Game Worlds - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 104

graphic scrap from anywhere that you find it. Try old copies of National Geographic .
Visit museums of art, design, and natural history if you can get to them; one of the
greatest resources of all is travel, if you can afford it. A good game designer is always
on the lookout for new ideas, even when he's ostensibly on vacation.
It's tempting to borrow from our closest visual neighbor, the movies, because
the moviemakers have already done the visual design work for us. Blade Runner
introduced the decaying urban future; Alien gave us disgustingly biological aliens
rather than little green men. The problem with these looks is that they've already
been borrowed many, many times. You can use them as a quick-and-dirty backdrop
if you don't want to put much effort into developing your world, and players will
instantly recognize the world and know what the game is about. But to stand out
from the crowd, consider other genres. Film noir, the Marx Brothers, John Wayne
westerns, war movies from the World War II era, costume dramas of all periods—
from the silliness of One Million Years B.C. to the Regency elegance of Pride and
Prejudice , they're all grist for the mill.
Telev ision goes through its ow n distinct phases, and because it's even more
fashion-driven than the movies, it is ripe for parody. The comedies of the 1950s
and 1960s and the nighttime soaps of the 1970s and 1980s all had characteristic
looks that seem laughable today but that are immediately familiar to most adult
Americans. This is not without risk; if you make explicit references to American
popular culture, non-Americans and children might not get the references. If your
gameplay is good enough, though, it shouldn't matter.
The Emotional Dimension
The emotional dimension of a game world defines not only the emotions of the
people in the world but, more important, the emotions that you, as a designer,
hope to arouse in the player. Multiplayer games evoke the widest variety of emo-
tions, because the players are socializing with real people and making friends (and,
alas, enemies) as they play. Single-player games have to influence players' emotions
with storytelling and gameplay. Action and strategy games are usually limited to a
narrow emotional dimension, but other games that rely more heavily on story and
characters can offer rich emotional content that deeply affects the player.
The idea of manipulating the player's emotions might seem a little strange. For
much of their history, games have been seen only as light entertainment, a means
to while away a few hours in a fantasy world. But just because that's all they have
been doesn't mean that's all they can be. In terms of the richness of their emotional
content, games are now just about where the movies were when they moved from
the nickelodeon to the screen. Greater emotional variety enables us to reach new
players who value it.