FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

Creative and Expressive Play

People love to design and create things, whether clothing, creatures, buildings, cities, or planets. They also love to customize a basic template of some kind to reflect their own choices. This activity can directly influence the gameplay (a player chooses a model of car to drive in a racing game) or can be purely cosmetic (a player chooses a color for the car). If a personal choice affects the gameplay, play­ers won't always select the option the designer might consider the best option, even if they're told which one it is. They often choose one that they like regardless of the consequences. That's how strong the appeal of self-expression is.

As video game machines become more powerful and games begin to reach a wider audience, creative and self-expressive play become increasingly important. Research shows that girls and women are often more motivated by a desire to express them­selves through play than by a desire to defeat others in competition. Chapter 5, "Creative and Expressive Play," is entirely devoted to the design issues of creative and expressive play.

Immersion

...it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Litteraria, Chapter XIV

Coleridge was originally referring not to immersion but to an absence of skepti­cism. He wanted people who read his poems to accept the poems' romantic, imaginary people ("shadows of imagination") on "poetic faith," without asking questions. However, the term suspension of disbelief, as used by the game industry, has come to mean immersion: losing track of the outside world. Immersion is the feeling of being submerged in a form of entertainment, or rather, being unaware that you are experiencing an artificial world. When you are immersed in a book, movie, or game, you devote all your attention to it and it seems real. You have lost track of the boundaries of the magic circle. The pretended reality in which you are immersed seems as real as, or at least as meaningful as, the real world.

This feeling of immersion is deeply and satisfyingly entertaining to some players; others prefer not to become immersed and to remember that it's only a game while they play. People who take the game seriously find interruptions that break their sense of immersion jarring and disappointing. This is part of the reason that har­mony is so important.

Players become immersed in games in several ways:

■ Tactical immersion is the sense of being "in the groove" in high-speed action games. It's sometimes called the Tetris trance. When playing such a game, the action is so fast that your brain has no time for anything else. You don't have time to think about strategy or a story line; the game is mostly about survival. To encourage tactical immersion, you must offer the player dozens of small challenges that can each be met in a fraction of a second. These small challenges must be fairly similar to one another—such as in an arcade shooter. Abrupt changes in the gameplay destroy tactical immersion.

■ Strategic immersion occurs when you are deeply involved in trying to win a game, like the immersion of the chess master: observing, calculating, and plan­ning. You don't think about a story, characters, or the game world but focus strictly on optimizing your choices. To experience strategic immersion, the players must understand the rules of the game clearly so that they can plan actions to their max­imum advantage. Strategic immersion breaks down if a game confronts players with a situation they have never seen before or if the game contains too many unpredictable elements. Unexpected or erratic behavior makes it impossible to plan.

■ Narrative immersion is the feeling of being inside a story, completely involved and accepting the world and events of the story as real. It is the same immersion as that produced by a good book or movie, but in video games, the player is also an actor within the story. Good storytelling—interesting characters, exciting plots, dramatic situations—produces narrative immersion. Bad storytelling—two-dimen­sional characters, implausible plots, or trite situations—destroys narrative immersion, and so does gameplay that is inappropriate in the context of the story.

If a player is immersed in a story about being a dancer, the gameplay should be about dancing, not about flying a plane or commanding an army.

You cannot create immersion purely by design. The game must also be attractive and well constructed, or its flaws break the player's sense of immersion. Also, you cannot design a game that pleases everyone, and players do not become immersed in a game they don't like. If you want to create an immersive game, you first must have a clear understanding of how your player likes to be entertained, then deliver the best entertainment experience that you can. Chapter 3, "Game Concepts," dis­cusses the question of understanding your hypothetical player in more detail.

Socializing

Most conventional games are multiplayer games, so since the earliest times, gaming has been a social activity. People love to play video games together too, and tech­nology gives them lots of ways to do it:

■ Multiplayer local gaming means two or more people playing together in one place. It's classic home console play for more than one person. Each player has his
own controller, but they all look at the same screen. In some games the screen is split, and each player looks at her own part of it; in others, the players all see the same game world together.

■ Networked play, also called multiplayer distributed gaming, refers to people playing against other people over a network at distributed locations. This is the way people play games over the Internet. To communicate with each other, they have to have a voice connection or type messages as they play.

■ LAN parties are events in which a group of people all get together in one room, but each has his own computer hooked to the others by a local area network (LAN). This way they can talk to each other, but they can't see each other's screens.

■ Group play occurs when a group of people get together in one room to play a single-player game. The player using the controller at any given time is said to be in the "hot seat," and the other players watch and offer advice. Players usually hand off the controller from one to the next as the gameplay changes, so as to have the person most skilled at the current challenges play during that part of the game.

This style of play is particularly popular with children.

When designing a multiplayer game, it's important to think about the social aspect of entertaining people. By offering them chat mechanisms, bulletin boards, and other community-building facilities, you can extend the game's entertainment far beyond the gameplay alone. For more information about designing online games, see Chapter 21, "Online Games."