Art of Game Design (part 2) Elements

In part 1 of my commentary on key points from on The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell, I covered some of his ideas on simplicity and the need for game designers to focus on fun and the experience that the player recieves

It's taken me a while to get round to 'part 2' -- mainly because it raised some very interesting issues which I needed to cogitate on before writing about them.  Part 3 will follow soon.

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The four basic elements

Illustration shamelessly adapted from Schell's book.

As mentioned in a previous post, Schell postulates that there are four elements to a game:

• Aesthetics
• Story
• Mechanics
• Technology

He also states that "none of the elements is more important than the others".

After looking at other research, including a very thorough dissertation by a former MA student, it's arguable that this last statement is aimed more at mainstream games rather than niche ones.  For example, the game Heavy Rain had an almost total emphasis on story over mechanics, and worked more like an interactive film -- giving the player a deeply emotional experience rather than a kinetic one.

At the same time, Schell's reasoning seems generally sound: it's clearly risky to imbalance these elements without good reason.

Theme

If a design is based around a single theme, all these elements can reinforce one another.

Schell uses the example of his Pirates of the Carribean virtual reality game to illustrate this, explaining that the theme they settled on was "being a pirate".  They created a subtly rocking ship's deck with cannons (which players could aim at attackers) surrounded by a projected display screen (using 3D to give the feeling of being a long distance from the horizon), set the air conditioning to blow a breeze through players' hair, and allowed the virtual ship to be properly steered using the fully-functioning ship's wheel.

In my opinion a theme needs to pervade the game thoroughly, otherwise it is just a kind of branding exercise.

Case study: Kirby's Epic Yarn

Kirby's Epic Yarn for Nintendo Wii has a main theme of knitting and patchwork.

The story tells us that the player has been transported to a knitted world -- a world which has been split into patchwork sections which need to be tied back together by collecting magic yarn.  That's certainly reinforcing the theme.

The aesthetics are the big thing here, because the visual elements are presented as wool or sewn fabric, with characters and weapons unravelling and reforming into different shapes.  It's certainly a very unique visual style, and appears to be targeted at a predominantly female demographic.

The gameplay mechanics include Kirby throwing a woollen lasso to grab things and to swing from objects, and using zips to reveal things -- a nice integration of the theme into the mechanics.  This works very well in some places -- such as when you literally unravel a boss -- but can feel forced in others (e.g. putting out a fire with a ‘water jet’ made of wool).

The technology is a bit of a bind here, because the Wii controller doesn't really fit the theme.  It's used as a traditional joypad and players need to learn to control specific functions with particular buttons.

Overall, this appears to be a pretty successful application of a theme to a game, and professional game reviews are positive about this.

Development

The development process for a game can follow a traditional waterfall model but Schell argues that the iterative (spiral) approach is better, and allows for rapid prototyping.  The illustration below shows this model as it is used for software development:

I've used this model many times myself for software development and it really does work well.  The beauty of this approach is that it offers a number of positives:

• Speed up initial prototypying by using primitive shapes instead of final models
• Test key mechanics in isolation (i.e. proof-of-concept)
• Use a trial-and-error approach to experiment with balance

The only disadvantage (so far as I can see) is that this can be a slow process.

(Updated 24 Oct 2013 -- added fallback link for embedded video)