Category: Thoughts

When we, developers and enthusiasts, discuss the design of videogames, we invariably focus on the formal system of the game, the sets of rules and goals, challenges and rewards that define the gameplay aspect of the experience. We do this because we feel that gameplay design is at the heart of the creation of interactive entertainment. This may or may not be correct, but gameplay design is certainly not the only aspect of videogame creation worthy of our consideration. And certainly not the only one that makes use of the unique qualities of the computer as a medium.

I would like to devote an article to these “forgotten” aspects of videogame design. I want to discuss why they are important and how they take advantage of the medium. I came up with the list below in no time. But if you can think of any other forgotten or neglected or undervalued or underestimated aspects of videogame design, please post your ideas in the comments. It will help me write the article.

If I ever find the time to do it -feels like there’s a whole book to write here…

Atmosphere
Atmosphere is often quoted as an important aspect of the enjoyment of games. But it is hardly rewarded in game review scores and rarely discussed among game designers. Yet videogames have been able to use the interactive and generative medium of the computer to create moods and atmospheres in a way that no other medium has. And it feels like we have only scratched the surface.

Character design
The importance of the appeal of a well designed videogame character cannot be underestimated. Several books have been published devoted solely to pictures of videogame characters. The most widely known thing about videogames in the mainstream is not the clever open world design of Grand Theft Auto but the smart character design of Laura Croft.
And it’s not just the looks of characters that deserve our attention. Designing a character for a videogame also requires inventing a life for these people and a personality. And most of all, finding a way to express all this through the interactive medium.

Avatar control
An aspect more closely related to gameplay design is control design. But often videogame developers suffice with the bare functionality of run-jump-shoot. This is a pity because avatar control can be very expressive. It can give the player an instinctive understanding of the personality of the avatar. Controlling a character can also be a fun activity in and of itself, completely separate from the challenges and rewards of the game.

Interactive storytelling
Videogames are getting better and better at telling their stories through the medium. The stories themselves are still somewhat on a pulp fiction level, but we are getting very good at telling them. We still rely on cut scenes and non-interactive and non-generative elements quite a bit, although we’ve managed to integrate them better. The next step seems to be in finding out how we can experiment with interaction to tell a story, or perhaps better: to make the player experience a story, rather than merely witness it. And perhaps the player can even be involved in the creation of the story in some way.

Environment design
I’m am not the only person in the world who thinks of playing videogames as a form of travel. To go to another place is a very appealing aspect of videogames. But how do we design these places? It is not simply about modeling an actual space -though we could probably learn a lot from architects. There’s always technological constraints that forbid this. But more importantly, simply walking around in a virtual space is not necessarily very interesting. And a waste of a great opportunity for pacing, interaction, emergence and storytelling. So there’s a lot more to designing an environment for a videogame.

Camera
The camera is one of the most important aspects of cinema and should not be neglected in games either. An entire language has already developed around the camera’s framing, angles, motions, editing, and so on. The interactive medium adds the elements of control and response to this list. How do these enrich the language? What can game camera’s do that film camera’s cannot?

Flow
Playing a well designed videogame can feel like a flowing through a wonderful musical composition. Creating this composition is very much about finding a balance, a harmony of different elements. A way of making the player always feel good about playing the game. However, editing, pacing, punctuation and progression are rarely discussed outside of the functional realm of balancing gameplay. Yet, many videogames already excel at the much more subtle art of flow design.

Navigation
Even on a purely functional level, designing the way in which one navigates a videogame’s content or virtual world is an opportunity for formal elegance that can be very enjoyable in its own right. But navigation offers a powerful narrative tool as well, not in the least because it can generate a linear thread, often useful for storytelling.

Interaction design
It seems like game developers look down on designing the look and feel of the user interface of a game. Very often, I get the impression that game typography and buttons and menus are designed ironically, to be kitschy on purpose, as if the designers were trying to tell the player that these things are irrelevant. But when they are done well, they can greatly contribute to how the player feels about the game.

Art direction
It strikes me as odd that there is an art direction position in videogame production. It makes it sound like art is only one element in a game and games are not artworks in their entirety. Of course, often, this is indeed the case and the art director only fulfills a function much like the person with the same title would in an ad agency. Personally I’m all for putting this person in charge of the entire production of games and dropping the word “art” from his or her title. But in the mean time, we should probably develop a little bit more respect for this crucial aspect of video game creation.

Narrative world concept
I don’t like the term “back story” because it implies that the story could somehow be separated from its expression in the game. It makes it sound like the story is just an excuse to justify the gameplay and ultimately irrelevant. I disagree. When done well, discovering the story that a game world came out of by exploring and interacting can be a wonderful experience. Potentially much more engrossing than the experience of narrative through one-directional activities such as reading books or watching films.

Sound
Sound design is well known as one those aspects of game design that are considered very important but always underestimated. It is often equated with the production of sound effects as we know it from other media. But the non-linear medium offers many more possibilities for sound.

Music
The interactive medium offers an new gamma of techniques to imaginative composers who no longer need to feel limited by the traditional linearity of music. The first experiments with generative and dynamic music in games have already begun. I’m sure there is lots more to discover and learn.

Virtual life
The design of the autonomous behaviour of creatures and environments is an entirely new art form made possible by the computer and often seen in videogames. The term “artificial intelligence” does not really do credit to the artistic aspects that are involved with the creation of virtual organisms. Autonomous systems in videogames are very rarely simply simulations of reality. They are always defined by choices of the author and as such offer great potential for expression.

I came up with this list in a few minutes. I’m sure there’s many more aspects of game creation that I forgot. Please add them in the comments.
I think it is important that game creators start taking these aspects much more seriously and reduce the obsession over gameplay design. Not only because many of these aspects are far more important to the audience. But also because they offer enormous undiscovered creative potential. And they are every bit as unique to the interactive medium as gameplay is, if not more so, in some cases.

All these aspects are up for emancipation. Not in the least in terms of how we evaluate games and judge their quality. Review scores that attribute most points to gameplay, graphics, sound and replay value simply don’t cut it anymore. Because it’s not like the aspects mentioned above refer to some strange potential that lies dormant in the medium. Many videogames being created today contain excellent illustrations of many of these “forgotten” aspects. And I believe they form some of the key elements to the success of videogames. It is time we give them the attention that they deserve.

In their insightful book, “21st Century Game Design”, Chris Bateman and Richard Boon say:

In many ways, [the survival horror genre] marks the development of one of the first modern genres -being a blend of so many aspects of previous games, we have no choice but to consider it on its own terms. Where a control mechanism or play perspective doesn’t suggest a genre (as in racing or FPS), we can expect to see more genres of this style emerge as games continue to develop.
The survival horror genre is characterized primarily by its commitment to atmosphere. This is not to say that these games are light on design expertise or gameplay; merely that atmosphere is inseparable from gameplay. Resident Evil, for example, is a very easy game to play if one ignores its atmospheric effects; if the player allows themselves to be immersed in its world, however, it feels tremendously dangerous. Crucially, this suspension of disbelief is made very easy, if not compulsory, by excellent atmospheric design.

It struck me how pertinent this quote is to what we’re trying to do at Tale of Tales. Even though we may be coming from a different background (fine art) and we’re not exactly making horror survival games, the end result is the same: our work relies heavily on the active collaboration of the player. In that sense, our games may be more similar to theater than to anything else. We ask the player to assume a role and we give them some freedom (and thus responsibility) to fill it in. And depending on how they do that, they will enjoy the experience or not.

I guess that’s where the challenge lies in our work: Can you play the part of a magical deer in an idyllic forest? Can you behave like an old lady -a dying lady even- in a cemetery? Not everyone can. It requires a certain talent. And a certain willingness (more so, admittedly, in our low budget productions than in the work of our triple A horror survival brethren).
Perhaps, ultimately, player satisfaction is not as dissimilar to other games as we may sometimes think: in both cases, the player is happy when they have adequately performed in a way that the game expects. Our expectations are different. And we don’t award points. But if you don’t play in the proper way, chances are you won’t enjoy the game.

Much like survival horror games will be enjoyed much more deeply, if you control your avatar in a way that makes sense in the fictional world. If you only make him or her do things that fit with their personality and in the circumstances. As opposed to using that avatar as a tool to make progress through an abstract system (which is what I imagine pure gameplay is about). Playing a survival horror game comes to mean acting as much as it does gaming. Perhaps even more so, considering that it seems to be vital for the enjoyment of the title, especially for less action-oriented games like Silent Hill and Fatal Frame.

I agree with Bateman and Boon that this is a distinctly modern form. One that really uses the unique qualities of the interactive medium, instead of replicating older forms of entertainment (like sports or games or theme park rides). And I hope that they are right: that we will indeed see more genres in this style in the future.

It is difficult for us the express in words what we are trying to do with our creations at Tale of Tales. We call them video games, but we are well aware of the fact that we are stretching the meaning of the term when we do this. We continue, however, because, for us, the meaning of this term has already been stretched. Perhaps not by the way that video games are being designed, but definitely by the way that they are being played. By people like us.

The medium that is used by games -realtime 3D- is attractive to us as artists because it is a powerful tool for simulation. So far, game technology has been mostly used for simulation of objective factual reality. But we are interested in using it to simulate a subjective reality.

Many of our ideas originate from a question in the form of

“What would it feel like to be creature x, doing activity y, in location z?”

Our designs often start as an attempt to find the answer to this question -although they may outgrow this initial empetus later. Not by showing how it feels to be x, doing y in z, but by creating an environment in which the user can, if not experience the sensation itself, at least contemplate the experience by themselves.

We share this purpose with many artists, throughout the ages. Baroque composers, renaissance painters, romantic poets, all have similar aspirations. But their work relies entirely on the imagination of the viewer to create the effect. The interactivity of computer technology allows us to give the user a more active role in the piece, which we hope will stimulate the imagination more than mere observation. This is how interactivity becomes a crucial part of our work.

We don’t think we are the first designers to use the medium in this way. Many video game designers have and do. But creating the sensation of “being x, doing y in z” is most often of less importance than the fact that the end product needs to be a challenge-based, entertaining game (or a clear plot-driven narrative, for that matter). There are various reasons for this, both economic and artistic. But as players of video games, we have often been disappointed when our experience was interrupted by the requirement to play the game (or progress in the story). As a result, as designers, we try to create games with the tables turned: simulation becomes more important than gameplay, meaning becomes more important than fun (and sensation more important than communication).

We have probably made the mistake in the past of presenting our personal choice as something that the video game design craft as a whole should aspire to. That was wrong. To us, as video game consumers, moving away from challenge-based entertainment-focused gameplay towards poetic and meaningful experiences, feels like progress, simply because this leads to an increase in the offer of games that we enjoy. But is not progress in any absolute sense -unless you consider greater diversity a form of progress.

There is nothing wrong with games that offer fun and entertainment. There is nothing wrong with games that try and evoke meaning through gameplay. Games have been around for ages. They will never become obsolete. It is naive to think that they will ever turn into something else. And it is naive to think that anything threatens their existence. But computer technology was not invented for the sole purpose of creating and playing games. And to consider video games as the ultimate form of interactive entertainment or art, is simply premature and unnecessarily restrictive.

At Tale of Tales, we are not interested in creating challenging skills-teaching gameplay with rigid rules and predetermined goals. We may use these kinds of structures in our work if they contribute to the sensation of “being x, doing y, in z”. Some themes are served by this, some are not. But we feel no obligation whatsoever as designers to include such forms of interaction in our work.

When Auriea and I made the choice to create art with game technology, we did so based on our personal experience with video games. That experience had influenced our previous work, but, oddly, it had never entered our mind that we could make a video game ourselves. Possibly because we were not as interested in playing video games as we were in immersing ourselves in the virtual worlds and characters that they presented. But at the time, we were hardly aware of that distinction.

Ever since we started using interactive media for our art, we have wanted to create worlds, environments that surround and embrace, living organisms that respond to the viewer’s presence. We tried very hard to do this on the web, always working on the edge of the technically possible (as a result many of our net art pieces are now broken by the “advances” of technology). But at some point we realized that we were pushing the technology in a direction that it didn’t want to go. So we gave up and turned our attention to game technology, more specifically realtime 3D.

Realtime 3D offered us the possibility to “do for real” what we had always had to fake in the past. To really create a space, to embody the user in that environment, to make a living world that would do things on its own as well as respond to input. We have always been interested in creating things to play with that also play with you, or even play with other things.

When we were working on our first game project, 8, our interest was in creating a beautiful world that people could walk around in and be in. We added puzzle elements because we thought we needed to give people something to do while they were in the virtual world, or a reason to return to it. In that sense, gameplay was kind of an afterthought. So much so that we even hired an external game designer to “do that dirty job” for us. As designers, we had absolutely no interest in creating a game. Our focus was on the world, and the stories and characters in it. And on making it feel nice to be in this world and to interact with it.

For us, interactivity is not about “making interesting choices” or “overcoming meaningful challenges”. It’s about make-belief. About becoming part of a story, about being embedded in a world, about filling the shoes of somebody else for a while. For us, computer entertainment is not this democratic medium that empowers the viewer to do “anything they choose to do”. Instead, it’s a powerful medium to allow people to experience an unusual emotion, to be something else, to be in another place. For us, interactivity is travel.

And we believe that this is the strength of the medium: it can take us places, places we never imagined could exist, or places so familiar that we almost forgot they did. But the simple idea of being immersed in a living virtual world, despite of its clear appeal, is in fact very problematic for contemporary designers. We’ve all been trained by linear media to think that there must be reasons for things, that there must be a causal chain in whatever we do. I think this is why we all love games so much. On the one hand, video games do allow us to enter these virtual worlds, while, on the other, they don’t abandon us in them: they give us “something to do”. In this respect, the game structure takes the place of the plot structure we are so familiar with in cinema and literature: it creates linearity in an otherwise non-linear medium. The game as safety net.

This makes sense because non-linearity is unfamiliar. It is unheard of in the art and entertainment that we know. Non-linearity, and the unpredictability that comes with it, is frightening, not just to the audience, but also to the authors. For authors, it is difficult to create something of which they don’t know what it will become, how it will behave. Something truly interactive and emergent. So they create games instead and bend the interactive and generative qualities of the medium to their will, so that the author remains in control of the user’s experience at all times. This is the traditional approach to art making.

It’s understandable to want to hang on to it. But I think this is an intermediary phase. I think, in time, we will learn how to create truly non-linear works. Works that embrace the idea that there is not a single center or a single truth. That there is not a single story to tell, or even a multitude of stories. That a new story can happen every time. Such works may not give us the same kind of pleasure that we get from games. But they will give us something new, a new experience, new insights. A new art form worthy of this new technology.

Video games are far more popular than the niche-attitude of the hardcore culture could justify. It’s simply impossible for the entire audience of video games to consist of over-educated geeks and obsessed hobbyists. Not with sales numbers this high. There’s simply not enough people in the world who are nerdy enough to think that collecting all the gold coins on a trail or shooting all the nazis in a dungeon -or doing it as fast as you can- is “cool”. Something else is going on in video games. Something that appeals to people far outside the hardcore niche.

Games have been around for ages. They’ve always been a popular pastime. But video games, especially of the more recent generations, have become far more important than any other form of gaming in the past. They reach a much larger audience and are starting to have major cultural impact.

Video games must be so popular because they offer something different, something unique, something that the player cannot find anywhere else. This unique thing can not be their design in terms of rules and goals. While essential to most video games, rules and goals are hardly unique to the electronic medium. Playing a game is something that can be done in many ways. You don’t need a computer for it. A piece of paper and a pencil suffice. So why blow these huge budgets on something that can be done in a much more simple, cheap and convenient way? Or more to the point, how come it makes economic sense to do so (given that video games are popular enough to return on the huge investment)?

Because there’s something about video games. They give us a kind of experience that no other form or entertainment can. They allow us to lose ourselves in virtual worlds, to travel to places that could not exist, to become friends with people who you would never meet. In the previous century, cinema replaced books as the major source for story telling. The reasons are obvious: cinema is easier to consume and more efficient in terms of story-telling and evoking emotions. Watching a film can be a deeply sensual experience with an immediacy that is virtually impossible to achieve through reading a book. Games take the physicality of cinema one step further. By putting the viewer in the scene.

Books solicit sympathy, cinema actively encourages empathy but video games generate involvement. This goes far beyond playing soccer or chess! This is not merely a competition or a measuring of strength or intellect. We’re involved in a fictional world, we care about the characters in it, we feel like we’re there. In a much more visceral and direct way than was possible in any other medium before. Sure, the underlying systems may be cold logic and obscure code. But the effect is direct: video games gives us the sensation of falling down the rabbit hole ourselves.

And this, my fellow amateurs, is where our focus should be. On creating an involving experience for our audience. This is not just about games, no matter what the internet experts might claim. Most contemporary video games might be games in essence. But this is not what makes them unique. And it is its uniqueness that makes the medium appealing. And therefore its uniqueness that designers should focus on.

Despite of its popularity and social penetration, computer technology is still in early stages as a medium for artistic creation. The modest attempts triggered by the advent of the Compact Disc in the early nineties, were quickly forgotten when the internet hijacked every PC on the planet. Now it seems like video games are taking up the challenge, slowly and painfully. But while the CD Roms of the nineties often approached the medium with a certain freshness and purity, video games are dragging an enormous load of baggage with them. And voluntarily so, as many designers insist on the heritage of not only several decades of video game history, but, also even of the millenia-spanning history of game creation itself.

I argue that this is not necessary.

Computer technology is a new medium. We should look at it with a fresh pair of eyes and try to discover its strengths and its weaknesses. We don’t need to ignore the history of other media. Other media can be very inspiring. But why limit our interest to games? The computer artist can learn as much from painting, photography, theater, comic strips, cinema, literature, music, sculpture and architecture as he or she can from games.

I understand why games are of interest to developers of interactive art: games are possibly the only form of entertainment from the past that is interactive. So there’s a lot to learn there. But why limit ourselves? With computers everything can become interactive!

It creates linearity.

Discuss!