Aha moment
by Will Kerslake
W
e designers encounter an abundance of little moments in which we make discoveries about things that end up becoming trivially obvious in retrospect. Ideally we all strive to create designs in our games that are both elegant and simple; however, we often get there through a process that is neither. As Scott Adams quite eloquently said, “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Design is knowing which ones to keep.” That is not to say that all game design is wistful trial and error. With time and experience, good designers should be able to derive a majority of their craft from previous efforts, isolating new creative mistakes to the areas in which we are branching into new territory. While experience significantly reduces the resulting surprises, they are never entirely eliminated.
For Instance When working on The Urbz, one of the tasks I had was rebuilding the social interaction system. It needed to take into account the different subcultures we were adding to the game. The resulting system was based on RPG combat mechanics, substituting attack types and armor classes with cultural and social interactions and clothing styles. Things were working well, so I decided to take the RPG metaphor to the next step, color-coding player interactions with the equivalent of “to-hit” percentages. Unfortunately for a game like The Sims, humorous failures and unpredictable results are part of the appeal for many players. In attempting to bring clarity to the system, I ended up 72 gamesauce • Fall 2010
breaking it—because I lost sight of the target audience. The problem with these kinds of revelations is that they tend to be tied to specific genres or individual projects. While interesting in a postmortem context, the findings don’t have a sufficiently broad application. My position at Radar has me delving into the world of transmedia, and consequently I’ve been spending more time working with writers and producers from the film side of the entertainment business. When explaining one of the project concepts to me, the writer kept referring back to this central theme he was attempting to integrate throughout the story.
As I pondered this, it hit me. In nearly a dozen years of making games, I’ve spent countless hours in meetings trying to nail down the core focus of the project, but I had never even sent an email to discuss the message we were trying to leave people with after they finished the game. A lot of this comes from the simulation mindset so present in game development. We are often trying to take some concept— driving a car or exploring a city—and make it feel as absolutely real as possible. There is a constant quest for better and more reactive emergent systems that can make our worlds feel alive. We build first-person shooters that strive to make you feel like you are actually on the battlefield, or at least a Jerry Bruck-
Where are our themes? What are the questions that games are asking us to think about after we put down the controller? And it got me thinking…. When writing book reports in elementary school, students are taught to explain the basic elements of the story—the plot and characters. As those students approach middle and high school, the focus shifts from literal understanding towards exploring the themes present within a work. The same can be said about film. While it’s true that some summer blockbusters are little more than a series of special effects, every year a wide range of films are released containing strong underlying themes. In both literature and film, detailed critiques are focused less on the specifics of what happened and more on the themes present within the work. What if the same sort of analysis were applied to games? Where are our themes? What are the questions that games are asking us to think about after we put down the controller? Outside of a few, select examples, particularly in the emerging art-game genre, there really aren’t many games out there that engage the player to think about issues beyond the context of the events being simulated on screen.
heimer version of a battlefield. And there is nothing wrong with that. There is value in focusing on those simulation-based goals when deciding what features to add and what falls outside of the scope of the game-play. However, to give our audience the sort of experience that transcends moment-tomoment game-play, we have to go beyond the simulation focus. Not only can we expose players to deeper concepts, but unlike any other media, in ours the audience can directly experience the message. Yet our games won’t do that unless we are actively engaged in weaving thematic elements into our stories and more importantly, our mechanics. It’s obvious that you can make fun and successful games without themes. I love blowing stuff up as much as the next gamer, and the last thing I want is for designers to start turning every game into some sort of moral sermon, preaching their view of the world. But with all the time and effort that we already put into our games, it’s worth it to sit down for at least one meeting, or even one lunch and ask, “Is there anything we are trying to say here?”