Games and Video Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 23

overbuild. They didn't pile on a lot of gratuitous features just so they could boast about
them. And they resisted the temptation to employ inappropriate emotional effects.
Effects like shock violence, bad language, inside humor.

You know, the suspension of disbelief is f ragile. It's hard to achie ve it and hard to maintain.
One bit of unnecessary gore, one hip colloquialism, one reference to anything outside
the imaginary world you've created is enough to destroy that world. These cheap effects
are the most common indicators of a lack of vision or confidence. People who put this
stuff into their games are not working hard enough.

Harmony is an essential quality of a game's aesthetic appeal. With every design
decision you make, you should ask yourself whether the result is in harmony with
your overall vision. Too many games have elements that seem bolted on, last-min-
ute ideas that somebody thought would be cool to include. Although every game
design requires compromises, an important part of your job as a designer is to min-
imize the false notes or off-key elements that compromises tend to create.

DESIGN RULE Strive for Harmony

A good game is a harmonious game. Try to find a way to make every aspect of your game
fit together into a coherent, integrated whole.

Storytelling
Many games incorporate some kind of story as part of the entertainment. In con-
ventional games, players can find it difficult to become immersed in a story because
the players must also implement the rules. Stopping to implement the rules inter-
rupts the players' sense of being in another place or being actors in a plot. Video
games can mix storylike entertainment and gamelike entertainment almost seam-
lessly. To some extent, they can make players feel as if they are inside a story, affecting
its flow of events. This has enormous implications for game design and is one of the
reasons that video games are more than simply a new kind of game; they are a
completely new medium. Many video games—even those that involve the most fre-
netic action—now include elements of storytelling. Chapter 7, “Storytelling and
Narrative,” will discuss this concept in detail.

NOTE Storytelling
enables video games to
entertain the player in
ways that conventional
games cannot and
permits the creation
of a new, hybrid form
of entertainment: the
interactive story.

In fact, storytelling is so powerful as an entertainment device that one genre of
video game—the adventure game—is starting to move away from the formal con-
cept of a game entirely. Although we still call them games , adventure games are in
fact a new hybrid form of interactive entertainment—the interactive story. Chapter
19, “Adventure Games,” discusses this and other aspects of adventure games in
more detail. As time goes on, we can expect to see more new kinds of game/story/
play experiences emerge that defy conventional descriptions. Video games aren't
just games any more.