Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
As a beginning designer making
Lode Runner
levels, I had a naive idea of difficulty:
harder is
better
, and the ultimate challenge of playing any game is to
master the hardest challenges
. It's an
upward narrative of progress and increasing conflict, the same kind of story we find in many
heroic narratives of literature or film. At the peak of difficulty, there's an epic battle. On one side,
there's the player, with everything she's learned. On the other side, there's the game's system
at its utmost, wielding a climactic scene that the designer of the game has made to “throw the
kitchen sink” of possible challenges at the player.
Difficulty can be compelling and dramatic: the player starts off easy, learns and deepens her
understanding of the game's possibilities, and climbs through increasing challenges to master
the system. Overcoming difficulty is deeply appealing to us as human beings for good reason: it
can give us confidence in our own ability to learn and even master difficult aspects of our lives.
In earlier chapters, we looked at how verbs can develop in relation to objects and other verbs.
These elements of vocabulary are the building blocks of a conversation that players have with
games we create, a conversation that we enable and shape by developing the game's vocabu-
lary. In this chapter, we discuss how ideas about pacing and development can be applied to the
entire experience of a game, from the start through the middle and toward the end—assuming
the game even has an end!
When we think about games as a conversation, we can discover many potential ways of looking
at games. After all, not every conversation needs to be about challenging the participants, even
if many important conversations
are
challenging. In a conversation, challenge can mix with
pauses for reflection, times when we listen quietly, and statements of support and reassur-
ance. Conversations are about
push and pull
: one person says something, and the other person
listens and responds. At times we challenge each other, and at other times we allow another's
thoughts to explore and develop. A good conversation isn't necessarily led by one person
either; some or all the participants have ways to voice their own input about the pace and goals
of the conversation.
We can find ways to do all these things with games as well, in the unique ways that conversing
through a system can create. As the creators of a game, we can shape the ways that the player
can push and pull through the game's system. Verbs are a great example of how a player can
take an action and push into a game. We can share decisions with the player about how the
push and pull of its conversation evolves—even the purpose of the conversation.
Resistance
is another way of thinking about the push and pull of games. When a player uses
the verbs at her disposal, she pushes against the game to see what will happen, and the game
responds. As discussed in Chapter 3, “Scenes,” when the player of
To mb ed
uses the “dig”
verb against a metal section of floor, causing Danger Jane to hit it with her shovel, the game
