VERBS AND OBJECTS - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 36

We wanted to ensure that even nonintelligent objects in the game react to the player's bombs.
Wild radium—radium that the player can collect to increase her stock of bombs—will itself
ignite and explode if touched by one of the player's explosions. Sometimes the player will want
to set off a chain reaction; other times the player will want to be careful to dig out wild radium
without setting it off. The crystals the player is trying to collect will crack and shatter after being
hit by explosions. The first explosion causes the crystal to crack. This usually happens while
using a bomb to unearth the crystal and is a warning not to do it again. The second explosion
shatters the crystal. Your explosions have consequences.
All these things reinforce the player's primary verb: her ability to cause explosions and to dig
through the ground with those explosions. And we've tried to design objects that allow us to
develop that verb in interesting ways: like giving a player the opportunity to rely on an enemy
to dig a path for her rather than spending a bomb, for example. We've tried to avoid objects
that would be cul-de-sacs—that would have a single use and then fail to develop and provide
meaningful choices after that.
Review
■ Games are made of rules. Verbs—“jump,” “climb,” “shoot,” “place a piece,” “rotate a block”—
are the rules that give the player liberty to interact with the other rules of the game.
■ We can use verbs to set up choices for the player. Often, to make for interesting choices,
we want to give the player several verbs—“move horizontally” and “shoot vertically,” for
example. We want these verbs to have a relationship to each other.
■ We want to be careful about choosing verbs and relationships that we can develop. If we
add too many verbs, not only will the player's understanding of the game be less focused,
but many of those verbs are likely to be left underdeveloped.
■ We “develop” a verb the same way we develop a character in a story. We give them more re-
sponsibilities, we ask them to perform together more closely, we give them difficult choices
to make.
■ Verbs have objects—things they act upon—to reinforce them, develop them, and give
them choices. As with the verbs themselves, we want to avoid introducing objects that will
be underdeveloped, and we want to design objects with relationships to each other.
■ We want objects to have relationships with the player's important verbs. Verbs are what the
player uses to gain information about the other rules of the game, so whenever the player
uses a verb in a way that she expects a reaction from, she should get one. We want our
verbs to be robust.
■ Every rule has a context that helps the player relate to it, to understand it. This context
can be reinforced by the way the game looks and sounds: something that can hurt the
protagonist is covered in spikes, something that we want to direct the player toward is
valuable-looking.