Game Worlds - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 105

INFLUENCING THE PLAYER'S FEELINGS
Games are intrinsically good at evoking feelings related to the player's efforts to
achieve something. They can create “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,”
as the old ABC Wide World of Sports introduction used to say. Use the elements of
risk and reward—a price for failure and a prize for success—to further heighten
these emotions. Games can also produce frustration as a by-product of their chal-
lenges, but this isn't a good thing; some players tolerate frustration poorly and stop
playing if it gets too high. To reduce frustration, build games with player-settable
difficulty levels and make sure the easy level is genuinely easy. Excitement and
anticipation, too, play large roles in many games. If you can devise a close contest
or a series of stimulating challenges, you will generate these kinds of emotions.
Construction and management simulations, whose challenges are usually financial,
arouse the player's feelings of ambition, greed, and desire for power or control.
They also offer the emotional rewards of creative play. Give the player a way to
amass a fortune, then let her spend it to build things of her own design. The
SimCity and various Tycoon games ( RollerCoaster Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon, and so on),
do this well. Artificial life games and god games such as Spore or The Sims let the
player control the lives of autonomous people and creatures for better or worse, sat-
isfying a desire to be omnipotent over a world of beings subject to the player's will.
(This may not be a very admirable fantasy, but it's one that a lot of people enjoy
having fulfilled.)
To create suspense, sur prise, and fear, use the time-honored techniques of horror
films: darkness, sudden noises, disgusting imagery, and things that jump out at the
player unexpectedly. Don't overdo it, however. A gore-fest becomes tedious after a
while, and Alfred Hitchcock demonstrated that the shock is all the greater when it
occurs infrequently. For suspense to work well, the player needs to feel vulnerable
and unprepared. Don't arm him too heavily; the world's a lot less scary when you're
carrying a rocket launcher around. Survival horror is a popular subgenre of action
game, as seen in the Silent Hill and Resident Evil series, that uses these approaches.
Another class of emotions is produced by interactions between characters and the
player's identification with one of them. Love, grief, shame, jealousy, and outrage
are all emotions that can result from such interactions. (See Figure 4.13 for a
famous example.) To evoke them, you'll have to use storytelling techniques, creat-
ing characters that the player cares about and believes in and credible relationships
between them. Once you get the player to identify with someone, threaten that
character or place obstacles in his path in a way that holds the player's interest.
This is the essence of dramatic tension, whether you're watching Greek tragedy or
reading Harry Potter. Something important must be at stake. The problem need not
necessarily be physical danger; it can also be a social, emotional, or economic risk.
The young women in Jane Austen's novels were not in imminent peril of death or
starvation, but it was essential to their family's social standing and financial future
for them to make good marriages. The conflict between their personal desires and
their family obligations provides the tension in the novels.