FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
The Player-Centric Approach
This book teaches you an approach called player-centric game design. This approach helps you produce an enjoyable game, which, in turn, helps it be a commercially successful one. Many other factors affect the commercial success of a game as well: marketing, distribution, and the experience of the development team. These are beyond the control of the game designer, so no design or development methodology can guarantee a hit. However, a well-designed game undoubtedly has a better chance of being a hit than a poorly designed one.
PLAYER-CENTRIC GAME DESIGN is a philosophy of design in which the designer envisions a representative player of a game the designer wants to create. The designer then undertakes two key obligations to that player:
■ The duty to entertain: A game's primary function is to entertain the player, and it is the designer's obligation to create a game that does so. Other motivations are secondary.
■ The duty to empathize: To design a game that entertains the player, the designer must imagine that he is the player and must build the game to meet the player's desires and preferences for entertainment.
You can adapt the first obligation, the duty to entertain, somewhat if you're designing the game for education, research, advertising, political, or other purposes, but for recreational video games it is imperative. If a player is going to spend time and money on your game, your first concern must be to see that he enjoys himself. This means that entertaining the player takes priority over your own desire to express yourself creatively. You must have a creative vision for your game, but if some aspect of your vision is incompatible with entertaining the player, you should modify or eliminate it.
The second obligation, the duty to empathize, requires you to place yourself in the position of a representative player and imagine what it is like to play your game.
You must mentally become the player and stand in his shoes. For every design decision that you make—and there will be thousands—you must ask yourself how it meets the player's desires and preferences about interactive entertainment. Note the mention of a representative player. It is up to you to decide what that means, but this hypothetical being must bear some resemblance to the customers whom you want to actually buy the game. Smart game designers conduct audience research if they're planning to make a game for an audience that they don't know much about.
When you employ player-centric game design, you need to think about how the player will react to everything in your game: its artwork, its user interface, its game - play, and so on. But that is only the surface. At a deeper level, you must understand what the player wants from the entire experience you are offering—what motivates her to play your game at all? To design a game around the player, you must have a clear answer to the following questions: Who is your player, anyway? What does she like and dislike? Why did she buy your game? The answer is also influenced by the game concept that you choose for your game. Chapter 3, "Game Concepts," discusses both player-centric design and game concepts in more detail.
This process of empathizing with your player is one of the aspects that differentiates games from presentational forms of entertainment. With books, paintings, music, and movies, it is considered artistically virtuous to create your work without worrying about how it is received, and it's thought to be rather mercenary to modify the content based on sales considerations. But with a video game—whether you think of it as a work of art or not—you must think about the player's feelings about the game, because the player participates in the game with both thought and action.
There are two common misconceptions about player-centric design that you must avoid.
MISCONCEPTION 1: I AM MY OWN TYPICAL PLAYER.
For years, designers built video games, in effect, for themselves. They assumed that whatever they liked, their customers would also like. Because most designers were young males, they took it for granted that their customer base was also made up of young males. That was indeed true for a long time, but now it is a dangerous fallacy. As the market for games expands beyond the traditional gamer, you must be
able to design games for other kinds of players. In the player-centric approach, this means learning to think like your intended players, whoever they may be: little girls, old men, busy mothers, and so on. You cannot assume that players like what you like. Rather, you must learn to design for what they like. (You may also find that you grow to like a game that you didn't think you would as you work to design it!)
One of the most common mistakes that male designers make is to assume that male and female players are alike, when in fact they often have different priorities and preferences. For an excellent discussion of how to reach female players without alienating male ones, read Gender Inclusive Game Design, by Sheri Graner Ray (Ray, 2003). With every design decision, ask yourself, "What if the player is female?" Does your decision apply equally to her?
A few game developers argue that they don't want to work on any game that they personally wouldn't want to play—that if a game doesn't appeal to them, they won't have any "passion" for it and won't do a good job. Taken to its logical conclusion, that means we would never have games for young children, because young children can't build games for themselves. Insisting that you must have passion for your game or you can't do a good job on it is a very self-centered approach—the opposite of player-centric design. Professionalism is just as important as passion. Professionalism is the willingness to work hard to do a good job because that's what you're paid for, regardless of whether you would choose to play your game for entertainment. If you are a true professional, you can create a brilliant game for an audience other than yourself. Kaye Elling, the former art manager at Blitz Games, revealed in a lecture to the Animex International Festival of Animation and Computer Games that the design team on the game Bratz: Rock Angelz—a game intended for 10-year-old girls—consisted entirely of adult men. The game was a big success in spite of this, because the designers learned how to think like their intended players. They talked to girls and women, studied other products that girls like, and took seriously their duty to empathize (Elling, 2006).
Do not assume that you epitomize your typical player. Player-centric game design requires you to imagine what it is like to be your player, even if that person is someone very different from you.
MISCONCEPTION 2: THE PLAYER IS MY OPPONENT.
Because arcade (coin-op) games have been around a long time, some of the techniques of arcade game design have crept into other genres where they are not appropriate. Arcade games make money by getting the player to put in more coins. Consequently, they are designed to be hard to play for more than a few minutes and to continually threaten the player with losing the game. This places considerable constraints
on the designer's freedom to tell a story or to modulate the difficulty of the game - play. The famous Japanese designer Shigeru Miyamoto, who invented the arcade game Donkey Kong (and with it the entire Mario franchise), eventually abandoned arcade game design because he found it too limiting.
The arcade model encourages the game designer to think of the player as an opponent. It suggests that the designer's job is to create obstacles for the player, to make it hard for the player to win the game. This is a profoundly wrongheaded approach to game design. It does not take into account the player's interests or motivations for playing. It tends to equate "hard" with "fun." And it ignores the potential of creative games, which may not include obstacles at all. Game design is about much more than creating challenges.
If you are working on multiplayer competitive games, in which the players provide the challenge for each other, you're less likely to make this mistake. But it's an easy trap to fall into when you're designing single-player games because it's up to you to provide the challenges. Never lose sight of the fact that your design goal is to entertain the player by a variety of means, not simply to oppose her forward progress through the game.
Your duty to empathize with the player also includes an obligation not to be unduly arbitrary or capricious toward her. You can build in random factors that may make the game harder (like being dealt a bad hand of cards), and that's all right if players understand that they might have better luck next time. But doing things like causing a player to lose a long game entirely at random, without any way to avoid it, is bad design. It shows a lack of empathy.
Do not think of the player as your opponent. Game design is about entertaining the player, not opposing the player. There are many ways to entertain a player.
