   Jesper Juul IT University of Copenhagen April 8th

 What is game design? Some background: What is a game? How to focus on making a fun game. Exercises.

Spacewar! (1961)   

 

 Traditional games: Unauthored. If you had fun with the card game you pass on the rules. (Evolutionary selection!) Authored: A set of people design a game and, hopefully, test it. Effort must be made to test for fun.

 Game design is about the creation of an object (a cd, code) and an experience. The rules of a game are formal (like programming), but the player’s experience is not formally defined. Game design is iterative. Use 15% of your resources to prove that the game is fun. The goal is not “correctness”, but “fun”. Game design is indirect control of the player. Again: You create a thing, and an experience.

Counter- strike

 A game is 1) a rule-based formal system with 2) variable and quantifiable outcome, where 3) different outcomes are assigned different values, 4) the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, 5) the player feels attached to the outcome, and 6) the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.

 Games require: Rules upheld; game state tracked. In sports, selected aspects of the world are included in the game. In soccer, gravity is a found object appropriated for game purposes. Game adaptations vs. game implementations.

 Sufficiently well-defined that players do not argue about them and/or they are implementable on a computer. A rule relates only to specified parts of the game and game context. (Decontextualization.) In non-electronic games, rules become unambiguous over time because players find it annoying to argue about them. Rules vs. strategies The ingenuity paradox: Rules are algorithmic (can be implemented without any ingenuity), but provide challenges that require ingenuity to overcome.

 A game’s gameplay is the degree and nature of the interactivity that the game includes, i.e., how the player is able to interact with the game-world and how that game-world reacts to the choices the player makes. (Richard Rouse) All the glitz and glitter poured into games these days, such as expensive art, animation, real actors, or the best musicians, cannot cover up for poor gameplay. (Marc Salzman)

  Sid Meier: A game is a series of interesting choices. Marcel Danesi: The aesthetic index of a puzzle, as it may be called, seems to be inversely proportional to the complexity of its solution or to the obviousness of the pattern, trap, or trick it hides.



 Two children, a boy and a girl, were out riding their bikes yesterday, coming at each other from opposite directions. When they were exactly 20 miles apart, they began racing towards each other. The instant they started, a fly on the handlebar of the girl's bike also started flying toward the boy. As soon as it reached the handlebar of his bike, it turned and started back toward the girl. The fly flew back and forth in this way, from handlebar to handlebar, until the two bicycles met. Each bike moved at a constant speed of 10 miles an hour, and the swifter fly flew at a constant speed of 15 miles and hour. How much distance did the fly cover? 15 miles! (15 miles an hour for one hour.)

  A player will, at any given time, have a repertoire of methods for playing a game. Improving your skills at playing a game involves expanding and refining your repertoire. Generally speaking, being able to overcome a challenge by reckoning (by pure routine) is uninteresting. Improving your repertoire is enjoyable. Game design is much about working with the player's repertoire.

  X

      

 Designer has a great design. Programmer has great code. But the game is terrible. Because the design and the code have to match. You cannot make one without the other!

 The goal is not "correctness", but perceived fairness and consistency. Use multiple small-power shots. Or big, fuzzy, bombs. Have many things on-screen. Hard cases: "All eyes on the ball". Soccer, Pong. Players can’t accept unfairly: Losing the game, losing a life, not being rewarded for a cool maneuver. But they can accept: Not picking up a small powerup, missing some percentage of unimportant shots.

 Game designer wants the coolest game design Programmer wants the coolest/most beautiful code. Player wants the most fun game. Remember: It is the player that should have the fun!

 Hunicke, LeBlanc, Zubeck: MDA. Types of aesthetic goals: Games:

 What kind of fun should the player be having? Decide this. Does your programming support the fun? If not, change the design or change the code.

 You work in a company making cell phone games. The manager comes in. Cool! We got the Doom II license. Single Player! Identify the kinds of fun that Doom II has. How can this be implemented on a cell phone? To 11:00!

 You have game design for a strategy game quite similar to Age of Empires. The programmer tells you that the engine only supports 6 simultaneous units on screen. What were the original aesthetic goals of the design? Can they be saved? Changed? New code? New design?

 You work in a company making cell phone games. The manager comes in. Cool! We got the Counter-strike license. Identify the kinds of fun that Counter-Strike has. Using HTTP, the ping to the server is 5 seconds. The game has to be multiplayer. How can this be implemented on a cell phone? Change code? Design? Aesthetic goals? 11:30

 Player should have the fun. Not correctness but fun. Code and game design are intimately entwined. Course eval