My newest Gamasutra article just finally went up (they’ve been backed up). It’s about a prescriptive definition for “game” that, unlike the everyday term, is actually useful for game designers and critics. Please check it out here.
Hello all! As I’ve talked about before, I’m in the process of writing a book right now. Between that, Auro, and a few other side projects, I won’t be having too much time to make posts. After April 8th, which is my deadline, I’ll be back in full-swing, though! Today, I just wanted to quickly let everyone know what’s going on with us, and also rattle off a little theory that I’ve been playing with.
Before I continue, let me mention: our first game, 100 Rogues got its Dinoman Bruiser update, and it’s live now! Go check it out
So, even though I have this looming deadline for my book coming up, I have to say that I’ve still been making Auro my top priority. Game design wise, we’re honing in more and more, and the game as it is now, while still not “there”, is proving to be super-useful for me in terms of that honing in process. Also, I may have stated before that I am not a programmer, but I have been able to code just enough to implement and modify Auro’s special abilities, in the hopes of finding better and better ways of expressing the Disciplines.
Despite being a really solid and focused vision, Auro is proving to be a really difficult game to design and to program. This is because not only is everything so tight, but also there are so many special exceptional interactions that can happen. Here are some examples (some of which are currently implemented, and some of which aren’t)
There are certainly a few other special interactions like that, but I still have a LOT of work to do in this area. It’s pretty good in the Fire and Ice trees, but the other three all need work in terms of this kind of hard-coded, special synergy. Note that all of the skills will have naturally some level of emergent synergy, so there’s always that cushion there, but it’s good to have the special hardcoded ones too if you can. read more
“Game Over, man! Game Over!”
– Bill Paxton in “Aliens”
The common expression “Game Over” has actually caused damage to our ability to understand games. Everyone knows what “Game Over” means, right? It means the game is over, and you failed. Bill Paxton essentially was using it as a synomyn for “We lost!”
Well, that would be fine, except that before “game over”, “the game being over” and “you winning or losing” were commonly understood to be two different things. This is a term which only started showing up in a big way in the 1980s, at least with the modern meaning that it has taken on. The problem is, the term has caused us great confusion in understanding games. Note that this article is something of an extension of my On Score article, so if you haven’t read that, consider checking it out first.
The Fantasy SimulatorEarly in the history of digital games, it was decided – with varying levels of commitment – that these new digital games would be (to varying degrees) “fantasy simulators”. Very soon, we were introduced to the concept of “death” in games. “Death” would almost always mean losing, or at least losing a “life”. This was natural for games like Pac Man or Donkey Kong, where you’re controlling a sentient creature whose challenges – being chased by ghosts and being run-down by giant flaming barrels – were very much representative of something that would threaten such a creature.
But it didn’t stop there. Completely abstract games also took on the “death” idea. People would fill the well in Tetris, and an observer might note that you “died” at the end.
You may say, “so what?” to all of this. The problem is that we’ve lost our ability to understand a fundamental concept of games: the goal. This focus on avoiding this thematic idea of “death” has blurred our vision to the point where people are actually unable to understand games at all.
A fantastic case in point is Tetris. I have actually come across many people who seem to think that the “goal” in Tetris is “to survive” (we’ll get to the problem with that in a second), and possibly even more people who think that Tetris has no implicit goal – that it’s essentially a toy (like a ball, a flight simulator, or Minecraft) – and that any goals you have, you make up.
Let me first demonstrate, for anyone who is in doubt, that Tetris (I’m talking specifically here, NES Tetris… it’s possible that there is some new version that’s totally different) does have a very specific goal: to get a high score (I talked about this a bit in my previous article, On Score). But quickly, here’s some evidence:
Firstly, the entire game is built around and balanced around a score system. If score isn’t the goal – like if survival is the goal – then the clear optimal strategy is to always get single lines. The entire system of comboing to get triples or Tetrises is totally stupid and should be entirely avoided. Obviously, this also means that Tetris is a pretty shitty game, if that’s the case, as huge chunks of the design are just false choices.
Secondly, the game plays a triumphant fanfare, and plays a short movie of a rocket taking off when you’ve gotten a high score. The higher the score, the more fantastic a movie is displayed.
Third, it says the point of the game is to get a high score in the fucking manual. RTFM, people!
There, I went and highlighted the important parts for you.
But finally, and this is the most important one: in Tetris, “death”, or filling the well, is inevitable(for 99.999% of all players, the ones who aren’t willing to do this kind of shit). So which of the two makes more sense: that the game end condition is inevitable, or that the game loss condition is inevitable?
The Goal is to Survive, Obviously!
What exactly does “survival” mean? At what point have you survived? An hour? Ten hours? Not to get involved in political matters, but it actually reminds me a lot of the current US involvement in Afghanistan. The stated goal there is to essentially “keep terrorists from having a safe haven there”. Well, at what point have we done that? I assume we’ve done it for a decade now, so… how much longer do we have to do it before it’s done?
For this reason, many people consider Tetris (and the Afghanistan war) a “game that cannot be won”. Well, frankly, a game that cannot be won is not a game. Games are a type of contest – there must be a possibility of losing and winning. In fact, it is definitely reasonable to say that if you cannot win, then you also cannot lose. Can it be considered “losing” when the alternative was literally completely not even an option? If the game was lost before you even started, how is it even a game at all?
The fact is that many of you have won Tetris many times over – and Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong, and Galaga, because these are all score-based games. Many people think that they have never won in these games because they are erroneously tying “death” to the “goal” of the game. In these games, “death” is actually just the game end condition. Playing European boardgames such as Puerto Rico or Through the Desert, or sports such as Soccer or Baseball allow us to see the difference between “losing” and “the game ending” very clearly. All game designers need to know what their “game end conditions” and their “game loss conditions” are from the outset, because everything else in the game is using this as its context.
I should briefly mention that there are examples of games wherein the game-end and game-loss condition are tied together. Any direct-combat game, such as Street Fighter, StarCraft or Yomi: Fighting Card Game will have their game end-condition trigger on a game-loss trigger. Usually, it’s when someone reaches zero health or zero of some other resource (in StarCraft, that would be number of buildings), the game loss is triggered for that player, and the game end is also triggered. But this is a very specific type of game, and tying these things together doesn’t work for all game-types. Be conscious of when your game triggers its end, and what triggers a player “losing” or “winning”.
“Game End” and “Game Lost” are not the same thing, but “Game Over” has sort of done that to us. It’s yet another way in which we have gotten so, so lost in these early days of digital games.
