Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Most video games present their game world with pictures and sound: art, anima-
tion, music, and audio effects. Not all game worlds have a visible or audible
component, however. In a text adventure, the player creates the images and sounds
of the world in his imagination when he reads the text on the screen. Designing
such a world is a matter of using your literary skills to describe it in words.
Game worlds are much more than the sum of the pictures and sounds that portray
them. A game world can have a culture, an aesthetic, a set of moral values, and
other dimensions that you'll look at in this chapter. The game world also has a rela-
tionship to reality, whether it is highly abstract, with little connection to the world
of everyday things, or highly representational, attempting to be as similar to the
real world as possible.
Games entertain by several means: gameplay, novelty, social interaction (if it is a
multiplayer game), and so on. In a game such as chess, almost all the entertain-
ment value is in the gameplay; few people think of it as a game about medieval
warfare. In an adventure game such as
Escape from Monkey Island
, the world is
essential to the fantasy. Without the world,
Escape from Monkey Island
would not
exist, and if it had a different world, it would be a different game. One of the pur-
poses of a game world is simply to entertain in its own right: to offer the player a
place to explore and an environment to interact with.
As a general rule, the more that a player understands a game's core mechanics, the
less the game world matters. Mastering the core mechanics requires a kind of
abstract thought, and fantasy can be a distraction. Serious chess players don't think
of the pieces as representing actual kings and queens and knights. When players
become highly skilled at a game such as
Counter-Strike
, they no longer think that
they're pretending to be soldiers or terrorists; they think only about hiding, mov-
ing, shooting, ambushing, obtaining ammunition, and so on. However, this kind
of abstract play, ignoring a game's world, usually occurs only among experienced
players. To someone who's playing a game for the first time, the world is vital to
creating and sustaining her interest.
The other purpose of a game's world is to sell the game in the first place. It's not the
game's mechanics that make a customer pick up a box in a store but the fantasy it
offers: who she'll be, where she'll be, and what she'll be doing there if she plays
that game.
Many different properties define a game's world. Some, such as the size of the
world, are quantitative and can be given numerical values. Others, such as the
world's mood, are qualitative and can only be described with words. Certain
