Introduction and game studies
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There is a certain theological argument that the entire point of mankind's existence and evolution is to become gods. Every step in our development as a species, from the emergence of life from the primordial soup, to the first time our fishy ancestors stood on terra firma, to a man in an ape suit throwing a KFC chicken drumstick at Stanley Kubrick, has been towards becoming deities. It makes sense: what better way to ensure our survival than to become omnipotent and immortal?
But there are gods are already moving among us. You won't find them in magic neverending sky palaces or the Great Pyramid of Giza. Instead they're more likely to be slurping coffee by the gallon in the swanky studios of a games company. These are the closest things we have to divine beings walking among us.
It's fairly obvious that these people are playing god by controlling and scripting the AI entities which inhabit a game's world. They shape the landscape, arrange the flora, set the weather and map routes. They build lands and breed their inhabitants; they control everything from the design of an abode's wallpaper to the shape of entire planets.
But this isn't anything new: artists and writers have been creating fictional places for millennia. There's another layer of activity happening here – one that's more profound and more philosophical. Game designers are actively engaging with and changing the way that gamers – people like you and me – think, act and react. They're telling us which path we should take, or who to kill and who to save, using sometimes incredibly subtle psychological cues to make us feel fear, or comfort, or anger. And they're putting in a huge amount of hard work to take us to utopias and dystopias.
Over the next four pages, we chat to some of the most important names in game development to tell the story of game design, and to get to grips with the intricate ideas, theories and perspectives that explain how interactive entertainment is built.
Game studies
Want to design games? Dayna Galloway explains Abertay University's various course options...
Game design is an enormous and broad subject that takes in many different academic disciplines: mathematics, physics, film and media studies, architecture, art and design, and sound engineering all play parts in the development of games. So how is it taught?
"At Abertay University we have the fortune to be able to teach game design within the broader context of games development, whereby our game design students have the opportunity to work alongside students studying for a degree in one of the other disciplines (programming, art, production and sound)," explains programme tutor Dayna Galloway.
"Our approach to teaching is a careful balance of theory and practice – we aim to ensure that our graduates can meet the demands of the industry today, but also that they possess the skills, confidence and knowledge to drive future innovation."
Abertay has made quite a name for itself as a go-to uni if you want to break into the games industry, and recent success stories include indie developer Pixel Blimp, which has become part of Microsoft Ventures' business mentoring program. Galloway describes the company's success as "a real testament to the quality of our degree programmes which encourage our students to apply their creative and technical skills in an entrepreneurial context."
Of course, not everyone will have the time and funds for a degree. Galloway recommends the following books for aspiring game designers: Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton, and Game Feel by Steve Swink.
"All of these texts provide detailed critique and analysis of the game design process along with useful exercises to help you establish and develop a concept, as well as aiding with the practical aspects of prototyping and the development of a solid user experience," says Dayna.
Basic rules
In order to understand game design, we have to go back to the start of commercial gaming in the 1970s. However crude and unsophisticated they may appear now, games such as Pong, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong laid down rules of design that are still in play today; they're based on repetitive concepts that are simple to grasp, but can also be 'gamed' to the player's advantage.
"Pong is wonderful as it's such a simple concept and stands up to this day – the way that aggressive play can come back to haunt you leads to you playing a frantic game of risk and reward," explains Dayna Galloway, programme tutor for Abertay University's game design and production management degree. "Pac-Man is so iconic, and it's one of the first games that truly immersed me once I uncovered its systems and formed a strategy to increase the likelihood of success."
As the '70s drew to a close, systems were seeping out of enthusiasts' garages and university research labs, into people's homes and purpose-built arcades. Arcade games in particular had to be commercially viable. They had to look like they were easy to beat – to get your initials next to that high score – but they also had to turn a profit and drain teens' quarters.
On home systems, games could offer delayed gratification and a slower pace. According to Galloway, "Tetris deserves a mention as it has such a clear and rewarding loop of core gameplay – easy to pick up and difficult to truly master – and it also managed to achieve broad appeal across the spectrum of players. And Super Mario Bros is just a masterclass in good design."
The '80s became the '90s and new forms of gameplay emerged. 3D, which hit the mainstream with Doom and Wolfenstein, gave us multilayered levels to explore. The internet meant that people could play with or against each other. Core gameplay values and mechanics changed very little, though – a shooter is ostensibly just a platformer from a different perspective, and an MMO is much like playing Warhammer (albeit remotely rather than face-to-face).
But systems were perfected, control methods were honed, graphics were sharpened and gaming evolved. This decade also saw the beginnng of the series that Galloway believes has come to define good gameplay: Half-Life. "With the proliferation of narrative FPS games nowadays, we very much take for granted how innovative and truly ground-breaking this series was," he says.
Why are Valve's 1998 shooter and its 2004 sequel so highly regarded? "The use of environmental storytelling to make the player question and consider the events that have taken place," explains Galloway. "The implementation of intuitive, environmental puzzles that reward the player and provide a release of tension; the characterisation of Gordon Freeman within the confines of a silent protagonist; the rich, believable world that set the bar for art direction in games; and the artificial intelligence of the many foes that would aim to bring your adventure to a premature end."
Surface tension
Game chemistry
This buildup and release of tension is arguably the most important part of game design. It's long been known that games stimulate the production of dopamine in the brain, which explains why they can become addictive. Emerging victorious from a drawn out battle in World of Tanks or working out the solution to a puzzle in Hack 'n' Slash causes a frenzy of hormones in the brain, which makes us eager for the next challenge.
Games aren't just pleasure – inducing lightshows though – even the most abstract titles have to have some basis in the real world, be it a rectangle with emotions or an anthropomorphic cement blob. "The best games use affordances and metaphors that we understand from the real world," says Galloway. "They treat the player with respect and give the player space and time to make connections with the objects, characters and places present in the game."
As we play games, we begin to understand how their worlds work, and what we can and can't do. At the same time, games have to introduce concepts of movement and interaction, and, guide the player forwards. They have to do so in an understated way, because to force a gameplay concept on the player would immediately break their suspension of disbelief. "Developers have to manage the player's expectations of the game and provide believable reasons for the constraints on their freedom within the world," says Galloway.
For this reason, games use subtle cues to guide the player to the rewards. In Fallout 3's dungeons flaming barrels and wall-mounted lights indicate which path to take. "'Breadcrumb trails' are used to attract the player's attention through the use of colour, lighting, form, movement or even just strategically placed objects from the game economy such as health pickups, loot or discarded notes," says Galloway.
Rewards don't necessarily take conventional forms, and a plot twist, a snippet of backstory or a stunning view could be every bit as gratifying as a new weapon or a loot drop. Half-Life is regarded as a pioneer in this respect because it seamlessly tied the narrative into the gameworld – as well as finding monsters around the corner, you uncover the revelation that the marines have turned up to nuke the Black Mesa facility rather than save its brainiac workers. It was this more cinematic, long-game approach to sustain and release that brought Half-Life and its ilk in line with film and television.
"Games utilise similar elements to film and television to engage the player," says Galloway. "As an audio-visual form, games can grab the attention of the player and manipulate their emotions through the use of cinematic style camera work, expressive lighting, sound design and music. Games also use traditional techniques such as characterisation, drama, story and plot to draw the player into a world."
Recently though, game design appears to have rubber-banded on itself. Generation X, who grew up in the '90s and '00s, created the language of modern gaming, but a new generation - millennials - have spoken this language since birth, and are now coming up with new and interesting swear words. "We are seeing the emergence and critical success of games that use systems and mechanics in provocative, innovative and thoughtful ways" says Galloway.
"Titles such as Papers, Please, 9.03m, Gone Home and DayZ all embed meaning within the individual elements and systems they present to the player," he continues. "Every choice and action undertaken by the player has a consequence – so whether a survivor in DayZ decides to check one more apparently deserted barn, or momentarily trust another player by providing them with a spare weapon, takes on a greater significance and essentially becomes an exciting, emergent playground of cause and effect."
Build the playground
But the psychology of games is only half the battle, and a designer facing a deadline is going to be more interested in making sure that characters' heads don't float off due to a programming error than the Freudian semiotics of a sword design. "In the games industry you are always faced with time constraints; developers always want to push themselves and the games they are working on," says Patrick Esteves, design director of Crytek's gladiatorial combat title Ryse: Son of Rome.
From a commercial perspective, games need a unique selling point in order to differentiate them from the masses of similar titles. With Ryse, it was "always about creating a cinematic gaming experiencing, where the player was taken through the grandeur and gutter of the Roman Empire," says Esteves. "Gameplay wise, it was built around players engaging in the brutally honest combat of the age as a soldier rising through the ranks."
At the very foundation of every game is a game design document. This huge blueprint details every aspect of the game, and includes concept art, character descriptions, diagrams of particular mechanics or plot iterations, level overviews, musical cues and menu design. They become bibles that are referenced through every stage of development, and frequently altered or updated as designers realise what does and doesn't work.
"As you develop a game you start with an idea, and build on that idea," says Esteves. "During that process you make the leap from paper design to functioning in-game, and it's not always the case that what was on paper was as fun to play as you originally envisioned. At that point the team rallies behind what is functioning in-game and makes changes to get it to play and feel as good as possible."
But as with any creative process, divorcing yourself from your favourite ideas can be as painful as a poker to your privates. "People will tell you that you should not get married to your ideas, but that is not possible – unless you are a robot," says Esteves. "You can work months honing a mechanic or system that might just not work, or there might not be enough time to finish. Whatever the case, it's a bitter pill to swallow, but it comes with the territory."
Ryse began as an Xbox One launch title published by Microsoft, but Crytek and Deep Silver handled the PC re-issue. This method of production is as old as games themselves, but it massively increases the pressure on the developer to meet deadlines and get the game out of the door. A new generation of companies, such as Valve and Cloud Imperium Games, are rejecting this model and self-publishing their titles.
"We sit round the table and we don't have discussions about, 'We've got to ship four million cartridges on this date, and the marketing is going to spend this sort of money,'" says Erin Roberts, studio director of Cloud Imperium Games' space combat title Star Citizen. "We just sit there and say, "what's the best thing we can do for the game?"
Citizen's advice
Reach for the stars
Star Citizen began in October 2012 with a crowdfunding campaign by Chris Roberts (Erin's brother), which attracted an incredible $4.2 million. But it didn't end there: by June 2013 it had reached $10 million. Erin jumped on board at $17 million. In September 2014 it had funds totalling $55 million at its disposal. It's clear that this new way of funding interactive entertainment requires a whole new approach to making games.
Fortunately, Cloud Imperium had success in mind from day one. "We always had a very long-term plan for what we were going to do," says Roberts. "The fact that the crowdfunding's taken off to such an extent has allowed us to put in a bunch of the stuff we wouldn't have at first. We haven't really changed the idea of the game, but we certainly have increased what we're working on, and the fidelity."
Star Citizen's design is shaped as a series of modules, each of which is positioned within the game's universe and tackles a different area of gameplay. It's an all-encompassing approach that makes it remarkably hard to nail down the game in terms of genre and next to impossible to review - Star Citizen has become a gaming format and ecosystem unto itself. But it's also the best way to get the game working - Cloud Imperium has released modules in dribs and drabs, satiating the thirst of eager backers and reiterating the game based on their input and ideas.
"You've got hundreds of thousands of people out there and you're working on their dream for them," says Roberts. "We work on it, and when we have something really cool to show we put it out to the community, and we get feedback from them. Then we work on some more stuff. I just can't think of a better way of making games right now, as long as you've got the right people making the game, and the community behind it."
Erin and his brother can't grant miracles and - we hate to say it - they probably aren't going to live forever. But they are building an entire universe - one more complex than anything ever imagined before. And they're living proof, surely, that mankind has just taken one more step towards godliness
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