Intelligent Design

Wherever we go, we are surrounded by game mechanics. We carry them with us, we create them and we interact with them. Life itself can be mapped into any number of game genres – resource management? Check! Platformer? Sure! Strategy RPG? Why not?! – the world itself, it seems, is the best place to find inspiration for mechanics. This is why we usually speak of metaphors when we talk about game mechanics.

The concept of the metaphor comes into play when we attempt to translate real life mechanics into game mechanics (and vice versa) and I will get to it later; but before we even have to think of the metaphor we must first be able to identify the mechanics themselves. (more…)

During GDC I took Marc LeBlanc‘s (and company) Game Design Workshop. One of the activities we underwent was building a paper prototype for a video game we all were familiar with. My group had very different tastes in videogames and so one of the only common interests we found was Pac-Man. We needed to act fast, and so went with it.

Paper prototyping, you say?

Paper prototyping is usually one of the first steps in the design chain, so this sort of reverse-engineering approach was certainly unconventional. Paper prototypes are commonly used to test core mechanics at a very basic level, to see if they are fun, appealing or at all interesting. With that in mind, what we had to do was identify the core mechanics in Pac-Man and try to translate them to paper. (more…)