Theory of Fun for Game Design (8 page)

A modern platformer makes use of all of these dimensions:

Since the original
Donkey Kong
, players have been able to pick up a hammer to use as a weapon. One of the commonest signs of incremental innovation in game design is designers simply adding more of a given element rather than adding a new element. Hence, today we have a bewildering array of weapons.

Platformers have now covered all the dimensions. They have started pulling in elements of racing and flying games and fighters and shooters. They have built in secret discovery and time limits and power-ups. Recent games have included more robust stories and even elements from role-playing games. Are there more dimensions on which to expand?

Going from
Pong
to a modern tennis game is not so large a leap. How odd that we’ve ended up in the recursive pattern of making games that model other games—it suggests that there’s something that the real-life sport of tennis can teach that doesn’t require running around on a court in a white outfit now. Nonetheless, rather than teaching the skill of hurling rocks and judging trajectories, it would be nice if games instead taught things like whether or not the price of oil is going to rise in response to signing or not signing a global warming treaty.

This may sound bleak, but in fact, it’s not. The skills needed around a meeting room table and the skills needed at the tribal council are not so different, after all. There are whole genres of game that are about husbandry, resource management, logistics, and negotiation. If anything, the question to ask might be why the most popular games are the ones that teach obsolete skills while the more sophisticated ones that teach subtler skills tend to reach smaller markets.

A lot of it can probably be traced to visceral appeal. Remember, we live most of our lives in the unconscious. Action games let us stay there, whereas games that demand careful consideration of logistics might require logical, conscious thought. So we ring changes on old, often irrelevant challenges because, frankly, it’s easier.

We’ve evolved exquisite sensitivity to visceral challenges. A survey of games featuring jumping found that the games with the “best controls” all shared an important characteristic: when you hit the jump button, the character on screen spent almost exactly the same amount of time in the air. Games with “bad controls” violated this unspoken assumption. I’m pretty sure that if we went looking, we’d find that good jumping games have been unscientifically adhering to this unspoken rule for a couple of decades, without ever noticing its existence.

That’s hardly the only case of our adjusting our work to better target the unconscious mind. A very common feature of action games, for example, is to push you through a task faster and faster. This is purely intended to address the visceral reaction and the autonomic nervous system. When you learn any physical skill, you are told to do it slowly at first and slowly increase the speed as you master the task. The reason is that developing speed without precision is not all that useful. Going slow lets you practice the precision first, make it unconscious, and then work on the speed.

You don’t tend to see “time attack” modes in strategy games, for this same reason. The tasks in the strategic games are not about automatic responses, and therefore the training to execute at reflex levels of speed would be misguided. (If anything, a good strategy game will teach you not to get too familiar with the situation and will keep you on your toes.)

This whole approach is intended for learning by rote. When I was a kid, I had a game for the Atari 2600 console called
Laser Blast
. I got to the point where I could get a million points at the maximum difficulty setting without ever dying. With my eyes closed. This is the same sort of training that we put our militaries through—the training of rote and reflex. It’s not a very
adaptable
mode of training, but it is desirable in many cases.

A more interesting tactic that applies to a wider range of games is asking the player to be thorough. This is a broader survival skill. It requires patience, and a certain enjoyment of discovery. It also works against our inclination to work directly on the final goal.

In many games, you are asked to find “secrets” or to explore an area completely. This teaches many interesting things, such as considering a problem from all angles, making sure that you should make sure you have all the information before you make a decision, and thoroughness is often better than speed. Not to denigrate training by rote and reflex, but this is a much subtler and interesting set of skills to teach, and one that is more widely applicable to the modern world.

Games have these characteristics:

Seen in this light, it’s not surprising that the evolution of the modern video game can largely be explained in terms of topology. Each generation of game can be described by a relatively minute alteration in the shape of the play space. For example, there have only really been around five fighting games in all of videogaming history. Significant advances have been limited to a few features like movement on a plane, movement in 3-D, and the addition of “combos” or sequences of moves.

This is not to say that many of the classic fighting games didn’t bring significant incremental advances. Of course they did. But did they effectively “add another hole to the donut”?

Consider the evolution of the 2-D shooter or “shmup.”
Space Invaders
offered a single screen with enemies that marched predictably. After that came
Galaxian
, which had no defenses and enemies that attacked a bit more aggressively.

Simple topological variants then ensued:
Gyruss
and
Tempest
are just
Galaxian
in a circle.
Gorf
and others added scrolling and also had an end boss and stages that changed in nature as you progressed.
Zaxxon
added verticality, which was then quickly thrown away in the development of the genre.
Centipede
gave you some room to maneuver at the bottom, and a charming setting, but isn’t really that different from
Galaxian. Asteroids
is an inverted circle: you’re in the middle, and the enemies come from outside.

Galaga
was probably the most influential of all of these because it added bonus levels and the power-up, a concept that has become standard in every shmup since.
Xevious
and
Vanguard
added alternate modes of fire (bombs and firing in other directions).
Robotron
and
Defender
are special cases. Both have the element of rescuing. This has been pretty much abandoned today (sadly—though
Choplifter
was a wonderful sidetrack there).

Now, I don’t know what the first 2-D shooter to have power-ups and scrolling and bosses at the end of stages was, but a case can be made that there hasn’t been a topologically different 2-D shooter since. Unsurprisingly, the shooter genre has stagnated and lost market share. After all, we learned that mechanic a long time ago, and everything since has been learning patterns that we
know
to be artificial and unlikely to be repeated anywhere.

This offers a possible algorithm for innovation:
find a new dimension to add to the gameplay
. We saw this in the way that puzzle games evolved after
Tetris
: people started trying to do it with hexagons, with three dimensions, and eventually, pattern matching of colors became the thing that replaced spatial analysis. If we really wanted to innovate on puzzle games, how about exploring puzzle games based on time rather than space, for example?

Until now, I’ve been discussing formal game design—abstract simulations. But we rarely see truly abstract simulations in games. People tend to dress up game systems with some fiction. Designers put artwork on them that is suggestive of some real-world context. Take checkers for example—abstractly, it’s a board game about entrapment and forced action, played on a diamond-shaped grid. When we say “king me” in checkers, we’re adding a subtle bit of fiction to the game; suddenly it has acquired feudal overtones and a medieval context. Usually, the pieces have a crown embossed on them.

This is similar to word problems in math class. The fiction serves two purposes: it trains you to see past it to the underlying math problem, and it also trains you to recognize real-world situations where that math problem might be lurking.

Games in general tend to be like word problems. You won’t find many games that are pure unclothed abstractions. Most games have more in common with chess or checkers—they provide some level of misdirection. Usually there are metaphors for what is going on in the game.

While metaphors are fun to play with, players can basically ignore them. The name of the unique checker piece that has made it to the other side is basically irrelevant, mathematically speaking. We could call the regular pieces chickens and the crowned ones wolves and the game would not change one whit.

Games, by the very nature of what they teach, push toward this sort of understanding. Since they are about teaching underlying patterns, they train their players to ignore the fiction that wraps the patterns.