THE ELEMENTS OF GAME PLAYING ERSİN ERTAN

Unique Solutions When players’ creativity can lead them to solutions that I had not envisioned, it shows me that the players and I are sharing in the creation of their experience, instead of my dictating everything. And when the players and I share in the authorship, I feel my game is doing its job.

Anticipatory versus Complex Systems Good designers will try to guess what players are going to attempt to do and make certain their game responds well to those actions. Anticipatory school of game design, where the designer thinks of what players might do and hardwires the game to work well with those actions.

Emergence It is the development of numerous robust and logical systems that leads to player-unique solutions to situations in the game. Establishing a game universe that functions in accordance with logical rules players can easily understand and use to their advantage allows those same players to come up with their own solutions to the problems the game presents.

CIVILIZATION At the same time, many designers fear players discovering emergent strategies they can use as exploits: tactics that will allow players to finish a game too easily, skipping a lot of the fun. With its complex systems design, Civilization was a prime candidate for player exploitation. In the original game, players were able to exploit a rush strategy where they would never build cities of a size larger than two while staying in the most primitive form of government, quickly sweeping over the world and winning the game prematurely. This strategy was so effective it was clearly the best strategy to use and allowed players to miss 90 percent of the game. Sid Meier ended up patching the game to increase the citizens’ unhappiness when this strategy was used, fixing the exploit. In this case the emergent tactic revealed a shortcut through the game that needed to be fixed.

CENTIPEDE “Blob” strategy was developed, one that the game’s designer, Ed Logg, never anticipated. To use the blob strategy, players would clear all of the mushrooms from the board on the first wave, and then allow mushrooms to survive only on the bottom-right quadrant of the screen. If, through careful destruction of the centipede, the players only allow mushrooms to be created in that section of the screen, the flea will never come out, making the game much simpler indeed.

Non-Linearity Non-linearity gives interactivity meaning, and without non-linearity, game developers might as well be working on movies instead. The more parts of your game that you can make non-linear, the better your game will be. Unfortunately, on the flip side, the more non-linearity your game has, the more time consuming and difficult it will be to develop. In general, when someone says something is linear they mean that it follows a line. Games, however, are non-linear works. In the game of chess, there are multiple ways to capture the opponent’s king, to move from the game’s predetermined starting state to its conclusion.

Types of Non- Linearity Storytelling: Of course, a non-linear story line is necessarily tied to non-linear gameplay, and no one would bother to try to make a story non-linear if the game itself offered players very little in the way of meaningful decisions. Multiple Solutions: Well-designed game will enable players to come up with their own solutions to the challenges the game presents. Order: Beyond being able to figure out the solutions to challenges in unique ways, players will appreciate the ability to pick the order in which they perform challenges. Selection: Another way of making a game non-linear is to allow players to pick and choose which challenges they want to overcome.

THE SUFFERING Overall, my game The Suffering was significantly less non-linear than Odyssey, but still I applied many of the same non-linear storytelling techniques in order to give the game’s story depth. The Suffering makes each player’s experience unique through its morality system, which assesses how the game is being played and then determines the player character’s past and changes how the characters in the present speak to him. As a horror game, the plot was kept somewhat vague on purpose, with players needing to fill in many of the blanks themselves. Furthermore, each player was likely to have a different subsection of the overall story, since much of the story is contained in optional side areas. Indeed, players who blaze through the game full speed ahead will miss a lot of the plot, while those who play normally will probably see about half of what there is to be found.

The Purpose of Non- Linearity It is important to always remember that non-linearity is included in the game to provide players some meaningful authorship in the way they play the game. If they are forced to stay on a specific line to get from the beginning of the game to the end, the game will feel constrained. The challenges along that line may be brilliantly conceived, but if players have no choice but to take them on in order, one by one, the fun they provide will be greatly diminished. A note of caution: all designers should understand that non-linearity is not about having players wander around the game-world aimlessly. If the game is non-linear to the point where players have no idea what they are supposed to try to accomplish or how they might go about it, the non-linearity may have gone too far.

Modeling Reality The desire to model reality in computer games is one that has driven game development for a number of years. The more real we make the games, proponents say, the more compelling and immersive gamers will find them. But is this always the case? What would a greater degree of reality add to a game like Tetris or Centipede? Surely they could not be much more immersive than they already are. Consider a game such as Age of Empires, which is already modeled on reality. Would adding more reality to it make it any more fun? Actually, quite the opposite is true: adding a more realistic economic model or combat system would detract from the game’s strengths as a macro-strategy game and quite possibly make the game more annoying than fun.

Teaching the Player In the past, many computer games relied on manuals to teach players how to play them. Today many games try to get away from this reliance on players’ reading ability, realizing that often the last thing players want to do when they have just purchased a new game is to sit down and read an extensive instructional manual. Players definitely have a strong desire to just pick up the controller and start playing the game.

Input/Output Your game’s input and output systems are two of the primary factors that determine how steep the learning curve for your game is and whether players will find it intuitive to play. Using the input/output systems you design, players must be able to control and understand the game effortlessly. Designing these systems is one of the hardest aspects of game design, since, if they are designed well, players will not even know they are there. But if they are designed poorly, players will become easily frustrated, complaining that the game’s controls prevent them from doing what they really want to do in the game.

Controls and Input The controls for many computer games seem to be getting more and more complex, particularly those for 3D action games, there is a lot to be said for keeping your controls simple. Indeed, a lot of the success of games like Diablo, Command & Conquer, and The Sims can be attributed to the fact that players can play these games one-handed, controlling everything with only the mouse.

Output and Game-World Feedback Consider a strategy game in which players have a number of units scattered all over a large map. The map is so large that only a small portion of it can fit on the screen at once. If a group of the players’ units happen to be off- screen and are attacked but players are not made aware of it by the game, players will become irritated.