Through the Lens: Video Games - Game Design Theory - page 113

Items and Other Features
he Twisted Metal series of games are not racers, exactly, but these games
offer a lot of examples for using asymmetrical forces and special power-
ups to turn racing contests into games. Carmageddon , which was known
for its graphic violence, was actually quite experimental in a lot of ways.
Not only were there special power-up items and stuns that you could
perform for bonus points, but there was also a terrifying, invincible, AI-
controlled “police truck� (something of a monster truck combined with a
construction vehicle) that would hunt the racers down. Adding this kind
of a side threat to a game otherwise focused on racing created some very
interesting situations that forced players to make tough decisions.
Much Shorter Courses
I recommend that game designers try making racing games with tiny
tracks. In general you should start as small as possible with anything
you design, and then move up in size only as needed. A small racecourse
means that players will be interacting with each other more frequently,
even if one player is much better than the other.
You Can't Fix the Skill Deficit Problem…
This harkens back to our discussion about difficulty in Chapter 3 . A mul-
tiplayer game often must address the problem of skill deficits—if one
player is significantly better than another, the thinking goes, it just won't
be fun for either player. If the skill deficit is actually so large that one
player has no chance of winning and the other has no chance of losing
(outside of throwing the match), then in a way it's not a contest, and
therefore not a game.
The problem of skill deficits tends to be a big one in racing games,
which depend on high levels of both skill and memorization. I'm sure
that most of you have had something like this happen: you buy a cool
new racing game, and start playing it. You play it and play it, beating
various single-player challenges, and so on. So you tell your friend, “I'm
really excited about this new racing game I got. You should come over
and play it with me!� And your friend does! But only minutes after your
first game, you realize that even though this game is great, playing it
with your friend is not great for either of you. You don't see each other or
interact with each other in any way—you may as well be doing a single-
player time trial.
Developers have realized this for a long time, and their solutions
boil down to two things. One is to add items to the game. Items didn't
start with so-called kart racers—they had been around in games such as