Creative and Expressive Play - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 117

and make new choices available as the player's performance improves. You can let
the player purchase a new car with winnings earned in previous races, for example.
The right to choose a new and more powerful avatar serves as a reward to some players.
■ Avatar customization allows the player to modify the appearance or abilities of
his avatar by selecting interchangeable features. In role-playing games, this often
takes the form of giving the avatar new skills, clothing, weapons, and armor. In
driving games, the customizable features may include the paint color of the car and
its engine, transmission, tires, and brakes. Customization can occur both at the
beginning of the game and through upgrades awarded or purchased as the game
goes on. In this way, a player creates a unique character of his own design.
■ Avatar construction gives the player the greatest freedom of all; he can con-
struct his avatar from the ground up, choosing every detail from a set of available
options. Usually offered in role-playing games, avatar construction allows the
player to choose such features as the sex, body type, skin color, and clothing of the
avatar, as well as the avatar's strength, intelligence, dexterity, and other functional
qualities. The online RPG Lord of the Rings Online offers a particularly extensive ava-
tar construction feature, as does the single-player RPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
for the PC.
Understanding Attributes
The qualities that a player modifies when constructing or customizing an avatar are
called attributes . Chapter 10, “Core Mechanics,” discusses attributes in more detail,
but for now, it's enough to know that an attribute is any quality that helps to
describe something else. Hair color is an attribute of a person. Maximum airspeed is
an attribute of an aircraft. The computer can represent an attribute as a numeric
value (such as maximum airspeed) or a symbolic value (such as hair color). All
attributes in a video game must be characterized in one of these two ways. Even if
you create an attribute intended to describe something that we normally think of
as unquantifiable, like smell , ultimately it will come down to either a numeric or a
symbolic value.
You can divide attributes in a game into those that affect the gameplay, which are
called functional attributes , and those that don't affect the gameplay, which are
called cosmetic attributes . (Some designers prefer the term aesthetic attributes , but the
meaning is the same.) The next two sections examine these types more closely.
FUNCTIONAL ATTRIBUTES
Functional attributes influence the gameplay through interactions with the core
mechanics. Functional attributes can be further divided into characterization attri-
butes , which define fundamental aspects of a character and change slowly or not at
all, and status attributes , which give the current status of the character and may
change frequently. For example, maximum airspeed is a characterization attribute