SCENES - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 40

Rules in Scenes
In the previous chapter, we introduced the main characters in our story: the player's verbs,
which are the rules that allow the player to interact with the game. In this chapter, we're going
to talk about the ways we develop them. Our verbs and objects—the two elements of our
game that comprise our system of rules—are the actors in the story. These actors perform
in scenes .
Depending on the game, the speaker, and the position of the stars, we might call scenes levels,
stages, rounds, waves, boards, missions, or screens. They're not necessarily equivalent in time,
content, or presentation, though. A scene is the most basic unit of pacing in a game.
Every game might use completely different sizes and shapes for scenes. In fact, some games
might have only a single scene. That's fine—it just means there isn't going to be a lot of
designed character development. Character development might be the development of the
player's understanding of the rules and how they interact. Consider the most basic games of
the 1970s, such as Breakout and Pong . In both these games, the player moves a paddle back and
forth to intercept a ball and send it back to the other side of the screen, toward another player's
paddle (in Pong ) or a wall of bricks that can be broken (in Breakout ). These games work just fine
with only one scene, and the verb—moving the paddle to hit or miss the ball—is developed as
the player practices and comes to understand the ball's trajectory.
Often, a game can be broken into scenes that are even smaller than its own self-demarcation, if
we accept that a scene is the most basic unit of pacing. Super Mario Bros. has a world 1-1, a world
1-2, and a world 2-2. Within world 1-1, we can identify and talk about a number of different
scenes: the part with the monsters and pipes, the part where Mario climbs the stairs and jumps
over the pit, the part where he jumps and tries to grab the flagpole. In each of these parts, a
different kind of development is going on, so it's useful to consider each one a scene of its own.
A scene is a more atomic, fundamental unit of gameplay than a level, or a world, or a region in a
game world.
How can scenes develop a verb? Let's visualize, in our enormous brains, a game whose protago-
nist is from the future, wild though the concept may be. In the future, every citizen is equipped
with a personal teleporter. Just think about going to a place, and you're there. Naturally, in this
golden age of laziness, human legs have atrophied to the point that they more closely resemble
the rockers on a rocking chair in appearance and function.
The player's verb is “teleport,” and the physical layer is the mouse. Click somewhere, BING! The
protagonist is there (see Figure 3.1). It's a simple game.