FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

The Player’s Role

To understand your own game and to explain it to others, you must know what the player will do, and in a sense, what the player will be in the game world—what her role is. These are the first questions you face in creating your game concept.

What Is the Player Going to Do?

It's sometimes tempting to start thinking about a game in terms of its setting or its characters. For example, "Wouldn't it be fun to play a game set in ancient Rome?"
or "Wouldn't it be fun to play a game as Indiana Jones?" These are reasonable ideas, and of course many games have been made from both of them. However, you can­not make a game from a setting or character alone. The first step toward turning the idea into a game concept is to answer the question, "What is the player going to do?"

This is the single most important question you can ask yourself at the concept stage. You don't have to assign activities to input devices yet ("the X button kicks and the O button punches"), but you do have to know the activities that you want to offer the player—the verbs of the game. For games in some genres, the answer is simple and obvious: drive a race car or fight in a boxing match. For games in other genres, such as role-playing games, the question may have many answers: explore, fight, cast spells, collect objects, buy and sell, talk to dragons.

Video games allow someone to play—that is, to act. The player has purchased the game in order to do something, not just to see, hear, or read something. Interactivity is the raison d'etre of all gaming; it is what sets gaming apart from presentational forms of entertainment such as books and movies. The correct answer to the ques­tion, "Wouldn't it be fun to play a game set in ancient Rome?" is another question: "Yes, it would. What kinds of things could a player do in ancient Rome?" The more precise you are, the better. Avoid generalities such as "the player builds a city," and think of the exact verbs to assign to the input devices: buy land, sell land, con­struct a road, and so on.

Do not start designing the story, avatar, game world, artwork, or anything else until you have answered the question “What is the player going to do?”