Bent Spoon Games Blog

This is the most important question a game designer can ask. Here is what I came up with:

Experience different reality

I am not a big fan of games that take place in the real world or in a world which feels like the real world. I prefer science fiction and fantasy, swords and futuristic technology, distant planets and hidden temples. Instead of staring at gray rusty steel and red-orange bricks, I would much rather look at blue sky and green grass. By breaking free of the real world, game designer can open his mind to new possibilities. Once the designer imagines a new reality, it will open its possibilities to him. This way he can use the environment to his advantage: to communicate or emphasize a point the game is trying to make.

The best way to make the player experience a different reality is through emotions, not through graphics as so many modern games seem to think. Therefore, a game must allow the player to experience a different emotional reality. From technological perspective, there is a big gap between 2D and 3D, as well as 320×200 and 1280×1024 resolutions. Aside from those, however, more pixels or polygons will not necessarily make a game better. Once the designer stops focusing on the outward appearance of the game, he can start focusing on the content.

There are two main ways to create new emotional reality: world and characters. World includes the atmosphere, atmospheric effects, and how the environment affects the gameplay. Saying a game takes place in a snowy forest is not enough. The designer needs to explore all aspects of that decision. There can be snow-covered holes, whispering trees, footprint trail, unstoppable wind, permeating cold, and endless snowfall. All those details can impact the gameplay and make it more interesting. Those details make the environment come alive and allow the player to enter and experience it.

Characters inhabiting the world, their appearance, behavior, and stories affect the reality just as much. To go with our snowy forest, we can add a snowman who lives in an igloo. His appearance alone tells the player “this is not your normal world, this is a fantasy”. This gets rid of a lot expectations the player might have had about the game world and prepares him for the new reality he is about to experience. We can make snowman’s personality ice-cold or, going for a juxtaposition, really warm and hospitable. The showman can tell the player about his fear of spring and his dreams of finding a snow-woman. Interacting with the character will draw the player into the game and allow the player to fully experience the new emotional reality.

When the player interacts with the environment and the characters, it’s important that everything acts and behaves as if it was real. The imaginary world need to behave exactly like the real world except when game designer explicitly decides it should differ. This will prevent unwanted surprises and will keep the world more or less logically sound. The characters especially need to think, act, and speak in a way that makes sense for them and for the world they inhabit. If a character says “Press A to jump,” it will immediately ruin the immersion (cough Zelda cough).

Exploration also falls under this category. The player should always feel completely surrounded by the environment. At no point should the fourth wall be broken. In an open sandbox game, it’s crucial for the world to be large enough so the player can feel truly free. Morrowind does this extremely well; whereas, Oblivion’s world is too small and filled with invisible boundaries and walls. Doom 2 had a great, though not very imaginative, environment. It used lighting very well, as well as highly dynamic levels. Perhaps the best example of immersive emotional reality is The Longest Journey series, especially Dreamfall.

Learn

A very sad fact is that after playing most modern games, there is nothing the player has learned outside of the game’s world. A good game should teach the player about life, death, love, hate, and all the things in between. A good game should teach the player about themselves and about others.  Learning should come from several sources: personal choices, others’ choices, and the game itself.

When it comes to choices, the player must learn the consequence of each choice he makes. You don’t help a stranger, you miss out on an important piece of information or a helpful item. You do help a stranger, he steals from you or murders you in your sleep. Both realities are possible, both should be explored. One reason I don’t like Save and Load mechanic is because it allows the player to undo his choices too easily. I think the player will get more out of the game if he accepts each choice he makes, no matter how bad the outcome.

You can learn from others’ choices too, though not as well as your own. And sometimes the game itself would like to teach you a lesson. Often things just happen to us, not necessarily because of something we did, but simply because there are a lot of factors outside of our control. These should be explored in a game as well, especially to setup the story and to drive the plot. While playing the game, the player should be challenged to learn. The game should throw ideas and new concepts at the player constantly. The player should learn from these challenges and benefit not only in the game world, but also in real life. When the player is done with the game, he should be transformed and enlightened by ideas the game presented and by what he took away from the game. Naturally, this won’t happen every time or to every player, but it’s a worthy goal to strive for as a game designer.

The game should actively pursue the goal of learning and not use it as a time/place filler. There are very few games that do this well. A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity, both text-based adventure games, do this well, probably because there is no emphasis on the graphics. Most historic strategy games accomplish this as well, e.g. Civilization and Age of Empires series.

Be Creative

There should be some kind of creative outlet in the game. It can be as simple as allowing the player to name the items and mix potions, or as complicated as creating your own items and changing the game world. This way the player can better enjoy the game and have a truly unique experience with it. It’s important to realize this creativity should be expressed inside the game, so creating a new level using a level editor does not count. Morrowind and Oblivion both do this very well, as do most other RPGs. Unfortunately, Spore’s only redeeming feature is it’s creature creator.

Aside: Tale of Tales had a similar article a couple of months ago.