SCENES - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 71

Review

■ A scene is the most basic unit of pacing in any given game. What constitutes a scene
might be different in every game.

■ The responsibilities of a scene are to introduce and develop rules of the game. Objects
are the building blocks of our scenes, what we use to create choices.

■ It's important to introduce rules clearly so that the player understands what they mean
and represent when she encounters them in successive scenes.

■ We should use the rules we've established—verbs, objects, their relationships—to cre-
ate choices for the player. Otherwise, we're creating choices that have no relationship
to the game.

■ Scenes are often made of many tiny choices, exclusive to each player's individual
performance of a scene. That's why it's often useful to think and design in terms of the
overall shape of a scene.

■ Each scene should have a purpose that we can identify: to develop a specific rule or to
present a specific idea. Design means using the rules the player already understands to
communicate that idea.

■ Layering—including different rules that work well together in a scene, like making the
player track two different kinds of movement simultaneously—can create stronger,
more effective scenes.

■ Moments of inversion or climax give a scene a more dynamic shape and can draw
attention to different aspects of the player's verbs.

■ Chance is useful for focusing the game on the interactions between rules rather than
how they're presented. Using randomized patterns for scene layouts, for example, is at
its most useful when it's the interactions between many rules that are important, not
the encounters that can be staged with them.

■ Chance allows us to break stagnation by interfering with the player's ability to predict
the game and to break symmetry by forcing competing players to play differently.

■ Designing a scene often involves several drafts. Between drafts, play, identify problems,
and make changes to solve those problems.

Discussion Activities

Choose a game—the game your group used for the previous chapter's discussion, if
possible. Give yourself 10 minutes to play. If you're in a group, only one person should
play at a time. When the 10 minutes are up, finish the scene the player is currently on.
The group can decide what constitutes the end of the scene. Discuss that last scene.

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