You cannot make a game that appeals to everyone by throwing in a hodgepodge of features because group A likes some of them and group B likes others. If you do, you will produce a game that has too many features and no harmony. For instance, you can’t make a game that appeals to action fans, to strategy fans, and to fans of management simulations by combining kung fu, chess, and Monopoly—the result would be a mess that appeals to none of them. On the other hand, you can include a storyline in a fighting game so long as the storyline doesn’t interfere with the gameplay. The storyline adds depth to the game without driving away its key mar- ket of fighting-game enthusiasts, and it might attract the interest of people who otherwise wouldn’t pay any attention to a fighting game. Heavenly Sword and God of War are good examples.
Certain groups are turned off by particular content or features. For example, women don’t much care for material that portrays them as brainless sex objects;
parents won’t buy games for their kids if the games are nothing but blood and gore;
members of minority races (and many in the majority too) are naturally offended by racist content. These are the most obvious examples, but there are more subtle ones as well. Women are generally more sensitive to the aesthetics of a game than men are, and they are less likely to buy a game with ugly artwork. Some players have no interest in narrative material and are put off if they are forced to watch it in a genre that doesn’t normally include narratives. (This is why the storyline in the kung fu game, mentioned earlier, shouldn’t interfere with the gameplay.) These examples illustrate the effects of exclusionary material—content or features that serve to drive players away from a game that they otherwise might like. Your goal should be to make the best game that you can about your chosen subject, while avoiding exclusionary material that reduces the size of your audience.
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DESIGN RULE Keep Exclusionary Material Out of Your Game
To reach a large audience while still creating a harmonious, coherent game, don’t try to attract everyone by adding unrelated features. Instead, work to avoid repelling people who might otherwise be attracted.
Core Versus Casual
The most significant distinction among player types is not between console-game players and computer-game players, nor between men and women, nor even between children and adults. The most significant distinction is between hardcore (usually just shortened to “core”) gamers and casual gamers.
Core gamers play a lot of games. Games are more than light entertainment to them; games are a hobby that demands time and money. Core gamers subscribe to game magazines, chat on game bulletin boards, and build fan websites about their favorite games. Above all, core gamers play for the exhilaration of defeating the game. They tolerate frustration well because of the charge they get out of finally winning. The greater the obstacle, the greater the sense of achievement. Core gam- ers thrive on competition. They don’t like games that are easy; they like games that are challenging.
By comparison, casual gamers play for the sheer enjoyment of the experience. If the game stops being enjoyable or becomes frustrating, the casual gamer stops playing.
For the casual gamer, playing a game must be entertaining, whether it’s competitive or not. A casual gamer is simply not willing to spend hours learning complex controls or getting killed again and again until he finds the one weak point in an otherwise invin- cible enemy; he feels that he has better things to do with his time. To design a game for casual gamers, you have to give them a sense of rapid progress and achievement.
In reality, of course, there are as many types of gamer as there are games; everyone has a reason for playing computer games. But the casual/core distinction is a very powerful one. If you design a game specifically for one group, you almost certainly won’t have a lot of sales to the other group. A few very well-designed games man- age to appeal to both: Goldeneye, for example, can be played happily by both core and casual gamers. Core gamers can set the game at the highest difficulty level and drive themselves crazy trying to cut 15 seconds off the last time it took to play a mission. Casual gamers can set the game at the easiest level and blast away, enjoy- ing the game’s smooth controls and visual detail.
Other Distinctions
Several other groups exhibit particular trends in their game-playing preferences, and a brief list follows. Note that this section is about choosing a target audience,
ptg7947181 not about actually designing a game for one. If you want to make your game partic-
ularly appealing to a special group, see Appendix A, “Designing to Appeal to Particular Groups.”
■ Men and women. Men and women are not nearly as different as various works of pop psychology like us to believe. A large number of games are made with only male players in mind, but it doesn’t take much to make them more appealing to women as well. See Sheri Graner Ray’s Gender Inclusive Game Design for a thorough discussion of the subject (Ray, 2003).
■ Children and adults. Children’s gaming preferences and abilities differ much more sharply from those of adults than men’s differ from women’s. Children have different motor and cognitive skills, different attention spans, and different lin- guistic abilities, and all of these change dramatically as children grow up. Most important, however, games designed for children must be appealing and acceptable to their parents as well. There is a vast amount of research on creating entertain- ment for children. If you’re interested in targeting this market specifically, you might start with Chapter 9 of the book Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment by Carolyn Handler Miller (Miller, 2004).
■ Boys and girls. For years, the male-dominated game industry had a precon- ceived notion that girls didn’t play video games, so the designers didn’t bother to think about girls. This idea was wrong, however. Girls were playing video games, in spite of the industry’s neglect. Still, boys’ and girls’ interests differ more widely than men’s and women’s do, and making games that appeal to girls requires knowledge that few designers have. Appendix A contains a discussion about games for girls.
■ Players with disabilities. A number of developers are working to improve the accessibility of video games to players with disabilities. Although few games are made specifically for people with special needs, it is easy and inexpensive to make games more accessible. You can make your game available to the deaf by including subtitles for spoken dialog and providing visual as well as auditory cues for particu- lar events; you can allow players with visual impairments to adjust the contrast of the screen and the font size of any text in the game.
■ Players of other cultures. The process of adapting a game for sale in a country other than the one for which it was made is called localization. The process involves more than just translating the text to a different language and rerecording the audio; for the game to be a hit, you must take numerous cultural factors into account. It is far easier to make a game enjoyable to people in other countries if you plan it that way and consider them a part of your target audience from the begin- ning. Designing for localization is outside the scope of this book, but if you want a worldwide market, you must take the time to research the subject.
Progression Considerations
If your game will be a long one, the player will need a sense of progress through it.
At this stage of game design, you must decide what will provide that sense of progress:
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levels, a story, or both. Will your game be so large that it should be divided into lev- els? Will your levels be unrelated, and all available to the player at any time, or will they be organized into a sequential or branching configuration, in which complet- ing a level makes the next one available? What types of conditions will determine when a player has completed a level? The genre that you have chosen will help you to determine your answers.
The other question is whether you want a story. Stories give games a context and a goal. Some genres, such as sports and puzzle games, don’t usually include stories because their context is self-explanatory. In other genres, such as role-playing and adventure games, the story is a large part of the game’s entertainment.
Representational games frequently have a story; abstract games generally don’t, although Ms. Pac-Man was an exception in a small way. Stories about abstract char- acters are seldom very involving.
If you do choose to have a story in your game, you don’t have to know exactly what narrative content you want to include at the concept-formation stage. All you need to know is whether you want a story and, if so, what its overall direction will be.
You should be able to summarize it in a sentence or two; for example: “Jack Jones, leader of a secret anti-drug task force, will conduct a series of raids against the drug barons, ending in an apocalyptic battle in the cocaine fields of Colombia. Along the way, some of the people he encounters will not be quite what they seem.”
Errors in the storyline are much easier to correct than errors in the gameplay, and gamers will forgive story errors more quickly as well. Make sure you understand your game first; then build your story into it.
DESIGN RULE The Story Comes Later
Do not spend a lot of time devising a story at the concept stage. This is a cardinal error frequently made by people who are more used to presentational media such as books and film. You must concentrate most of your efforts on the gameplay at this point.
Types of Game Machines
When you first start fleshing out your game concept, you should concentrate on the dream, the player’s role, and the target audience. However, a game concept is not complete without a statement about which machine (or machines) the game runs on. Some genres of games are better suited to one kind of machine than another, and all machines have features and performance characteristics—input and output devices, processor speed, storage space—that define the scope of the game. You need to know the strengths and weaknesses of the different types of machines and how their owners use them.
ptg7947181 Throughout this book you’ll see many references to PCs—personal computers. The
IBM PC and its clones, running the Windows operating system, are by far the most popular personal computers for gaming. However, when you see the term PC, you shouldn’t assume that it only means IBM PC clones running Windows. Developers also make games for the Macintosh and for machines running the Linux operating system, and these qualify as PCs too.
Home Game Consoles
A home game console is usually set up in the living room or a bedroom. The player sits or stands holding a dedicated controller 3 to 6 feet away from the television that serves as its display. Although modern high definition digital televisions are a great improvement over the analog sets that the early consoles used, the player is still too far from the screen to see small details or to read fine print conveniently.
This means that games designed for the home console machine are seldom as intri- cate as the typical personal computer game. The graphics have to be simpler and bolder, and the control method and user interface must be manageable with the controller provided. A mouse can point much more precisely than most controllers, even ones with analog joysticks. Still, you are guaranteed that every machine ships with a standardized controller, which means you don’t have to do the large amount of configuration testing that games for the PC require.
Because several people see the television at once, and because all consoles allow for at least two controllers, console machines are excellent for multiplayer games in which all the players look at the same screen. This means that every player can see what every other player is doing on the screen, which is something you need to consider when designing some games.
Nothing has changed the home console landscape more in the last few years than the arrival of the Nintendo Wii, with its revolutionary motion-sensitive controller.
Many casual players find the vast array of buttons and joysticks on the traditional game controller daunting. The Wii has made video games intuitive and easy to learn, with the result that Wii machines are being used in all sorts of unexpected ways—as therapy for injured, disabled, and elderly people, for example.
Generally speaking, hardware developers create a much larger variety of input devices for console machines, such as the Guitar Hero controller, than they do for the PC. Because the console manufacturers rigorously test any device with their logo on it, you can be confident that these devices are compatible with their machines. PC manufacturers cannot prevent third parties from creating additional hardware for their machines, so you cannot be as confident that off-brand input devices will work correctly with your PC game—you will simply have to test them. Chapter 8,
“User Interfaces,” addresses designing for a variety of controllers in more detail.
Home consoles tend to have graphics display hardware of comparable power to the graphics hardware in personal computers but slower central processing units and less RAM than personal computers. Because consoles sell for $200–$400 once they
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have been available for a year or so, the manufacturer has to cut the hardware design to the bone to keep the cost down. This means that, as computing devices, the most expensive console is always less powerful than the most expensive personal computer, and more difficult to program. On the other hand, their low price means that far more consoles are in players’ hands, which creates a larger market for their games.
The home console differs from the personal computer in another important way.
Console manufacturers won’t let just anyone make a game for their machine. You have to have a license from the manufacturer and their approval for your game idea—and they tend to be reluctant to approve anything controversial. Once the game is ready, you also have to submit it to the manufacturer for extensive testing before releasing it. Nintendo instituted these policies after the video game industry was nearly destroyed in the early 1980s by a flood of low-quality, buggy games (mostly made for the Atari VCS console). Nowadays, all the console manufacturers have policies similar to Nintendo’s. When developing for personal computers, you aren’t constrained this way. You can create any game you want, without anyone’s permission, on any subject you like. Obviously some publishers won’t publish games that they feel might be offensive, and many countries have censorship laws that explicitly prohibit certain content. But the PC is an open platform; you can build games for personal computers without being bound by any contractual limitations.
In the last few years, a partial convergence has taken place between the home con- sole and the PC. Consoles now routinely include hard disk drives that enable the player to store far more data than before, and they all include networking capabil- ity as well. Services such as Xbox LIVE have begun to network console machines, although this is not yet the standard way that people play. The single-player or multiplayer local experience is still the most common one.
Personal Computers
A personal computer (PC) can be set up away from the communal living space, on a computer desk. In this case, the player has a keyboard, a mouse, possibly a joy- stick, and (more rarely) a dedicated game controller such as those on console machines. The player sits 12 to 18 inches away from a relatively small (compared to the television) high-resolution display. The high resolution means that the game can have subtle, detailed graphics. The mouse allows precision pointing and a more complex user interface. The keyboard enables the player to enter text conveniently and send messages to other players over a network, something that is nearly impos- sible with console machines.
The personal computer is quite awkward for more than one person to use. The con- trols of a PC are all designed for one individual, and even the furniture it usually sits on—a desk—is intended for solitary use. PC games are rarely designed for more than one person to play on a single machine. On the other hand, a PC is very likely to be connected to the Internet, whereas consoles only recently got this capability.
The PC is still the machine of choice for multiplayer networked games.
ptg7947181 The great boon of PC development is that anyone can program one; you don’t have
to get a license from the manufacturer or buy an expensive development station.
Consequently, personal computers are at the cutting edge of innovation in com- puter gaming. They’re the platform of choice for small-scale, low-demand projects, interactive art, and other experimental forms of interactive entertainment.
The great bane of PC development is that no two machines are alike. Because they’re customizable, millions of configurations are possible. In the early days of the game industry, this was a real nightmare for programmers. Fortunately, the Windows and Macintosh operating systems have solved many of these problems by isolating the programs from the hardware. Still, games tend to require more from the machine than other applications do, and configuration conflicts still occur.
PC games may be divided into two general and quite different categories: stand- alone games, which the player installs on his machine like any other program, and browser-based games that run inside a web browser such as Safari or Internet Explorer.