Slay the Dragon. Robert Denton Bryant
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every time.
However, games are not only about the experience created by the rule systems. They’re about the story also. Stories have rules as well. Just think of all the rules associated with opening the lost Ark, or using the Force? Or how someone can awaken from a dream in Inception. Players (and characters) make choices that affect outcomes, and those outcomes affect further choices the player can make. It’s a feedback loop: Rules create consequences. Consequences create feelings. Those feelings affect the player’s next actions, and those actions are again judged by the rules. And so on, tens of thousands of times per play session.
Think about the emotions you feel when you are playing a game and have to GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL. Or when you finally solve the puzzle that’s been thwarting your progress. Or when you find that one hidden item that will complete your quest. Our goal as game writers is to use those feelings to deepen the narrative experience for the player. This is the storytelling alchemy that games can possess—a combination of gameplay and narrative.
We’ll explore story further in the next chapter, but for now, let’s say that a story is a journey of emotion. If that’s true, and we feel it is, then it’s useful to think of a game as a journey of action.
A GAME IS A JOURNEY OF ACTION
What action? Everything: the action the player takes, the resulting action that the game system (or an opposing player) takes, then the resulting subsequent actions that the players take, etc.
Game mechanics are the actions that a player can take in a game. They are the “verbs” of the game. Gameplay designers are always thinking about what the players can do in a level, just as screenwriters are always thinking about what the characters are doing in a scene. What makes sense? What’s challenging? What’s too easy or too boring?
Here’s a brutally incomplete list of some common game mechanics, with some example games. Think about games that you’ve played recently, or your favorites. Which mechanics do you recognize from this list? Which are missing?
Moving
This can cover a lot, like running at a fixed speed (Temple Run, Canabalt) or accelerating and decelerating, often while steering (Pole Position, Project Gotham Racing). You might be jumping (Super Mario Bros.) and ducking (Super Mario Bros. 3) to avoid obstacles or to reach platforms. You can move to pursue or to avoid, fleeing enemies (Pac-Man) or chasing them (powered-up Pac-Man).
Exploring
This might be seeking a hidden switch in a room (Myst, The Room) or a more general exploring of a level or a world to discover its wonders (World of Warcraft). You could be collecting things (Pokémon, Lego Star Wars) or gathering resources (Minecraft). If someone is searching for you, then perhaps you should think about hiding (Metal Gear Solid).
Planning
This is a broad one, as it can include managing (SimCity, Roller Coaster Tycoon), strategizing (Civilization, Rise of Nations), or simply buying and selling (The Sims, franchise mode in Madden). You may be choosing which weapon or power-up to use (Angry Birds, Mario Kart), arranging gems or other things (Bejeweled, Puzzle Quest), or allocating cards in your deck or points to your character (Magic: The Gathering or Mass Effect).
Fighting
This can include attacking and defending in individual hand-to-hand combat (Street Fighter, Tekken), on the squad level (Final Fantasy Tactics) or as a clash of armies (StarCraft, the Total War series). Although some games feature intimate stabbing, both more secretive (Assassin’s Creed) and less (Chivalry: Medieval Warfare), by far the most popular form of combat in video games is shooting. Whether the shooting is done from a side view (R-Type), a top-down view (Asteroids), an over-the shoulder view (Gears of War), or a first-person view (Quake, Unreal, Halo and so many others), players love to point at a target, press a button, and let the simulated physics fall where they may.
Timing
This is another broad one, as it can include volleying the ball in Pong or Breakout, matching your steps or strums to the beats in Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero, or swinging your club in Hot Shots Golf.
We warned you this list is brutally short. What have we missed? We’ll dig deeper into this in Chapter 07: Game Design Basics for Writers.
Remember that many games, and very many story games, tend to combine several mechanics, either simultaneously or in phases. In the Grand Theft Auto games you race sometimes, you shoot sometimes, and sometimes you shoot while racing. In Sid Meier’s Pirates! you sword fight, sail, and trade, amongst other piratey activities.
Understanding a game’s mechanics is crucial to where it is placed, both on the retail shelf and in the minds of game players, because historically, that’s how we think of game genres.
GAME GENRE VS. STORY GENRE
Stories are journeys of emotion. We tend to group movies and television—along with novels and plays—by the emotions they evoke (comedy, horror, romance, etc.).
Games are journeys of action, however. We tend to group games by their core mechanics (racing, shooting, role-playing, etc.). Players who enjoy a certain mechanic tend to look for other games with the same mechanics they enjoy, just as people who enjoy mystery novels look for more mysteries to read. That’s why retailers often put Halo and Call of Duty on the same shelf. Even though one is a space opera and the other is an urban combat simulator, they share the same core mechanic: point-and-click shooting. But just because we group games by their mechanics doesn’t mean that story isn’t important to our enjoyment of games. The story should complement the mechanics of the genre and vice versa. It all comes together during the development and production of the game. With that in mind, we want to touch on how video games are actually made.
HOW DO THEY MAKE GAMES? WHO’S THE DIRECTOR?
Movies have directors. They’re the ultimate boss on a film set; they are responsible for managing all the creative and technical departments so that the hundreds of people who work on the film are executing toward bringing the director’s coherent creative vision to the movie.
The movie-making process developed in Europe and America over a century ago, and its customs and practices—its industry culture—is very deeply rooted. It would be hard to imagine a film without a director, and we have a long tradition of genius-level auteurs (Welles, Hitchcock, Bergman, Fellini, Kubrick, …).
Games do not have directors, per se. They sometimes have creative directors, or design directors, or occasionally you’ll see a “directed by” or “game director” credit on large projects or some Japanese games, but the term is rare. There may be a person (say, the “Director of Game Design”) who owns the creative vision of the game, but he is always working with the producer (responsible for the schedule and budget) and the technical director (or lead programmer, responsible for the coding), as well as the other department heads (art, audio, marketing, live team, testing, community managers, etc.) to balance their creative vision against the other resources (Time! Money!) that are running short on the project.
The process of making computer games emerged four decades ago in Japan, America, and Europe, and each region’s game development culture is a little different. In America, the game development process still often reflects the well-established process of “grown-up” software development—banking, medicine, aviation—that arose in the 1960s and ’70s. There, the clients (represented by