Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
opportunities. In this case, analyzing the use of the ideograph enables a
complex focus on the ideological beliefs underpinning sports, television
consumption, masculinity, and poker.
Ideographs mobilize a larger cultural belief or concept to shape the ways
in which the audience conceives of a subject area. From enabling a political
defense or rallying a revolution to redefi ning an old game into a form of
televised entertainment, a focus on ideographs facilitates a better under-
standing of the underlying values of both author and audience. These small
pieces are instructive for better understanding how balance shapes design
and play, particularly in online or competitive settings. By deploying bal-
ance as a standard, a goal, an ideograph, designers and gamers indicate
their ideological assumptions about how video games should operate.
BALANCE AND GAME DESIGN
One of the key principles of video games is that they are overtly designed,
constructed worlds. Although there are certainly elements of emergent play
and games are entering larger popular culture in powerful ways, most of
the video games we play are subject to explicit rules that were set forth
by a (team of) designer(s) and executed by a computer. The dynamics of
this relationship are magnifi ed when analyzing competitive multiplayer
games, particularly those found online. There is no technical requirement
for balance; a design team could quite readily assemble a very unbalanced
game. However, the focus on balance, in conjunction with the fact that
game worlds are deliberately constructed is at the core of why balance is
an important ideograph. Understanding the role of the ideograph begins by
analyzing how designers build balance into their games and then looking at
players' perceptions with regard to balance.
Perhaps the best starting point for the analysis of the role of balance in
online games is to look back to the original online game, Roy Trubshaw
and Richard Bartle's
MUD
. In designing the world, Trubshaw and Bartle
made a number of choices that still shape the worlds designed decades
after
MUD
. A pivotal choice was the inclusion of a leveling system, which
they designed as a means to escape the class system seen in the real world.
Bartle states that within
MUD
, “there was nothing stopping you from
going up a level because you were a girl, or because you were slightly
socially inept, or because you are from the North of England. It was a
of whether or not there were barriers for some people in the game or are
barriers in contemporary games, this quote is quite interesting. Bartle
portrays
MUD
as a world dif erent from a life on Earth that is typically
described as unequal. Instead of a world where one's status is dictated
by many factors beyond their control, the computer literate could fi nd a
