Creative and Expressive Play - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 120

In multiplayer video games, cosmetic attributes can play a more important role
because other players rely on visual appearances to make decisions. A few years ago,
some bright player in a first-person shooter game got the idea to design an avatar
that looked exactly like a crate. The other players assumed that they were looking
at an actual crate, so they ignored it and then were surprised when they were shot
by someone in a room that apparently contained only a crate. In online role-play-
ing games, players also use cosmetic attributes to identify themselves as members
of a particular clan or group.
Cosmetic attributes make a game more fun at a low implementation cost. Because
they don't affect the gameplay, they don't have to be tested and balanced as thor-
oughly as a functional attribute. Just be sure that your cosmetic attributes really are
cosmetic. Avatar body size may sound like a cosmetic attribute, but if you later
decide to take it into account when performing combat calculations (bigger people
make bigger targets, for instance), then size becomes a functional attribute after all.
Ty pical cosmetic attr ibutes for human characters include headgear, clothing, shoes,
jewelry, hair color, eye color, skin color, and body type or size. Players typically cus-
tomize paint color and decals or insignia of vehicles.
Creative Play
Many games offer the player the chance to design or build something. In the
Caesar series, it's a Roman city; in Spore , it's a creature. People enjoy designing and
building things, and this kind of play is the main point of construction and man-
agement simulations.
If you offer creative play, you should allow players to save their creations at any
time and reload them to continue working on them. You should also let players
print their creations out, take screenshots, copy them to other players' machines,
and upload them to web sites. Sharing creations contributes to the fun.
Computerized creative play falls into two categories, constrained creative play and
freeform creative play . A computerized game necessarily restricts creative play to
whatever domain the game supports—painting, composing music, animation, and
so on. In freeform creative play, few or no rules limit what the player can do within
the confines of the game world, although play remains constrained by the domain,
the set of actions that the user interface offers, and the machine's physical
limitations.
Constrained Creative Play
If the player may only create within artificial constraints imposed by the rules, her
activity is called constrained creative play . Constraining creativity may sound unde-
sirable, but it really just provides a structure for the player's creativity. This type of
gameplay grows out of some familiar ideas: the expressive power offered by