Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
chapters in this topic are about that. This chapter is about establishing a basic vocabulary with
which to understand and discuss rules and how they function in a game—a grammar.
Writing this topic, I'm using an established grammar to structure the words and sentences
you're reading—hopefully to the end of communicating my ideas as clearly as possible. Writing
is a creative work, though, so sometimes I ignore certain rules or conventions when I think it
means the results will be more expressive. So let that be a caveat: none of the “rules” I'm going
to discuss are law, are immutable. The purpose of this text isn't to constrain your design but to
suggest ways to start thinking and talking about it.
Games are made of rules. We're going to think of rules as the characters in our games that are
going to be developed over the course of the game. When we talk about story, that's what
we're talking about: the development, conflict, climax, and resolution of the rules. Rules are
characters. Got it?
Who then are the most important characters—the main characters? You might be tempted to
say the protagonist, the hero, the gladiators in
Joust
. The nouns, right? Because in linear stories,
we're used to nouns—people—being the ones who develop. But the protagonists of our
games, the nouns, aren't rules.
Verbs
are a kind of rule; they're the most important rules of a game. By a “verb,” I'm referring
to any rule that gives the player liberty to act within the rules of the game. Any rule that lets
the player change the game state. Any rule that lets the player
do something
. Verbs are the
rules that allow the player to interact with the other rules in the game: “jump,” “shoot,” “fall,” or
“flap” in the case of
Joust
. Without verbs we have a simulation, not a collaborative story-telling
system.
Is it hard to think about verbs as main characters in a story? It's easy to think of the hero as the
main character, because verbs characterize the hero. Maybe climbing the sloping foothills at
the beginning of the game is easy, but climbing the precarious precipices near the end is much
harder. And maybe that suggests both that the hero's journey (not to be confused with the
story structure my Guildhall teacher insisted we base every one of our games on) is getting
more arduous as she approaches her goal and that the hero is being tested and becoming
stronger to meet these challenges.
But we can't design the player or her behavior. We design the rules that shape her experience,
her choices, her performance. Rules are how we communicate. Verbs are the rules that allow
her to communicate back. The game is a dialogue between game and player, and the rules we
design are the vocabulary with which this conversation takes place.
When a game's creator relies exclusively on animated cutscenes or text dumps to tell a story—
when she
only
uses noninteractive means of telling a story in an interactive game—it's because
she has misunderstood how to think of the story in terms of how the player is allowed to actu-
ally act within it.
