Fundamentals of (Role-playing?) Game Design: Amateur discourse on what constitutes good games

Prologue


Before I start with the core arguments and text matter of this thread, I would like to divulge the goal I want to aim for on the completion of the following sets of essays. The aim is to provide those who wish to discuss games a set of tools... a proving ground of some sort, where debates can be held on an equal footing and disputes can be resolved by resorting to commonly accepted ideas. I would like to explain why I consider this necessary. Every discussion of the form "What is ....?" often erupts into points and counter-points, assertions and contradictions, cases and examples galore and highly tortuous justifications. It is a wondrous thing that people should posses huge reservoirs of stamina just to defend their point of view in regard to something as mundane (?) as games and such an attitude should certainly be encouraged to an extent. What bothers me nonetheless is the frequency of such displays and the eternal recurrence of the same old ideas since ancient times. Now, it can be claimed and not unjustifiably so, that the matter of discussion is hardly resolved and needs be reinvigorated time and again just so that it may keep up with the continual advance in the field of game development. This argument although with its own merit fails to account for absolute hostility that is continually demonstrated by parties on each end of the spectrum of arguments concerning even more basic ideas of gaming. This is not to claim that we need to force some artificial unity for the sake of unity, but rather an observation that these matters of disputes do not always arise from positions of sensibility and thoughtfulness but rather are born of habit and (if I may be impertinent) bullheaded beliefs. Such a problem can only be resolved by rewording and recreating the foundations of arguments, so that the arguments themselves are more transparent, a glasnost if you will have it.

The second and probably more important reason these essays are being written is to convince you that comparing game-play is NOT a relative standard i.e. the excuse that certain games like Arcanum, Vampires: the Masquerade – Bloodlines are considered great because of personal taste is not valid. This is of course difficult but to my view not impossible. The chief goal will be demonstrate the means of achieving such a uniform standard. I can understand why many of the readers will take immediate objection to this approach. I would ask them to be kind enough to give me a chance to explain myself as I progress through the essays.

Another issue I wanted to submit to the readers was the general structure of these essays. I will be typically writing them with definitions of the terms I feel are important preceding the actual text. These definitions are not to be debated in a purely lexical or literal sense. They are just keywords to avoid lengthy allusions to complicated ideas. The only problem I deem possible with such a construction is that there may be too few of such definitions for a given topic. Since this exercise is assumed to be interactive with the readers participating via discussions, I assume that the problems in that respect will resolve themselves eventually.

Having clarified the general reason for writing these essays, I would like to add a disclaimer to preemptively avoid un-necessary criticism. I am NOT a game developer (read Amateur) and it is highly unlikely that I will develop any games that you will play in the future. I have not played as many games as some of you stalwarts have and as I should have. But as a consolation I have at least played a lot of games that are considered classics.

Having got this out of our way, I can kick-start the actual discussion.

Video games are a comparatively Nascent form of expression. Let us agree to avoid the term art when used solely for the sake of describing developing video games. For the sake of this discussion I define the word Art as a noun in two independent ways:

Art: As the formalized means of conveying knowledge. e.g. ""Aristotle has rendered the practice of education into an art."

A work of Art: As an object that is considered as bearing superior qualities by some arbitrary expertise.

As you can notice the appropriate usage for the development of games would be Art when the process would be formalized in some way. This process can take a copious amount of trial and error before becoming established and I assume that it is agreeable that it has not yet taken place.

Video games have a function in their fundamental construction: Entertainment. To whom? To those whose wish to be entertained. This sounds very vague, but I will provide a reason for this deliberate mystification that seems sound enough to my ears. Entertainment comes in very many forms. To some the genre of horror is entertainment, to some it is socially interacting with other human beings over internet. I can not list all forms nor do I claim to understand all of them. Hence it suits the spirit of this essay to leave it to the audience to figure out what they themselves consider entertainment. Of course it can be argued that Video games are used to train personnel. The counter is, that those are NOT video games; they are simulators! This is another fundamental distinction I am making for this article:

A (video) game must not be a ONLY a simulator.

Thus as a necessity, If a game fails to entertain its target audience, it is fundamentally flawed. But beyond doing only that, i.e. just being fun, there are features the developer can implement that enhance the game-play experience . In my view the enhancement is delivered by two independent criteria. The criterion of Functionality and the criteria of Innovation. Let me define them so to make my point of view clearer.

I consider functionality criterion as the implementation of the game-play elements so that they reduce the annoyance in the way of entertainment. Thus functionality deals with known elements of design and strives to improve portions of the games which neither contribute to the content of the game nor contribute towards enhancing the gaming experience. You might have heard several developers using the word streamlined to describe this exact same idea. Unfortunately, this is used to justify the reduction in content of a game instead of modifying the same to remove the obstacles from entertainment. For the future reference I would like to make sure that the readers are comfortable with this word no matter where they first encountered it. I can give you simple examples that describe the functionality criteria: NWN2 has a gameplay feature called attack of opportunity (AoO) that is implemented imperfectly leading to miscalculation by the AI to move automatically into enemy AoO region while better options are available. The developers can remedy this by either removing this feature or altering the AI so that it is no longer cumbersome. The latter is what I call streamlined combat and attach a functionality criterion to it.

The criterion of Innovation is concerned with a adding previously missing elements to the gameplay. Not mundane elements like improvements to the facial features but rather significantly improve the gameplay experience. Pardon me again for the vagueness, but as I explained earlier a lot of these quantifiers are relative and must be left to the audience. There are quite a few examples of innovation in games. These include advances in the AI, advances in graphics, advances in delivery of narratives, major changes in gameplay that allow fluid interaction with the computer interface, increasing the scope of such interactions to point to some. I believe that it is much more natural to sympathize with such changes compared to functionality and that is why I do not see a need to explain this overmuch.

The claim in this essay and its future companions is that when a game contains elements that are Innovative and implemented to satisfy the criterion of functionality then it is to be considered great. Please understand that the label “great” is arbitrary and is NOT a function of time. Deus Ex, a game developed in 2000 is still considered great. Not because there has been no improvement over that game since the day but rather because the way the game was developed was revolutionary at its time of creation. The same holds for games like Pacman, Mario and Thief.

This is exactly where the consumers of game should play their part. Their demand should be constant improvement over previously great games to provide the pressure on the developer to satisfy both the functionality and innovation criteria. This requires that the players are aware of such distinctions and that, is why this essay is being written.

The following essays will serially look at some of the gameplay elements found predominately in genre of Role Playing games and would be discussed in a similar vein.

 

mandatory tl:dr

 

You copy & paste 5 huge articles on different aspects of game design and actually expect a decent discussion out of it?

 

I like game discussion and I read your other posts in this "series" but you make some retarded posts elsewhere on this website and have a very strange way of writing so that makes me more reluctant to try to make something of it.

I appreciate your attempts to bring emphasis into your work but putting whole words in upper case really does distract from the sentence. Using a rule like that and then self-referring as "the article" makes a strange disconnect. I know you are a professional academic but the way of writing in academia is not the clearest nor the most efficient. It's only pervasive because most academia is written specifically to be read by other academics. Take that context away and academic "prose" if you will is pretty bloated and unwieldy.

I will wait and see how you order the rest of this

 

tl;dr: Creative people with talent and competency can create great games.



But I'm interested to see what else you're going to put here. You've had some interesting walls of text in the past, but I haven't read all of the ones you've posted.

 

So good game = a game which succeeds at its design goals and is entertaining/fun, and a great game is the same thing but... better?

What constitutes "improving the experience of gaming"? Is it setting new standards for other games? Is it improving upon the ideas in other games? Is it the creation of experiences that are heretofore unseen? Because this is a pretty shaky way of defining things considering what constitutes a standard in the games industry and an improvement in the eyes of many (for instance, Fallout 3 is an improvement over Fallout 2 because it has 3D graphics vs. 2D graphics). There is an inherent appeal to authority in your arguments (namely, your own) which you need to address, otherwise everything you say is basically just meaningless nonsense open to anyone else's criteria/interpretations.

In other words, by the standards set here, FarmVille is a great game... it is creative (innovative use of Facebook for monetization that set the standards for the industry) while also fulfilling its design goals (to generate fucktons of money) in what I think anyone would consider a "great" capacity. As to the fun question, well, I'm sure there are thousands upon thousands of players out there who would testify that it is. Yet almost everyone universally derides FarmVille as a bad game - for very valid reasons, but ones which are not defined in your arguments.

Funny, I remember that New Vegas was packed positively full of linear fetch quests that took you all over the place, while if anything, Fallout 3's are more compact or open-ended (such as collecting Nuka-Colas). I realize this is just an example but I don't think it is a good one for your purposes considering the games themselves.

False dichotomy. Something that is not expansive is not inherently restrictive, at least not necessarily in practical terms. Furthermore, the lines between functionality and creativity are pretty damn blurred. If function is the fulfillment of design then how can a game exceed its design to achieve creativity, for instance? What happens when you exercise creativity but a game does not achieve great function? Is it no longer creative after all?

Bullshit. Narrative is inherent to the experience of gaming and is unique compared to traditional media in that gaming's interactivity allows for a greater degree of authorship on the part of its audience. Many games use narrative as a design element specifically to enhance existing gameplay or, in some cases, narrative serves to define and structure the fundamentals of gaming. In other words, narrative is not plot, and narrative is not independent of medium.

Not entirely awful ideas but you have way too much fuzzy logic and ill-defined points which beg expansion. I realize that you admit to this to a degree but if you are going to create some sort of theorem of videogame design then you need to iron out these very fundamental problems.

 

All I know is that stats suck and detract from gameplay. So as long as RPG has no stats it's awesome.

The Kickstarter heroes throwing down chains of Evil Publisher, Stoic, told me so.

 

First thing I learned as an academic writer: ditch the excessive verbiage that only serves to gin up your prose. That's not really a tldr complaint but an observation that you use big words for the sake of big words and over explain everything. Be more concise.

 

In short: don't explain what you're going to say or how you're going to proceed. Just say it and proceed. There's also no need to digress in elaborate explanations. At most you would put stuff like that in footnotes but from what I read they don't really add anything to your point. You probably want a stronger introductory sentence than the "Comparing gameplay..." since I eviscerated the first half of what you wrote but I didn't feel like rewriting one.