FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

Communicating Your Dream to Others

A dream is a fantasy that you have by yourself; a computer game is something that you make for someone else. You and your development team are entertainers. If your game is in a well-known genre and setting (for example, a World War II flight simulator), you can be pretty certain that a number of people already share your dream. But if your game is in a new setting (a futuristic city of your imagination, for example)—and especially if you are opening up a new genre—you have to be very careful and thorough in communicating your dream to others. Some of the first questions a publishing executive is going to ask you are, "Why would anyone want to play this game?" and "What's going to make someone buy this game instead of another?"

So what does it mean to entertain someone? Many people think entertainment is synonymous with having fun, but even that isn't completely straightforward. People have fun in all kinds of ways. Some of those ways involve hard work, such as gardening or building a new deck. Some of them involve frustration, such as solving a puzzle. Some, such as athletic competitions, even involve pain. One per­son's entertainment is another person's insufferable boredom. To build a game that entertains, you must know who it will entertain and how. Chapter 1, "Games and Video Games," discussed a variety of ways in which video games entertain people. Keep them in mind as your work takes you from dream to game.