Design Tools... wait, two posts in one day - yep I'm on form this weekend

Blog Post Number 5 is about to begin...

More notes about various articles and seeing what we can take from them in this blog post. This time there are two articles in question 'Space of Possibility and Pacing in Casual Game Design - A PopCap Case Study' by Marcos Venturelli and 'Formal Abstract Design Tools' by Doug Church. Both of them talk about a vocabulary for talking about the ways in which we should design and things that we think about designing, however, Venturelli focuses on the emerging 'Casual Game' market whereas Church talks about games design in general. So without further delay, here we go.


Doug Church's Article
To be perfectly honest, a lot of Doug Church's 17 page article was waffle - he went into a lot of detail explaining certain things that he didn't really need to and ultimately we can't take anything from. However, the key design tools that he mentions are very important and very interesting - these are 'Perceivable Consequence', 'Intention' and 'Story'.


Perceivable Consequence
Perceivable Consequence is the player's understanding that their actions in the real world will ultimately effect how they play the game and it's outcomes. An example of this would be in a platformer, when the player comes across a hole that they must clear they realise that they must press the jump button to clear the hole, else they will fall into it and die - in laymen's terms, perceivable consequence is realising how the game works and what dangers there are; this leads onto the next design tool 'Intention' that will be discussed shortly.


As a designer, we need to think about perceivable consequence, we need to make sure that the player knows that something they do will have an outcome of some sorts, whether it is good or bad or even, in some aspects, obvious - as a gamer you should know that falling down a hole is a bad thing but that is because the designer makes it so. An example given to me of a case where perceivable consequence isn't given is if the player has to go through a choice of 2 doors not knowing that going through the left one will instantly kill them - the player needs to know that there will be good and bad consequences for their choice but in this case there isn't. It is due to this that 'Perceivable consequence' (I'll call it Peco from now on) is a crucial design tool.


Intention
Intention is very closely linked with Peco, intention is the player planning ahead and thinking about their actions and the outcomes and therefore planning how to overcome obstacles, etc. Using the same example as before, the player knows that they will die by falling down the hole and therefore they plan to run and jump over it to avoid this outcome.


As a designer, intention is something we should think about and help to implement but ultimately it is the player that makes their own intention, we cannot affect how they plan to overcome issues - if the player wishes to repeatedly fall into the hole and die, that is their choice and their intent. As designers, what I think we do is give the player the choice to make their decisions regardless of how much they control the rest of the game - this leads to the next tool 'Story'.


Story
Story is exactly what it says on the tin, it is the narrative thread of the game. Whether this narrative thread is directed by the designer and the player is merely progressing along a pre-determined path or the player has more direct influence on the story, the story is the main thing that drives the game forward and gives then player a goal to reach.


In my opinion, all games have a story that the designer wants the player to see or achieve but it is down to the player to follow it - even in a very linear RPG such as Final Fantasy XIII where the story will unfold how the designer wants it to as you progress, the player can choose to simply die and fail in fights and therefore not proceed and see the story. Obviously this is just stupid and no one would do it but the point is the player should be able to see that they have a choice, plan accordingly and know what will happen based on those choices - as designers it is down to us to design games that allow players to do this.


Marcos Venturelli's Article
Venturelli's article is about one specific games company, PopCap, but it generally talks about all casual games and casual game developers. PopCap is a well renowned casual game developer which is naturally why they are the subject matter for finding what makes casual games and tools we can take from them. From the article there are two key tools that we can take 'Pacing' and 'Possibility'.


Pacing
Pacing is essentially how quickly or slowly the game flows and how the game is affected as a result. The best way to describe this is is to say that casual games are quick and more mainstream games are slow - there is a reason for this though however. In casual games, there is little story, little choices for the player to make and as a result to make casual games appealing they are very fast paced, making the player make quick decisions that increases the tension and thus makes them more fun. In more mainstream games this wouldn't work as well because the story and planning would be lost, defeating the purpose of making the game detailed and in-depth.


Possibility
Possibility is the number of options that are available to the player - the more options available to the player, the slower the game pace. The two basically go hand in hand and as a result in casual games there are more limited possibilities to help keep the pace up - the reason why the pace goes down otherwise is that with more possibilities there are the more the player has to think about what they are doing and ultimately slows the game down.


Pacing and Possibility
As designers I feel that it is our duty to find the right balance between the two when we make a game, this can be affected by genre and other aspects, but ultimately once we find the balance we find the type of game we want to create and then we use Church's tools to form the basis of how the player plays our game.


Anyways, that was a LOOOOOONG post so 'til next time - that's all folks!