SCENES - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 62

Chance's usefulness in scene design is to shift the focus of the play onto the rules themselves,
not on how they're encountered. Randomness works best when the player is engaged with a
complicated network of rules; it can be used to provide myriad combinations of those rules and
objects. Randomness isn't a shortcut to design. Its function has much less effect when dealing
with more succinct rule sets. Chance is best used for combinatorial ends.
Take the game Crosstown (2009), an Xbox Indie Game that's a descendant of Wizard of Wor . The
players—up to four—explore a maze filled with creatures, attempting to collect four power
objects. There are more than 15 creatures in the game's cast, which all interact with the players
and with each other in different ways. One builds walls, one destroys them, one only attacks
other monsters (not players), one seeks out and defends the objects the players are seeking.
The interactions between these creatures are the center of the play. The layouts of each maze
are important only in that they force the creatures—and the four players—to interact. As a
result, each maze is a simple, randomly drawn pattern, with left-right symmetry and lots of
branching paths (see Figure 3.25), that allows for lots of interaction but also for individual
encounters to be isolated to different hallways.
I played an early version of Crosstown in which the mazes were much bigger. The creatures and
the players didn't interact as much because of the larger space. When the author made the
mazes smaller, the game started to really come together—characters interacted much more
often.
Crosstown doesn't have much to gain from designed mazes. Wizard of Wor , which has a smaller
cast of characters that don't interact with each other, only the player, uses designed mazes.
Some of those mazes are in fact moments of inversion: the arena scene, which features a large
open, wall-less area in the center, and the pit, which is entirely wall-less. Because walls are so
important for cover, these scenes represent major upsets for the player.
But chance doesn't have to be all or nothing. Consider the Worluk in Wizard of Wor . When it
appears in the maze at the end of a scene, it does so at a randomly chosen position (see
F i g u r e 3 . 2 6 ) .
What would happen if the Worluk appeared at the same position every game? The players
could anticipate its appearance and be ready for it each time, defusing its potency as a situation
that requires the players to collaborate.
So chance has the capacity to break stagnation in a game. The monsters in Wor appear in
different locations every time, ensuring players can't simply memorize each scene. This shifts
the focus from learning the scenes to dealing with the monsters. The Wizard himself, when he
appears, teleports to random positions, making him less like a foe that can be outfoxed than
a force of nature to be endured. The rules of interacting with monsters, with staying alive,
become more important, not the particulars of any one encounter.