Creative and Expressive Play - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 124

whatever he wants but usually doesn't offer the same rewards as the constrained
mode—and may not offer any rewards at all. In this mode, the game resembles a
tool more than a conventional video game.
The first RollerCoaster Tycoon game did not include a sandbox mode, and reviews of
the game cited it as a deficiency. The developers added a sandbox mode to the later
editions. Generally speaking, if you are making a game that offers creative play,
you should include a sandbox mode if you can. Players enjoy them, and because
sandbox modes don't interact much (if at all) with the game's core mechanics, they
are fairly easy to tune.
Two par tic ularly interesting, though ver y early, for ms of f reefor m creative play
appeared in Pinball Construction Set and Adventure Construction Set . These games
allowed the player to construct games that he or someone else could play. Much of
the fun came from trying out the resulting game to see how it played and making
refinements—in effect, they permitted game development (within quite restricted
domains) without all the work of full-scale development.
Storytelling Play
Some players enjoy creating stories of their own, using features provided by a game,
which they can then distribute online for others to read. The Movies , by Lionhead
Software, stands as the most ambitious project of this kind to date. The purpose of
the game is to let people make their own movies and share them online. Stunt
Island , from Disney Interactive, also enables people to film their own movies, but it
concentrates on stunts involving vehicles rather than actors. More important, The
Movies , unlike Stunt Island , allows players to export movies so they can edit their
films using external tools such as Adobe Premiere Pro. The movies in Stunt Island
can be viewed only within the game itself and can not be exported because the
game does not actually capture the images but simply re-creates the scene using
the game engine for each viewing.
The Movies offers more expressive power than any other storytelling game yet
made, but it does require a lot of effort from the players. If you want to make a
game with similar features, you will have to work with the programmers to design
a system that allows players to set up cameras in the game world, record the images
and sounds generated by the game engine, and edit them.
However, you don't have to go that far. The Sims proved to be a huge success with a
much simpler storytelling mechanism: Players can create characters and construct
houses for them to live in and then initiate events by giving commands to the
characters. The Sims also lets players capture screen shots from the game, put cap-
tions under them, organize them into storyboards, and upload them to a web site
for others to see. Telling stories this way requires much less complex software than
The Movies uses, and the players don't have to know how to edit video.