The Metaphor
I’m not talking about the kind you find in a short story- no, this is the metaphor in games.
Almost every game has a metaphor of some sort, except the super driest theme-less games. Chess, for example, has a pretty good metaphor, as does Go. However, something like Blokus, with its abstract play and strange pieces, probably lacks a metaphor.
The metaphor in games is related to theme. Theme is what we’re told the game is about (and a strong theme will come through in its gameplay as well.) Color is all the trappings that go into telling you the theme, like piece shapes, card art, titles, etc. The metaphor is the underlying thematic idea of the game that shows you what the game is supposed to convey.
Game Design, the Slacker Way
First, I want to recommend some other game design blog reading that is not my own: The Importance of Being Elegant takes a good shot at attempting to define elegance in board games and providing means by which we can evaluate a game for elegance. Good stuff that I need to dive into further.
Sometimes, I refer to game designers as “professional slackers.” This is in jest of course… good game design is actually pretty difficult, and it’s hard to make money at it. If you’re like most designers, you’re freelance, which means that the pay is inconsistent. So it’s really not a good job for slackers after all. To the would-be professional slackers, I recommend marrying rich or filing frivolous lawsuits.
But there is a slacker impulse that translates well to game design:
If it’s too much work, it’s probably not worth it.
Boardgames That Grab
Continuing in my series of articles comparing game design to other forms of creative expression…. (don’t worry, the semester is almost over.)
There’s a current trend in writing that I call “grabbiness.” That’s the ability of a piece to grab you right from the beginning: to suck you in and make you want to read more.
This concept exists in other forms too. There’s a reason they put artwork on the cover of a book or the box of a game. They want you to see the image and be intrigued so you open up the book or box. Not only that, it tries to evoke emotion in the viewer. It might bring to mind an epic battle, a child-like scene, or a struggle against a waterfall.
This concept can be applied to game design as well. A good game is going to answer the question right from the beginning: “why should I play this?”
Win, Lose, or Drawn & Quartered
You’d think after attending a 10 day long convention about boardgaming I’d have lots to talk about, wouldn’t you?
Well, the truth is, I spent a lot of time talking about game design, and terminology, and related issues while there quite a lot. While I have yet to become sick of talking about games and game design, I’m having trouble focusing on a specific topic so as to enlighten you this week. (I also have a couple designs buzzing in my head that I’m more eager to work on than write this column!)
I didn’t want to leave you high and dry this week without my font of game design knowledge, so I thought I’d briefly touch on a point that was raised in the comments of a post while I was gone: about winning and losing.
A Game of Pure Skill
I was at a party this past weekend that could at times have been described as “raucous.” Of course, I don’t go for this whole “unstructured social interaction” thing, so I was jonesing for gaming, coming off from a back to back win in drinking team foosball.
Fortunately, I carry a game around with me that I bring along specifically for these situations. One of the hosts of the party suggested that I bring along some of the prototypes that I was working on along, and that’d we try them. Or maybe that we’d get a big Werewolf game together.
Well, after two kegs emptied and several bowls of vodka punch chugged, I made the decision that this wasn’t the proper environment for a playtest, and getting together 9 players for Werewolf would have proven more obnoxious than it’s worth. Plus, many players can’t handle being drunk while playing werewolf and make a lot of mistake. (I, on the other hand, am a very dangerous drunken Werewolf player.)
I turned to Bartoneus and said, “It’s Loopin’ Louie Time.”
PowSpiel of Friends West
Last week, in my attempt to explain why games were art, I had to come up with a definition that I liked for art.
Apparently nobody else liked it.
However, I stick by it, but your mileage may vary. The only common ground josh0rfz and I could find about our definition of art involved guide’s sausages and pirates. I’m afraid that we’ll all just have to settle for “there still is no good definition of art.”
I may be missing my next two Friday columns (and some other columns in between.) Why’s that you may wonder? I’ll be in sunny Columbus Ohio attending the Gathering of Friends game convention. What’s that you may wonder? Well, stop wondering about everything, and I’ll explain a bit…
Games as Art: Yes, Yes, They Are
Over at Amber’s blog, she references a speech made at the GDC wherein the speaker called the Wii “a piece of shit” and also stated that Nintendo doesn’t care about games as art, because if you search their site for that phrase it doesn’t appear.
Well, that’s hardly a scientific analysis. As someone who has studied the design of games and has devoted his life to the concept of games as art, my semi-expert opinion is that Nintendo does view games as art, almost certainly moreso than Sony or Microsoft.
But, as what happened in the thread talking about this, it seemed to me that people were misunderstanding what it meant to view games as art. So I put on my academic hat, and said this:
Emergent Properties, 10:1 Rule, and Brute Force
A really good way came to me to explain what emergent properties are.
You know when you write something, like a story or a poem, and someone says “Oh, I really like the subtext about such and such.” And you think about it, and yeah, there is subtext about such and such, but you didn’t think about it being there when you wrote it. So you reply, “Thanks, that’s what I was going for.”
That’s an emergent property, and one of the best parts of game design as a creative field.
Speaking of which, I realized that I hadn’t shared the all-important 10:1 rule of game design. [Read the rest of this article]
Workshopping Games (and not Games Workshop)
The problem with taking several writing classes at once is that they ALL want to teach you how to workshop, even though there’s only so much you can teach about being a critical thinker about a piece of artistic expression. A lot of it is having experience in the field in question. For example, I’m a near-worthless art critic because I don’t have training in artistic aesthetics. I think I can be pretty insightful about writing, but much moreso in science fiction and fantasy stories because I’ve read so many.
Plus, an important part of workshopping is being able to suggest ideas and changes. In art, I probably won’t be able to say “Hey, you should try this” because I haven’t been trained to pick up on different styles in other works that could be applicable. In fiction, I can say “your organization is confusing, try this other way of telling your story” because I have experience with others using different narrative structures.
In many ways, game design is like this. When playtesting, you’d like your testers to have played enough games that they can suggest different mechanics, end conditions, etc. And like other creative fields, nearly everything has been done before in some fashion… the trick is for you to steal borrow an idea from another game and adapt it into other ideas to make something new and interesting (and way better than any game that has used any of the pieces before.) [Read the rest of this article]
More on the Tragedy of Multiplayer (Spotlighting Wario Ware)
The name “Wii” caused a number of reactions in the online community, ranging from those who swore they would not buy it to those who thought it was an interesting name that set it apart from the field. Through it all, Nintendo swore that the reason for the change was that it would bring people of all types together. The Wii would be the system for groups and families.
So why then, do they keep scuttling their own multiplayer games? [Read the rest of this article]
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