy that experience. In a commercial environment, publishers sometimes define their audience—a "target market"—and then think of a concept for a game to sell to them. In any case, the choices you make here have important consequences for your game because, in player-centric design, you test every design decision against your hypothetical representative player to be sure that the decision helps to entertain your target audience.
In an abstract video game, the player doesn't get immersed in a fictional game world and so doesn't have much of a role. He is simply a player playing the game for its own sake. But in a representational game, the player does a lot more pretending. He pretends to believe in the game world, the avatar, and the situations the game puts him in. In such games, the player plays a role, and as a designer it is up to you to define what that role is. It could be an athlete, a general, a dancer, an explorer, a business tycoon, or any of a million other things that people fantasize about doing. Sometimes the roles in a game are multifaceted: In a sports game, the player often changes roles from an athlete on the field, to the coach planning strategy, to the general manager hiring and trading players. You must be able to explain
the player's role clearly, because the role a game offers is part of how publishers decide whether to fund that game, as well as how players decide whether to buy it.
Abstract video games have arbitrary rules, so the player seldom has any preconceptions about what the game will, or won't, allow her to do. Representational video games, however, take place in a world that is at least somewhat familiar, and the player comes to the game with certain expectations and hopes. Representational games are about fulfilling dreams—dreams of achievement, of power, of creation, or simply of doing certain things and having certain experiences.
Once you have a game concept, a role, and an audience in mind, it's time to begin thinking about how you will fulfill your player's dream. What is the essence of the experience that you are going to offer? What kinds of challenges does the player expect to face, and what kinds of actions does she expect to perform? Deciding what it means to fulfill the dream is the first step on the road to defining the game - play itself.
You must not make changes to the concept elements of your game—the game concept, audience, player's role, and dream that it fulfills—once you have started into the elaboration stage of design.
