Game Design: Theory & Practice- P15 pps

but for many players it would seem to make the playing experience all the more compelling. Familiar Subject Matter Of course, The Sims is not the original software toy, nor is it even Will Wright’s first. His first success with the software toy genre came with SimCity. It too simu - lated a sophisticated system and allowed the player to truly control her city’s destiny. Though SimCity is an excellent, entertaining title, The Sims is more compel - ling still. A lot of this has to do with the fact that the player of The Sims is controlling humans instead of a city. In other words, it follows Chris Crawford’s insistence that games should focus on “people not things.” In general, most players will find people to be much more interesting than things, and players will be able to form an emotional bond with a simulated person much easier than with a simulated city. After playing The Sims for a while, players will feel sad when their sim’s amorous advances are rebuffed or when their house burns to the ground. Though certainly not as smart or interesting as actual humans, the simulated people in The Sims are close enough to being plausible that players will want to believe in their sims’ virtual existences and will fill in the simulation’s deficiencies for themselves. Furthermore, almost all the players who play The Sims will have an intimate knowledge of the subject being simulated before they start playing. They will feel that they are something of an expert on this “suburban life” subject and think they will be able to play the game better as a result. For instance, players know by instinct that they should set up a bathroom with a shower, a toilet, and a sink. If the job were to simulate an alien life-form’s daily life on another planet, players would have much less of an idea how to proceed and would need to figure out the life- form’s culture before they could expect to succeed at the game. Because players already know so much about the subject matter of The Sims, they are that much more drawn into the game. From the moment she starts up the game, the player feels good because she is putting her real-world knowledge to use in creating these simulated lives. When Will Wright made SimEarth, he created a game involving systems that players knew very little about, and this may explain why so many peo - ple found the game to be quite difficult. For SimCity, players had a better sense of what was going on; while they may not have been experts on urban planning and dynamics, players at least thought they knew how a city should be laid out and were familiar with problems such as traffic, pollution, and crime. With The Sims, most players know infinitely more about the topic than they do about city planning. Hence, the game is that much more compelling to play. Its very familiarity draws the player in like nothing else can. Of course, simulating a subject many of the players will be familiar with can be a challenge as well; if the designer gets it wrong, players will know instantly. In the 398 Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims TEAMFLY Team-Fly ® alien-life simulator, who is to say what is accurate since the world and creatures are made up to begin with? This grants the designer more artistic license for how the world is constructed. However, in a reality simulation like The Sims, if the designer makes the wrong choice about what will provoke a sim to do what action, players will see the error and their suspension of disbelief will be shattered instantly. Working with a subject that players are intimate with may serve to draw them in, but if it is not done correctly it may drive them away as well. Safe Experimentation On first inspection, one might not think that what The Sims simulates is actually all that interesting. Indeed, for the suburbanites who are likely to own a computer to play the game and have the disposable income to purchase it, how different is the game-world of The Sims from real life? It would seem that the escapist and wish-fulfillment qualities many games possess are totally lacking in The Sims. Fur- thermore, The Sims does not even present “life with all the dull bits cut out.” The player’s sims still have to engage in the more mundane aspects of modern life, such as going to the bathroom, going to work, paying bills, and taking out the trash. Is this fun? Strangely, it is, since these more tedious chores lend an air of “realism” to the proceedings, which makes the player’s successes or failures all the more meaningful. What The Sims really provides to the player is a test-bed for safe experimenta - tion. While prudence may prevent the player from pursuing a career as a criminal or Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims 399 Though the subject matter of The Sims may seem pedestrian, the game is so fascinating because it provides players with a safe world in which to experiment. professional athlete in real life, the game will allow the player to take her sims in that direction with little risk to the player. While building a house is a major under - taking involving great financial risk for the purchaser, in The Sims, players can build lavish houses, spend money on frivolous trinkets for their sims, throw wild hot tub parties, or pursue homosexual relationships just to get a sense of what life might be like if they lived it differently. If these experimental lifestyles turn out to not work as well as the players had hoped, the only loss is for their sims, an effect considerably less serious than real-world bankruptcy or social ostracizing. Indeed, if the player avoids saving her game after a catastrophic event or decision, the loss is easily undone entirely. The life the player controls in The Sims may be one quite close to her own, but the ability to try new things without fear of serious repercus - sions makes the experience compelling and exciting. Depth and Focus A big part of what makes The Sims work is the range of choices the player is pre- sented with for what he can do with his sims. Abdicating authorship is all well and good, but if the designer fails to provide the player enough meaningful choices, the player will find himself only able to author a very narrow range of stories. Indeed, it is the designer’s responsibility in creating a software toy to design that toy with a broad enough range of possibilities that the appeal of playing with it is not quickly exhausted. And Wright did that expertly with The Sims, leaving the player with a constant feeling that there is so much more to do and see in the game-world, that one could never hope to do it all. A player can concentrate on building her house, starting either with some of the pre-built houses or constructing one from the ground up. A robust set of house- construction and landscaping tools allows the player to create a very large variety of houses, with probably no two built-from-scratch houses ever being the same, even with hundreds of thousands of people playing the game. Once a house is built or purchased, players can concentrate on filling it up with all manner of interesting possessions which have a variety of effects on the inhabitants of the house. Of course, the player gets to construct the inhabitants as well, picking from a large range of personalities, body types, ages, ethnicities, and even hairstyles, with the option to make children or adults as well as males or females. Once the sims move into the house, the player is able to determine what they eat, what they study, what career they pursue, how they have their fun, and with whom they socialize. Whether it be house building, property acquisition and placement, character cre - ation, or life control, any one of these components includes far more choices than most games provide. When all of these different systems are combined, the range of choices available to the player increases exponentially, creating a game with truly unprecedented depth. 400 Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims Of course, what the sims cannot do in the game is significant as well. The sims cannot leave their homes except to go to work, and when they do the player cannot follow them. Being able to go to other places would be nice, but consider how much more complex the game would need to be to simulate the rest of the world. A massive amount of additional work would have been required, and had that sensible limitation not been made early on in the title’s development it might never have been completed. By focusing on the home life, the game is able to “get it right” in a way it could not have had the game-world of The Sims been larger. In short, what would have been gained in breadth would have been lost in depth. If a designer spends all her time adding an unreasonable range of possibilities to the game, it is likely that any one of the features the game includes will be far shallower than if the designer knows how to focus her efforts. The Sims also expertly captures the “just one more thing” style of gameplay. This type of gameplay is perhaps best exemplified by Civilization, where the player is constantly looking forward to the next technology to be discovered, the next unit to be built, or the next discovery of new territory. Similarly in The Sims, the player may be working on having his sims meet new people, trying to advance their careers, hoping to put an addition on the house, and thinking of someday having them raise a child, all at the same time. Because of these constant aspirations, there is never a good place to stop playing the game; there is constantly something on the horizon to look forward to. Hence the game is fabulously addictive, with captivated players devoting hour upon hour, day after day, and week after week of their lives to the game. Interface The best a game’s interface can hope to do is to not ruin the player’s experience. The interface’s job is to communicate to the player the state of the world and to receive input from the player as to what he wants to change in that game-world. The act of using this input/output interface is not meant to be fun in and of itself; it is the player’s interaction with the world that should be the compelling experience. But since the interface determines how the player interacts with the world, if that inter - face is not up to the task then at best the player will become frustrated and at worst the player will be unable to perform the action he wants. The Sims’ user interface is a beautiful example of how to do an interface cor - rectly. It provides the player with a staggering amount of information about the game-world, while allowing the player to easily and intuitively make whatever changes she wants. Unlike many modern action games, the tutorial primarily provides the player with information about how to play the game, not how to manipulate the interface. The interface is so simple and intuitive that players pick it up with very little difficulty, no doubt the result of rigorous playtesting. The fact Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims 401 that help is embedded throughout the interface is key, allowing the player to click on any text item for an explanation of how it is important and why it is relevant. A big part of the success of The Sims’ input/output scheme is its similarity to systems the player is likely to understand before he ever starts playing the game. For instance, the buttons that determine the game’s simulation speed look like those one would find on a tape player, something with which almost all players will be familiar. A large amount of the interface is reminiscent of Microsoft Windows, with the pointing and clicking the player does mirroring that OS wherever appropriate. Item manipulation is reminiscent of Windows as well; the player can use drag and drop to place objects, or simply click and click. The standard Windows “X” appears in the upper right-hand corner of dialog boxes to indicate that they can be closed, and the regular OK/Cancel button combinations are used wherever appropriate. While the functionality mirrors Windows in many ways, it is important to note that the appearance of the interface does not look exactly like Windows. All of the but - tons are nicely drawn in a friendly art style that is a far cry from Windows’ cold, utilitarian sterility. If the game used the actual dialog box art that Windows pro - vides, the player would instantly be reminded of working with the file picker or some other Windows interface, not an experience he is likely to remember fondly, certainly not as a “fun” activity. However, by putting a new visual style on the behavior of Windows, the interface is intuitive and familiar to the player without actually reminding him of file management. Another example of this is the “head” menu used throughout the game. When the player wants to have a sim perform an action on a particular object, the player 402 Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims The Sims has an extremely intuitive interface that includes multiple ways for the player to accomplish the same action. simply clicks on the object in question. From there a floating head of her current sim appears, with a range of different actions the sim can perform surrounding it in a circle. The player then simply moves the mouse over to the action he wants and clicks on it. While moving the pointer around, the sim’s head actually tracks the cursor, watching it wherever it goes. This menu functions identically to a pop-up menu in Windows, but with several distinct advantages. The first is that it does not look like a pop-up menu, and thereby the player does not associate it with boring Windows functionality. Second, the menu only lists the options that are available for the current object at that time. A normal pop-up menu would list all of the objects possible, with currently unavailable options grayed out. Third, by having the sim’s head in the center, the menu brings the player closer to the core of what he is doing; he is directing the sim to perform a certain action. The directive he is giv - ing to his beloved sim is more intimate than it would have been through a more sterile, bland, and standard pop-up menu. Controlled Versus Autonomous Behavior In the game, the player is able to direct his sims to perform certain actions: take out the trash, call up a friend, take a shower, and so forth. The sims will also, however, function on their own without the player’s direction. The sims contain enough inter- nal logic to tend to their most pressing needs, whether it is to eat, to go to the bathroom, to play a pinball game, or to read today’s paper. As the player makes additions to the house or purchases further possessions, the sims will walk over to new objects and either applaud or complain about them, their reaction dependent on how much they like each particular object. This communicates to the player whether the sim is generally going to be happy with the new possession or if the sim would rather it were not there. Since the way the house is set up is a big component of the sim’s total happiness, this provides crucial information to the player about how to best set up the house. The autonomous behavior of the sims also allows the player to set up the house and then sit back and watch how the sims live in it. This makes the game more like SimCity, in which the player could only set up the framework of the city—its streets, its zones, its key buildings—and then see how the inhabitants of the city live in it. A player of The Sims can build a pleasant house that he thinks would be good to live in and then sit back and watch the sims inhabit it, using their default behavior. This provides yet another avenue for interesting gameplay. Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims 403 The sims generally do not have the foresight of a player, however, and as a result will perform better, be more productive, and be happier if the player smartly directs their every move. For instance, the sims will not try to improve their career-boosting skills of their own volition, such as improving their creativity by learning how to paint. So it is often in the player’s best interest to override the sims’ internal choices for what action to perform next, if he wants the sim to attain her full potential. However, the autonomous behavior avoids the player having to micro-manage every little decision. Sure, being able to tell the sims exactly what to do is a key part of the game, but if the player is controlling a number of sims at once, planning something for every one of them to do at a given moment can be quite a task. The sims’ internal behavior helps to off-load this responsibility from the player when the player does not want to worry about it. A Lesson to Be Learned The Sims is perhaps the most original commercial game design released in recent years. The game does not take as a starting point any other published game, but instead seems to have emerged entirely from Will Wright’s brain. To look at the game is to marvel at its creativity and innovation. There is so much that is done right in The Sims, an entire book could be devoted to an analysis of its design. The game is truly like a computerized dollhouse, providing us the ability to play-act real human scenarios in order to better understand them. The description of the dollhouse found in the game is quite illuminating: 404 Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims The sims have some intelligence of their own, which frees up the player from having to worry about every last detail of their lives. Will Lloyd Wright Doll House This marvel of doll house design is meant for everyone, allowing children as well as adults to act out fantasies of controlling little fami - lies. This incredible replica comes complete with amazingly realistic furniture and decorative items. Don’t be surprised if hours upon hours are spent enjoying this little world. What is perhaps most interesting and compelling about The Sims is the poten - tial it has to teach us about our own lives. What is the relationship we have with the possessions we own? How does the space we live in affect our lives? How does jealousy start in a relationship? Of course, no one would argue that The Sims is a completely accurate simula - tion of human motivations and activities, but does it need to be completely accurate to cause us to think about our lives in new and interesting ways? As we move our sims around and watch them interact, we may disagree with how the simulation models their behavior. But in that disagreement, we think about what we really would expect them to do, with that reflection shedding new light on the relation- ships we maintain in our real lives. This, it seems, is the potential of computer games—not to allow us to escape from real life or to even replace it, but to open up new areas of thought, to be able to see the world through a different set of eyes and come back to our own lives equipped with that priceless information. Chapter 20: Game Analysis: The Sims 405 Chapter 21 Level Design “We’ve always striven for ‘immersion’ in the gameplay, but as we’ve grown (well, changed at least) as designers, our sense of that has changed. While the details of this attempt vary from game to game, the core goal has been to provide a range of player capability in the world. With this breadth of capability, the player hopefully feels more involved in their decisions. An Underworld player can open a door with the key, by picking the lock, by breaking it down, or by casting a spell. If the player can choose their own goals, and their own approaches to an obstacle, then when they reach the goal it is far more satisfying. Flexible simulation of game elements is a powerful way to enable the player to make their own way in the world.” — Doug Church, talking about his game Ultima Underworld 406 A s computer games have grown in size and scope, the tasks that in the past were performed by one person are now performed by multiple people. This division of labor is necessary for the timely completion of the sophisticated and massive games the publishers demand and the marketplace has come to expect. One of the unique roles that was created through this division of labor was that of the level designer. Once the core gameplay for a game is established, it is the level designer’s job to create the game-world in which that gameplay takes place, to build spaces that are fun for the player. The number of level designers required for a project is directly proportional to the complexity of the levels to be used in that project. For a 3D game with extremely detailed architecture which all must be built by the level designer, it is not unreasonable to have two levels per designer, perhaps only one. Sometimes the game’s primary designer also serves as a level designer, and sometimes she merely oversees the team of level designers working on the project. For a 2D game, it is not out of the question for the game’s lead designer to craft all of the game’s levels. Level design is where all the different components of a game come together. In some ways creating a level is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle; to build his lev- els, the level designer must make use of the game’s engine, art, and core gameplay. Often level design is where a game’s problems become most apparent. If the engine is not up to snuff, the levels will start behaving erratically in certain situations, or the frame rate will not be able to support the planned effects. If the art is made to the wrong scale or has rendering problems of any kind, these difficulties come out as the level designer starts placing the art in the world. If the title’s gameplay is not able to support a wide enough variety of levels to fill out an entire game, or, even worse, if the gameplay just is not any fun, this problem will become apparent dur - ing the level design process. It is the level designer’s responsibility to bring these problems to the attention of the team, and to see that the difficulties are resolved properly. Often this can result in the level designer being one of the least liked team members, since he must always be pestering people to fix problems, but if he instead tries to ignore the problems he encounters, the game will be worse as a result. The job of the level designer is one that comes with great responsibility. With all the different aspects of the game’s content to worry about, the level designer’s job is certainly not an easy one. Beyond making sure all of the game’s components are up to snuff, if the level designer’s own work is not of the highest quality, then the game is likely to fail miserably. If the levels do not bring out the best aspects of the engine, the art, and the gameplay, it does not matter how good those component parts may be. Without good levels to pull it all together, the game will fail to live up to its potential. Chapter 21: Level Design 407 [...]...408 Chapter 21: Level Design Levels in Different Games TE AM FL Y Joust made simple changes to its gameworld to produce different levels The definition of a “level” varies greatly from game to game It most commonly refers to the game- world of side-scrollers, first-person shooters, adventures, flight simulators, and role-playing games These games tend to have distinct areas which are referred to... the goal of every level is to provide an engaging gameplay experience for the player When working on the levels for a game, it is important to constantly keep in mind the focus of the game What is this game trying to accomplish? How important are the different aspects of the game? What will the level need to do to support the type of gameplay this game has? In addition, depending on the amount of pre-production... integral part of the metagame in that such exploration leads to the player’s victory in future games, but the exploration is only a means to an end, not an end in and of itself, unlike in a single-player game where exploration is a big part of the fun With the exception of racing games, sports games typically provide a very non-linear flow to their gameplay The flow of a basketball game s levels more closely... vital component of establishing the setting for a game Therefore, levels are an integral part of telling a game s story If the story is more than something tacked on to an already completed game, it only makes sense for the game s levels and the story to work in synergy Depending on 416 Chapter 21: Level Design In a historical game such as Gettysburg!, the gameplay is very much tied to a particular story... to do with gameplay and therefore the designer must be intimately involved with their creation Level Separation How a game is broken down into its component levels has a huge impact on the flow of the game Players often play a game a level at a time If a parent announces dinner while a child is playing a game, that child is likely to beg to be allowed to “just finish this level.” In console games, frequently... must occur differs from game to game For a game like Unreal, as with the Doom and Quake series before it, the designers were only instructed to make some cool levels, with little concern for story (since none of these games really had one) or which events should happen before which other events Some thought was put into at what point certain adversaries would first appear in the game, and hence the earlier... “builder” games For these titles, the authorship of the level is almost entirely abdicated to the player This chapter deals primarily with games that use pre-built levels which have a major impact on the gameplay Though sports titles and “builder” games may have levels, their construction is left up to the artists and players respectively, and therefore is not generally of concern to designers For games... for a simpler 2D game As a result, making changes to a Q3A level is significantly more time consuming Before level design begins, the design team should convene and break down the different gameplay components of the game, since each member must completely understand how the gameplay functions Each level designer must understand how Chapter 21: Level Design 413 his level will use that gameplay before... campaign-based strategy game such as StarCraft, the levels or scenarios are defined by maps accompanied by objectives the player must accomplish, such as defend the Terrans against the Protoss forces in this amount of time In a racing game, a level would be one of the tracks available in the game In a sports game, say baseball, the levels would be the different stadiums featured in the game Here the difference... level design is eternal vigilance For different types of games, what a level is expected to accomplish changes significantly Consider action/exploration games such as Super Mario 64, Tomb Raider, or Doom Though the gameplay in these three games is significantly different, the functions the levels serve in each is remarkably similar In all these games, the player customarily plays through the level from . focus of the game. What is this game trying to accomplish? How important are the different aspects of the game? What will the level need to do to support the type of gameplay this game has? In. potential. Chapter 21: Level Design 407 Levels in Different Games The definition of a “level” varies greatly from game to game. It most commonly refers to the game- world of side-scrollers, first-person shooters,. time. In a racing game, a level would be one of the tracks available in the game. In a sports game, say baseball, the levels would be the different stadiums featured in the game. Here the difference