Game mechanics: the literal, the metaphoric and the abstract

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. Read the rest of this entry »

GDC Tales: Pac-Man, the paper prototype

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Game mechanics that tell stories

Even though we are all still searching for the ultimate interactive storytelling experience, it is hardly arguable that video games have made progress in bringing slices of interaction into storytelling or, given their nature, storytelling into interaction. They have managed to do this in many ways, some of them definitely more effective than others, including examples such as Indigo Prophecy, KOTOR or Story Machine games such as Civilization or any sports game.

But there is a particular kind of interactive storytelling that I find more compelling than the others, even though I do not really think it holds the key to the zenith of interactive storytelling. I am talking about game mechanics that tell stories: player interactions that are charged with meaning and go beyond simple button presses – they are translated into story elements that bring us closer to the characters and closer to the story. Read the rest of this entry »

Balloon Man and the “art game” label

Balloon Man

A bit more than a week ago I had the pleasure of participating on IGDA’s first Global Game Jam and had a very good experience. The event kicked off with this brilliant keynote by Kyle Gabler and so we were off into our 48-hour design and development adventure.

It took us quite a while to finalize our concept and game idea, but when it happened, it was one of those magical moments where you just know everyone is on board. And when everyone is on board, I always find myself engulfed by this feeling that nothing can go wrong.

This time, though, there was plenty of room for a bunch of things to go wrong. We were working with Flash and did not have a Flash programmer, for example, and our two artists (me included) did not really have much experience with Photoshop (or Illustrator, for that matter).

However, everything started working out slowly. Concept art looked promising, early music finds were good, and general vibe was definitely good. We were making relatively good time and coming up with something we all liked.

And then it happened. We realized it, completely out of nowhere. We were making an art game.

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Realism at the core of fun

I grew up playing Civilization, all the way from Civ I with my dad to Civ IV, now. It was the first game where I ever got to wonder about converting reality into games, about taking elements from the real world and turning them into game mechanics. Of course I did not think of it in those terms back then, but I was always extremely aware of that strong bond between Civ and reality. When things that I did not know were real that I knew from Civ started appearing in the real world, that bond strengthened immensely, to the point that I learned I could trust Civ and assume that whatever it taught me was right.

So the other day I watched a Sid Meier’s video about his Dinosaur project and the reasons why it failed, which excited me very much, and I clung to every word of his as if it was imparted by God Himself. But one of the things he said caught my attention the most. It wasn’t even one of the most important things of the talk, as he just said it in passing, but coming from the designer of Civilization I just knew it to be true – very much like I knew everything Civ taught me to be true back then.

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Story and Challenge at the service of each other

After reading this Gamasutra interview with Jonathan Blow, designer of Braid among other things, I found myself immediately disagreeing with some of the things he states.

I agree with him when he describes that two of the driving forces behind games are Challenge and Story and that they usually conflict in such a way that when one tries to advance, the other acts as opposition – meaning that when playing a game it is the Challenge what keeps us from advancing the Story, until the point when the Challenge is beaten and so the Story can go on.

But he also makes it sound as if Challenge is being sacrificed to tell stories that are “typically not good”, which makes for weak games that resemble, from his point of view, “bad movies”.

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