Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
is always visible on the screen. It attempts to reach one of the doors—the wraparound doors
on the left and right side of the screen—and exit the maze. Now the players, after fending off
a huge mob of aggressive monsters, have the opportunity to be hunters. The Worluk can kill a
worrior on contact, but it doesn't pursue him—it just tries to reach an exit door quickly.
There are two exit doors. The Worluk moves much too fast for a single worrior to pursue it.
Hunting the Worluk requires teamwork. The reward for catching the Worluk, in fact, benefits
both players; it causes all points to be doubled for both players in the next maze. The players
outnumber their enemy for the first time and are given an incentive to work together.
Shooting the Worluk sometimes incites the Wizard himself—who spends most of the game
taunting the players vocally, unseen—to appear in the maze and attempt to kill a worrior as
punishment. Successfully shooting the Wizard is a difficult task, but it's one of the greatest
moments of role reversal in the game.
The pace of
Wizard of Wor
is defined by the contrast between these long scenes of the players
defending themselves against many enemies and these fast quick ones where they have the
opportunity to strike back and be empowered, possibly to humiliate their antagonist. Were
it not for these moments—if there was no Wizard or Worluk, only endless mazes and mon-
sters—the game would have no changes in pacing; the space of possibilities would remain the
same throughout. It would be a single, unbroken scene, essentially. The inversions that happen
in the Worluk scenes not only give a narrative shape to each
maze—they mark the end of a
scene and the release of the tension that has been building in that scene—but give the game a
more dynamic shape (see Figure
). Be slowly hunted for a villain's amusement, have a brief,
frantic opportunity to strike back at that villain. We talk more about reasons to give the player a
“change of pace,” to switch things up in the shape of the game and thus the space of possibili-
ties, in Chapter 4.
3.24
Figure 3.24
Timeline of a single maze in
Wizard of Wor
, with the Worluk battle in the rightmost frame.
Since we're working with computers, it's easy to incorporate
chance
into many different areas of
design. It's hard for a computer to produce a truly random number, but it's capable of generat-
ing what are practically random numbers of any size on the fly. A game creator can use these to
many different ends.
